Comedy horror flick by Brownsville native shown at festivals

BROWNSVILLE – Look out! Sex-crazed reefer zombies are attacking venues around the world!!!

“Doctor S The Movie,” directed by Brownsville native Bryan Ortiz, is a zany comedy horror flick set in 1964. In the movie, communists are sending marijuana reefers to the United States to destroy America’s youth, and a scientist, Doctor S, begins doing experiments on the marijuana.

“Doctor S comes up with this idea to increase its effects even more and then send it back over to the communists to fight ‘em back,” said Ortiz, 25, who lives in San Antonio. “The government takes hold of it, they change it, and they test it on a small town called Crystal Oaks, the town that he’s in. The teens smoke this new batch of reefer, and they turn into these reefer zombies.”

However, the experiment gets out of control, Ortiz said. Doctor S smokes his own version of the reefer and he changes, the zombies change and the U.S. Government loses control of everything in the town.

“Doctor S,” Ortiz said, was filmed in San Antonio and will be screened Monday at the Dragon Con International Film Festival in Atlanta.

The film was also shown last year at the Leeds International Film Festival, San Antonio Film Festival, the Brainwash Movie Festival, the Horrific Film Festival, and the Chicago Horror Film Festival. It was also screened at the Spooky Movie Festival in Washington, D.C.

“That’s just a small part of the list,” Ortiz said with a laugh.

This is his first feature-length film, and it arose out of a small trailer he and producer Michael Druck created to enter a contest presented by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. When Druck approached him about entering the contest, Ortiz had just finished another project and didn’t want to jump right into that. However, an idea began to form in his mind.

“I was thinking of some old school Grind House things and stuff that I had liked and researched,” said Ortiz, who graduated from St. Joseph’s Academy in 2003 and the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio in 2008 with a degree in theater.

“All of a sudden, this weird idea in my brain just started kicking in. It was about a mad scientist killing teenagers in the woods, and I thought ‘Oh, man that sounds crazy,’ and it just popped into my head,” he said. “Then the title came and I thought, ‘Doctor S Battles Sex-Crazed Reefer Zombies.”

Ortiz and Druck decided to make the small trailer for the contest but it didn’t place. By then, however, they had fallen in love with the project and decided to develop it into a full-length, black-and-white feature film. It was a labor of love that went against established norms for current films.

“Movies that are black and white and are of this kind of subject matter really have a hard time sometimes going anywhere in general,” Ortiz said. “It’s made to look old and dirty and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes you can’t find success in those kinds of things.

“But for us, in our case, the response has been overwhelmingly fantastic. People gravitate toward the title and they see the flick and they really understand what’s going on. And you know if you’re a zombie fan or an old school horror fan, then you see this movie and it rings in your brain.”

Ortiz is no stranger to film; he’s been making short films since 2005.

“I just started pumping out shorts like crazy just to express myself, and that got me through the door to meet people and learn the community in San Antonio,” he said. “Originally I decided to do subject matter that I thought was difficult. So I started doing like psychological type pieces, like science of sleep, internal sunshine, stuff like that, just kind of mind-melding kind of ideas.”

From that he moved into horror, suspense thrillers, comedies and dramas.

“I tried to arrange myself to understand what I’m good at, and what I’m not good at that I can improve on,” he said. “So literally I just kind of try and touch all kinds of gambits, all kinds of things to keep myself busy and understand what’s possible for me.”

Right now Ortiz and the others who worked on the film are looking for a distributor to make it available on Netflix and other venues, or for a sales agency that will help them sell the film to a distributor.

“We’re always open to screenings and of course the Valley is home for me, so I’d love to bring it down there sometime,” Ortiz said.