What if Michael Bay directed a vampire film?
If the director of such films as Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor did choose to turn his focus to the undead, the resulting film would undoubtedly be along the lines of something like “Vampire Marines” – a team of young, good-looking, kick-ass vampires working on assignment for the U.S. government.
At least that’s the conclusion that Tom Sanders and Ed Gross came to when they turned that particular question over in their minds and created Dark Commandos, the live-action Internet series. The show, airing in three-to-six minute installments, chronicles the adventures of the Undead Brigade as they take on the missions that no one else can handle.
“The idea of a team of vampire commandos was originally Ed’s,” says Sanders, “and I have to tell you, when I first heard it, I had my doubts. Ed’s always been into vampires, but I honestly felt that the genre had been beaten to death. But we started tinkering with it and, as usually happens when he and I start writing something, sending scenes and drafts back and forth, fleshing out the characters and developing a storyline. We both got excited about the material and pretty soon it was all either of us were thinking about.”
Dark Commandos originally began existence as a script called Millennium Rising. That story told the tale of New York Detective David Manning and his struggle against a blood cult headed by one Timothy Jenson, whose ultimate plan was to trigger a war between humanity and his vampire army. Additionally, Manning had to deal with the return of his late wife – a victim of Millennium Rising – who has returned as a vampire and who conceivably holds the ultimate clue on how to stop Jenson.
“We really saw it as a tragic love story set against the backdrop of an epic struggle for the survival of the human race,” says Gross with a smile. “Granted we were aiming high.”
Things were progressing well, until the aforementioned references to Michael Bay and Vampire Marines entered the picture. At that moment, Dark Commandos was born. Manning’s story was temporarily shelved (intending to be resurrected later in the show’s run) and a group of all new characters were introduced instead.
Dark Commandos in its current form stars Justin Neal Thompson as team leader Non Agememnon Gage, who is over 500 years old. Transformed during the Crusades, he served the vampire who turned him for several years, until the man’s unrelenting brutality caused him to flee. Non survived on the run for the next several centuries, until an unexpected meeting with his progenitor resulted in Non being forcefully buried in Austria in the mid 1800s, where he was left – presumably forever. During World War II, however, the forces of the Third Reich discovered his amazingly preserved body and brought him to Hilter’s top secret “Theosophic Research” facility, where his blood was sampled by Nazi scientists who hoped to use it to create an undead army. Their experiments produced several hideous false starts, but Hitler’s vision remained unrealized when American Commandos “rescued” Non, effectively drafting him into. Despite what he is, Non remains a spiritual man who continues to practice his Catholic faith (a point emphasized in episode five). On the one hand, Non would love nothing more than final death, but in the back of his mind is the fear that he would be denied entrance into Heaven. The alternative is too frightening to contemplate.
Dreyfuss, second-in-command, is played by Bradley Upton. Turned during the Spanish-American War, Dreyfuss was actually on a suicide bid when he was attacked by a female vampire, suddenly finding himself cursed with eternal life. After years of self-imposed isolation, he emerged as a solider of fortune, hiring out his skills mostly to Third World countries with little regard for his employer’s stance. He never revealed to them what he was; they knew him only as an efficient covert leader and killer. It was in this capacity that he crossed paths with Non several times and was eventually persuaded to join the DC in the 1970s. Of the Commandos, Dreyfuss is the most resigned to what he is, wasting no energy debating the morality of killing to live.
Christopher Boicelli is cast as Ed “The Kid” Torin. Chronologically, Ed is about 50, but physically (and some would say emotionally), he’s in his 20s. His father was a friend of Non’s and when Ed was dying in a Vietnam POW camp, Non went in and saved him the only way he knew how – by turning Ed into a vampire. The Kid desperately tries to hold on to his youthfulness. He embraces whatever is trendy at the moment, but it’s a kind of desperate clinging rather than a real exuberance. Feeling he was cheated out of his youth, first by Vietnam and then by Non’s life-saving “cure,” Ed has a soft spot for children, particularly the abused. While his youthful idealism makes him a spirited fighter, it also leaves his emotions raw and his impulse control lacking. At the same time, in many ways Ed embraces what he is, and approaches vampirism as something of a super hero gig, serving as Robin to Non’s Batman.
Amber Phillips is Sue Janic, the newest Commando. In her early ‘20s, Sue is a top CIA agent who is persuaded by someone high up in military intelligence to join the Undead Brigade. In Sue the audience witnesses the deconstruction of a human soul and its rebirth into the unnatural state of vampirism. Sue at first embraces this journey, as it seems to offer a path to the enlightenment she has long sought, but the transformation ultimately takes her to places darker than she could have ever imagined. Even as Non privately searches for his own redemption, Sue plunges headlong in the opposite direction, prodded along by Ed’s well-meaning, but ill-advised companionship. In many ways, Sue’s journey will be the audience’s into this bizarre world of the undead.
More behind the scenes information will be featured in next week’s installment. Below, check out episode one of Dark Commandos.
If you've checked out episode one of the original web series Dark Commandos (about a team of vampires carrying out covert missions for the government), then you can probably appreciate the challenges of producing a show like that on an extremely limited budget. To provide an inside look at the process involved, this video shows how the car chase for the episode came together.
graphics, and sound. A CNN review stated that "'God of War' is the type of game that makes you remember why you play games in the first place." asf
Posted by: abercrombie milano | May 14, 2011 at 06:52 AM