Set to be directed by Vivieno Caldinelli - familiar to readers here for his fantastic work on the Picnicface sketch comedy show - Portal To Hell is written by (and will co-star) Matt Watts, who has written a handful of quality titles for Canada's CBC (both radio and TV) while keen eyed viewers will recognize him from Scott Pilgrim Versus The World, and iconic Canadian shows Twitch City and The Newsroom. Bringing Cthulhu to life in all his tentacle-y glory is Manborg helmer Steve Kostanski while on the production side I'm filling an EP role along with Todd & The Book Of Pure Evil producer Andrew Rosen.Jack (Roddy Piper) is a simple man with simple needs. Mostly he just needs to be left alone to read his book. It's a good book and he likes it, or at least he would if the tenants of the building he manages weren't so damn needy themselves. And it's not just blown fuses and clogged toilets here ... no, when the building power goes out the culprit is a pair of tenants opening a portal to hell in the basement. Does this count as building maintenance? Is battling the supernatural part of Jack's job description? Maybe not, but if Jack can't close the portal the entire building and - let's face it - the whole world is screwed.
Yep, we're running a crowd funding campaign to help make the VFX and SFX sequences as big an burly as possible, but this is happening no matter what. Portal has been backed by the Harold Greenberg Fund's Shorts to Features program so there's money in the till for at least a basic version. But, really, why make the most basic version of this when you can go all out? And, yes, it's very much meant to lay the groundwork for a proposed feature.
Check out the full campaign here and, please, even if you can't support it financially help out by spreading the word!