Meet the Teens of CarnEvil. Before They Meet Their Fate.

Written by Frank D'Angeli on August 26, 2014. Posted in Contact Info for Frank D'Angeli aka Douglas Wentworth

Five joyriding teens – One secluded carnival – And four relentless killers.

Teenage brothers, Mark and Doolen, along with friends, Annie, Jack, and Scottie, are out for a night of fun and adventure. While traveling from Maine to Massachusetts, they see the beckoning beams of spotlights, which leads them to a carnival isolated deep in a New England Forest.

Upon entering, they find that all of the carnival’s occupants have been brutally tortured and are dead or dying. Sickened and shocked by this revolting discovery, they rush for the exit, but find the gate has been locked…and booby trapped.

Their predicament worsens once a family of deranged killers, armed with autopsy tools, begins stalking them.

The teens realize the killers have one goal in mind: to maim, mutilate, and torture them until they too, become props in this carnival of evil.

Spurred on by mind-numbing fear and the will to live, the teens decide to fight back, even though they realize that the price they paid for admission…may be their lives.

Mark – Age 19. Athletic, cocky. Mark embraces the sense of invincibility that youth falsely provides. A born leader, Mark is used to things going his way, and in the past, they have. But nobody’s luck lasts forever…

Doolen – Age 18. Mark’s younger brother. Doolen’s sense of invincibility derives more from a lack of intelligence than anything else. Has the same wry sense of humor as his older brother. Looks up to Mark and sticks by his side…which may prove to be his downfall.

Annie – Age 18. Every man’s fantasy of the beautiful ‘farmer’s daughter’. Annie is tough as nails and gives as well as she takes. She has some rough edges but, deep down, has a soft heart, and is looking for a way out of her small-town, broken home. On this fateful night, Annie meets and falls hard for…

Scottie – Age 18. Smart, sensitive. Originally from New York City. Scottie’s new in town and this is his first night riding with his new friends. He falls for Annie at first sight, and as the night wears on, he vows to do everything he can to protect her from the forces of evil. But some forces can’t be beaten.

Jack – Age 17. Tall and lean, Jack is like a Golden Retriever, just as loyal but not as smart. He’s desperate to be accepted by the others and, upon the first inkling of danger, is willing to risk his life to save the others. Jack soon learns that, sometimes, being first to fight back is the last thing one ever does.

So, take a wild guess. Who will survive the night in CarnEvil? Hint: The novel and screenplay were written concurrently, and though content varies considerably (the novel contains scenes, inner dialogue, and character background that the screenplay does not), the fate of the characters remains the same. But the screenplay does not follow the usual, Hollywood convention. ‘Nuff said.

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Should humans toy with cloning extinct species?

Written by Frank D'Angeli on May 12, 2014. Posted in Contact Info for Frank D'Angeli aka Douglas Wentworth

In STRANDED, humans have depleted our resources and caused the extinction of numerous plants and animals. This is one of the reasons why the survivors of a war-ravaged Earth must find another planet to populate. But a group of people believe that humans ruined one planet, so have not right to populate and ruin another; and thus we have the suspenseful conflict in the STRANDED screenplay and novel.

Scientists now have the knowledge to make a ‘sci-fi’ movie concept come true. They can, or are on the very cusp of, reviving extinct species. See the fascinating article here:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/02/opinion/sutter-jurassic-park-endangered/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

But in life, just because you can do something, should you do it? If we bring extinct species back to life, are we ‘fixing’ the damage we’ve done? Or is the loss of a species, even though caused by our thoughtless hunting or the decimation of a species habitat, part of evolution?

Humans have, in the past, made a concerted effort to save species on the brink of elimination. In the case of the heath hen, the last survivors were placed in a protected state preserve in Martha’s Vineyard, yet the last one vanished in 1932 (a 1918 film of the bird may be the only extant video footage of a game bird that was once so abundant, that servants would ask to have written in their contracts a limitation on the number of times per week it could be served. – read Carolyn Y. Johnson’s fine article here: http://tinyurl.com/kref583

So is there a compelling reason to bring a species back to life, besides pure curiosity? Even if dinosaurs were brought to life and had a real-world Jurassic Park built for them, most people would come, stare at them with mouths agape, take a picture or two, buy a souvenir trinket, then go home and tweet about how ‘they saw a dino’. The majority wouldn’t lobby for protective measures or worry about the impact of such beasts among us or be concerned with the implications of the process; they’d just go on with their lives like humans do after witnessing events.

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