Sean Parker
Jason Trost is the best kind of genre filmmaker, making films that fans can get excited for in a multitude of ways. While his acting credits include many background roles in notable studio flicks (Scream 2, Rushmore, Crank 2, MacGruber, Hatchet III, Studio 666) he has used his directorial prowess to blend elements from the ‘80s action genre and indie horror scenes with his love for video games, bringing us some wonderfully entertaining movies in the process. If you’ve always wondered how much sillier Over the Top would be if Sly Stallone played Dance Dance Revolution instead of arm-wrestling, wonder no longer! Go check out The FP and its three sequels; they are pure serotonin.
Trost’s latest, The Waves of Madness, continues Trost’s trend of highly ambitious actioneers, incorporating an almost entirely green-screened adventure to create a high-concept, high-seas adventure on a very modest budget. The Waves of Madness is like watching Resident Evil characters inside a side-scrolling, and far more Lovecraftian version of Deep Rising.
If you loved films like Manborg, Ninja Commando, Wolfcop, and Miami Connection, The Waves of Madness will be up your alley. Trost’s latest adds the writer-director-star (and the hyphens keep going) into that same style of action hero. A sort of brooding, muscular, late-eighties action hero cleverly dropped into a Universal monster movie, emulating the creativity of many game developers who similarly imagined some of our favorite video game characters. Part Chris Redfield, part Nathan Drake, and part Solid Snake, Agent Legrasse (Trost) is a one-man army of discretionary muscle and just the man for the job. When the coast guard receives a distress call from a cruise ship, their first call is to Legrasse, who is tasked with reconnaissance and securing any technology that could be used as a weapon.
The Waves of Madness starts familiarly, with a foggy night’s sky ethereally wafting us onto the Elder of the Seas. With the atmosphere presumably inspired by Steve Beck’s Ghost Ship, the ship’s name quietly foreshadows the film’s Lovecraftian elements. Our floaty POV coasts through a crowded deck, eventually arriving at a pianist providing a beautiful, albeit ominous, score. As he finishes his tune, there’s a discordant crescendo, enough for a guest enjoying the music to take note. These opening moments feel almost direct from Romero, as if Night of The Living Dead’s Johnny and Barbara are beginning their conversation in the car, musing about how the first day of summer should concur with daylight savings time, providing inference into something cosmic as the pianist aggressively asks to let something in, leaving the audience to ponder if that moment is somehow the catalyst for everything that’s about to go down.
Supernatural elements take over as The Waves of Madness’ hazy, black-and-white cold open quickly intensifies. The Elder of the Seas has gone dark, and an SOS call explicitly asking for no one to come looking for the vessel is picked up by the coast guard. Of course, no one ever heeds those warnings in video games. As Lagrasse boards the seemingly empty vessel, he finds survivor Francis (Tallay Wickham) and has odd flashbacks to his wife’s last days as well as meetings with his therapist (Ryan Gibson), as he makes his way toward the monster lurking in the decks below.
Featuring dialogue and story points that occasionally point out the absurdity of video game plot points, The Waves of Madness is a blast of pure creative genius from a true video game fan. “Don’t you want to talk into your remote uploady thingy and tell it that we just killed a monster?” Francis asks, as if this information could be used to aid subsequent people who may come aboard, hilariously recalling useless audio logs and memos from any game where the last team never returned. Trost uses some of our favorite tropes from Resident Evil, Until Dawn, and even delivers a Metroid inspired finale.
Showing off his affection for the art and stories of the games is sublimely displayed throughout, creating an endlessly fun and divertive adventure filled with these kinds of easter eggs for gamers. For starters, you’ll see S.D. Perry’s as one of the storefronts in the film, a shoutout to the author behind the Pocket Books series of Resident Evil novels.
Consisting of a core crew of three people, Trost filmed most of The Waves of Madness in a fifteen-foot space in the apartment above his own in Sydney, Australia, with a few scenes requiring the street outside and a small garage because getting vehicles into a walk up is more difficult than moving a green screen. Trost explains his entire process in a featurette available on the newly released Umbrella Blu-Ray, showing how he created the environments of The Waves of Madness in Final Cut, including throwing a party in that apartment and using footage of people mingling on the green screen set to fill the Elder of the Seas with its vacationers in the opening scene.
The behind-the-scenes featurette is almost as entertaining as The Waves of Madness itself. It shows Trost’s meticulousness as well as his ingenuity for engineering concepts, all while capturing his excitement for creating. When painting a floor green proved counterintuitive, a pivot to chroma key matching interlocking tiles, typically seen in kindergarten classrooms, proved to be a triumph.
I mentioned in a recent review how I’m becoming disenchanted with some of the ways indie filmmakers utilize crowdfunding in their films. Listen, you need to make a lot of choices in order to produce a feature, and allowing people the ability to see themselves on screen can help close the funding gap. The Waves of Madness uses the gimmick well, with testimonials of passengers on the Elder of the Seas telling us how much the trip changed their lives. These are also framed in the background and divert audience attention only momentarily, providing an extended realism that builds upon what Trost is setting in motion. I’ve never been on a cruise, but I certainly can entertain the idea that a corporate cruise line might attempt to sell you your next vacation while you have nowhere to go on your current one, and the testimonials have a more authentic touch from everyday people.
I will admit the monster in the film looks a bit rough around the edges. However, it remains a wholly original concept. The cosmic energy consists of multiple hands and goopy tentacles, appearing on-screen as a Tasmanian Devil effect of a cloud with hands and tentacles poking out of it. But, somehow it fits! Think of some of the creatures you’ve seen in horror games. Giant floating eyeballs or people formed entirely out of crows. The most recent Resident Evil had a giant fish creature and a terrifying baby fetus monster. Anything is possible in the realm of video games and film, and Trost’s awareness of that only makes The Waves of Madness more meta.
Trost’s love letter to the video game genre is almost as fun as loading up the classics he’s built the film around. His Lovecraftian elements add sublime weirdness, and his sense of humor is somewhat deadpan. This infuses The Waves of Madness with so much heart, I honestly haven’t found any video game fans who didn’t enjoy it. My video-game-loving friends have had to hear me talk their ears off about The Waves of Madness ever since last year’s Soho Horror Fest, but now that the Umbrella’s Blu-ray release is out, I have a good idea what to get some people for Christmas. If digital is more your speed, The Waves of Madness is also available to purchase on Prime Video.
Trost also has his next project lined up. AFAR: An Interactive Horror Film is currently InDemand on Indiegogo. Again, fusing video game and horror elements, AFAR is a choose-your-own-adventure movie where viewers will need to make decisions to unlock unique scenes and endings, sort of like In Space with Markiplier or Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
The Waves of Madness (OUT NOW) Official Trailer
OUT NOW: https://linktr.ee/TheWavesofMadness A special agent is dispatched to investigate a distress call from a round-the-world cruise, only to find the ship eerily abandoned and haunted by a malevolent force that twists sanity into terror. DIRECTOR: Jason Trost CAST: Jason Trost.
