Local director pleased with his first feature-length production

CARBONDALE - Local filmmaker Roger Trexler said he's been pleased with his first feature-length film, "Platypossum - The Movie," a film he's worked on for the past four years.

"It's a lot of things really. First and foremost, it's a monster movie and it's a stop-motion animation movie," Trexler said. "That's why it's taken so long to get done. It's an anti-fracking movie, too, and it's a throwback to films of the 1950s that had creatures created by nuclear radiation."

He said when he began the film process four years ago, hydraulic fracturing was an oft-talked about subject in Southern Illinois.

"It's a very timely subject, unfortunately, and it was four years ago when I started," he said.

Besides the time-consuming stop-motion animation, by which the movie's namesake beast comes alive, the movie is set in the fall, he said.

"Basically, I had to wait around for fall to come around four times," Trexler said. "It got really cold one winter and I could not bring myself to go out and film people when it was cold, but you've got to have some continuity."

The movie revolves around an unscrupulous hydraulic fracturing outfit testing a new fracking solution. When a captive platypus escapes, it manages to mate with a native opossum while in a puddle of the experimental fracking solution in the Shawnee National Forest, which eventually results in the birth of the mutant monster, Trexler said. It then goes on a killing rampage as people try to investigate.

The resulting playpossum was filmed in various ways, he said.

"We have a full-body monster. The model itself is about the size of a good-sized cat," Trexler said. "We have a bigger version of the head, and had it flicking its tongue a few times. Then we had a monster claw that was grabbing people by the head when it rips their heads off."

Using stop-motion was preferable to more modern forms of creature animation as a creative choice, Trexler said.

"I'm a big fan of it. I'm a big Ray Harryhausen fan. He was like the god of stop-motion," he said.

When he first began the project, it took about three hours to do three seconds of the creature's stop-motion animation, he said.

"We fine-tuned it down to about an hour and a half per three seconds. There's about 100 different clips in the movie, so you do the math," Trexler said.

He also credited Brad Moore with extensive special effects throughout the movie.

"Platypossum - The Movie" debuted at the Varsity in Carbondale on Aug. 18, and Trexler added a special screening at Infinity Comics in Eldorado Labor Day Weekend. He said he will be screening the film at several to-be-determined dates and locations. Plus, he said, he has four distributors in talks with him for the film.

He next plans to shoot a feature film based on the Big Muddy Monster, a southern Illinois sasquatch variant. Trexler, who retired from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in December 2016 also has written several books available on Amazon.

In the meantime, he said he's been pleased with his film's reception.

"The story about the screening I had at the Varsity said it best. It's a cautionary tale," he said. "It is science fiction, horror, comedy. It's definitely R-rated. I definitely don't want kids seeing this and I always make it clear."