FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New York, N.Y., February 27, 2017 - Greetings from Tromaville!
Troma Entertainment, the longest running truly independent film company in American history, has crossed the proverbial pond in order to acquire Irish filmmaker
S
é
amus Hanly's hilarious superhero/comedy feature film,
The Middle Finger, it was announced today by Lloyd Kaufman, President of Troma Entertainment and creator of
The Toxic Avenger.
The Middle Finger
tells the story of Dennis (Hanly), a lonely and frustrated teenager who is reluctantly transformed into a superhero. Embedded with the symbol of a hand showing its middle finger, Dennis must awkwardly endure his training and save his world from extinction!
Hailing from Dublin, Ireland, Seamus Hanly proves himself to be a true independent artist by Directing, Writing, Scoring, and Starring in
The Middle Finger. Drawing inspiration from YouTube critic sensation Red Letter Media's
Gorilla Interrupted
and one of Troma's own donations to the superhero genre
Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D.
, Hanly has created a film that Film Ireland's Jonathan Victory lovingly described as "Dumb in a clever way."
Séamus Hanly stars as the reluctant hero The Middle Finger
"DC could take a page out of Hanly's book, as
The Middle Finger trades in the morose superhero clich
é for a fun, clever superhero tale." -@DiceOnFilm
With its acquirement,
The Middle Finger has become an addition to the ever growing comedy titles distributed by Troma Entertainment as just this month the brilliant Sci-fi/Comedy
Essex Spacebin had its World Premiere at the prestigious
Prince Charles Cinema in London.
The Middle Finger has been officially selected by celebrated film festivals such as Miami International Film Festival, YES! Let's Make a Movie Film Festival, and the 7th Underground Cinema Film Festival, and Troma Entertainment hopes the film will be seen in many more to come!
Troma Now subscribers can look forward to
The Middle Finger
on
Watch.Troma.Com
Coming Soon!
Use the hashtags #themiddlefinger #middlefingermovie
Below is a Q&A between Director Séamus Hanly and Levi White, Head of Public Relations at Troma Entertainment.
LW: What was your inspiration behind
The Middle Finger?
SH: The film was mainly inspired by Red Letter Media's film Gorilla Interrupted and Troma's own Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD which were two films I watched shortly before writing The Middle Finger.
After previously making a more dramatic and artsy kind of no budget feature film called BenD, I decided it'd be better to make something more energetic and fun.
Growing up with the Monty Python films and shows like Earthworm Jim and The Tick helped a lot too.
LW: How did you manage to get the film get off the ground?
SH: I had worked with Constant Motion Pictures before and was impressed with how quickly they were able to get projects going with limited resources and money.
I pitched them the idea as something we could do quickly and cheaply and said we could do it with a small bit of money I'd saved up and they were completely on board.
LW: What was the process of getting the film made?
SH: By early 2015 I had a draft of the script and knew it was structurally how the film would go. Over the summer we started working towards getting a crew.
A lot of the people who worked on the film are people I met as a frequent contributor of The Firehouse Film Contest, a monthly screening of short films in Dublin. It's now three years old and has become a great melting pot of talented filmmakers used to making things with no money.
As we went through production of the film I started adding jokes here and there and added an extra scene or two to the script that we could plan and film quickly.
LW: What was the most difficult scene to shoot?
SH: The climax scene was the one where we had to choreograph a 5 person fight scene in a short amount of time.
It's not exactly a complicated fight but figuring out when and where everyone had to go in each shot proved trickier than I thought.
Towards the end we found ourselves really needing to get scenes in as fast as possible as we had rented the warehouse location and were late in our schedule.
That said there was another fight scene where I got hit really hard in the right testicle so who knows which was worse.
LW: The cast has great chemistry, what was the casting process like?
SH: It was mostly friends of mine who are actors or comedians in Dublin that were cast in the film, so the process was mainly just me texting and emailing people if they were free in October/November to hang out and film. We made sure scenes were filmed quickly so it wasn't out of their way to do it, and everyone was very enthusiastic.
People like Alison Spittle, Rose Henderson and Dave Duffy, who all appear in the film, have a celebrity status in Ireland. I sometimes get asked how I booked them, but they were all people I had just met and worked with over the years.
World Premiere of Theatrical Trailer for,
Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High Vol. 2
Warning this trailer is NSFW
Subscribe to
WATCH.troma.com for only $4.99/month, with a one month free trial to begin your membership. The
commercial for February's World Premieres on Troma Now is available on the Troma Movie's
YouTube page, or click the link
here!!
For more information contact levi@troma.com
Established in 1974 by Yale friends Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, Troma Entertainment is arguably the longest-running independent movie studio in North America, and it's one of the very few genuine brand names in the industry. World famous for movie classics like Kaufman's "The Toxic Avenger", Trey Parker's "Cannibal, the Musical", "Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead", "Class of Nuke 'em High", Charles Kaufman's "Mother's Day" and "Tromeo & Juliet", Troma's seminal films are now being remade as big-budget mainstream productions by the likes of Brett Ratner, Richard Saperstein, Akiva Goldsman and Steven Pink. Early work of many of today's luminaries can be found in Troma's library of 1000 films, cartoons, TV shows and shorts. Jenna Fischer, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Costner, Fergie, Vincent D'Onofrio, Samuel L. Jackson, James Gunn and Eli Roth are just a few. Troma's latest in house productions are "Return to Nuke 'Em High: Volumes 1 & 2". Troma's Blu-rays, DVDs, books, t-shirts and movie merchandise can be purchased at
Tromashop. Please visit Troma at
www.troma.com,
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