Black Walk takes a walk on the funny side

TAKE ONE, March-June, 2005 by Tom Lyons

ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2004, the startled and bewildered face of Rob Stefaniuk stared out at the citizens of Toronto from the covers of 100,000 Now magazines. The young Oshawa actor/writer/director had landed the cover of the alternative weekly on the eve of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) for his new film, Phil the Alien. Now liked first-time director Stefaniuk, and it liked his movie--an anarchic, low-budget comedy about an alcoholic space alien (named Phil and played by Stefaniuk with the same startled bewilderment) who lands in Northern Ontario.

Phil is variously befriended by drunken hosers, betrayed by "a super-intelligent beaver" (voiced by SCTV alumni Joe Flaherty) and is saved by jail-house religion. Meanwhile, over at the Top Secret American UFO Base, located under Niagara Falls, The General (John Kapelos) has discovered Phil and sends Jones (played with manic intensity by Bruce Hunter) to eliminate him. Throw in a beautiful Quebecoise assassin (Nicole De Boer), a bartender called "Wolf" (Graham Greene), assorted cameos by the likes of Sean Cullen and Canadian Idol Ryan Malcolm and the music of Neil Young and Rush, and you have the makings of a Canadian hoser classic in the tradition of Strange Brew. Now described Stefaniuk as the "poster boy for new Canadian cinema at the film fest" and declared that Phil the Alien heralded a "Canadian comic renaissance."

Geoff Pevere, the influential film critic at the Toronto Star, likewise raved about the film: "This is highly funny stuff in a proudly asinine Canadian tradition." Guy Dixon of Toronto's The Globe and Mail was only slightly less laudatory, giving the film three stars out of four and writing, "those who find Kids in the Hall funny and endearingly Canadian will love this film." Before TIFF was over, the indie flick that had become the talk of the festival had landed a Canadian distribution deal with Lions Gate Films.

Variety, however, was buying none of the Canuck buzz and publicity. It panned the movie. "The sort of Canadian comedy that sounds funnier on the page than it looks on the screen," wrote critic Eddie Cockrell. "Story structure is too choppy to work up any comic momentum ... Pic won't fly beyond the border, though it should make tube and homevid landings ... Tech credits are functional; print caught was grainy and dark." For good measure, Cockrell hammered another movie from the same Toronto indie house, Black Walk Productions, which had made Phil the Alien. "Emotions run hot but story blows cold in Ice Men," he wrote, referring to the Black Walk buddy drama directed by Thom Best that screened at the 2004 Montreal World Film Festival. "[Ice Men] will quickly skate to cable and homevid after something less than a championship season at undemanding fests and in limited domestic play."

That Variety was training its sights on Black Walk Productions might have seemed like a bad thing, given the back-to-back pans. But the fact that the new indie film company from T.O. was on the magazine's radar screen at all was regarded as something of an accomplishment by more than a few Hollywood heavyweights. That's because yet another Black Walk film, Ham & Cheese, had recently received a rave review from Variety's Ken Eisner, who described the mockumentary about two hapless wannabe actors (played by T.O. writers Mike Beaver and Jason Jones) as "a must see" and "a potential cult classic" which "rarely lets up in the laughs department.

"Ham helmer Sonoda does an excellent job of ratcheting up the yuks, with each adventure being a bit more outrageous than the last," Eisner wrote of the ultra-low-budget comedy, which had been rejected by TIFF in 2003. Shortly after the Variety rave appeared, Black Walk's phone started ringing off the hook. "That review really started everything," says Warren P. Sonoda, 31, the director of Ham & Cheese. "The day after, Universal, Paramount, Fox, Miramax, everybody called wanting to see the movie. Three months after we premiered [Ham & Cheese] at the Victoria film festival [in January 2004], I was in New York City taking a face-to-face meeting with the head of production at Miramax. I mean, it happened that quickly." Nothing solid has materialized so far from those meetings, although at press time Black Walk had a U.S. deal on the table with Screen Media. (Screen Media distributes motion pictures to television, cable, satellite and home video markets rather than theatres, according to the Hollywood Byline Web site.)

But Sonoda and the rest of the Black Walk regulars aren't exactly discouraged. He compares himself and his colleagues to "farm team" players who feel confident they are about to be called up to the "big leagues" where they will make their mark. Established as a feature-film company just two years ago, Black Walk currently has a dozen more films on its production slate, evenly divided between directors Stefaniuk and Sonoda. And with its own studio space, production facilities, talent pool, financial resources and distribution company--all carefully built up over the 10 years in its previous incarnation as a music-video production house--Black Walk seems heavily armed and determined to take on the world. For Mihkel Harilaid, the head and sole owner of Black Walk, the game is unfolding according to plan, which is something industry insiders predicted would never happen when Harilaid walked away from his very successful music-video business in the winter of 2002.