Sexuality experiments on fruit flies inspired writer-director Max Mitchell's latest political satire movie, "Horror in the Wind."
"In biogenetics, there are ways of changing the pheromones, the DNA of a fruit fly, so you can fool the one fruit fly into thinking the female is really a male," he said. "They've actually already done this, where they saved billions of dollars in tomato crops by getting the fruit fly to stop mating because they thought the female was a male."
In his movie, the experiment is done on humans. After a few missteps, two scientists inadvertently turn 90 percent of the world gay.
The film runs Friday through Sunday at the Guild Cinema.
It was shot in Alamogordo for less than $53,000.
"It's such a low budget that we never intended to be in theaters," Mitchell said. "We thought it would be straight-to-video. To satisfy the requirements of the Screen Actors Guild, you have to do one screening in a public theater. Normally theaters do that as a courtesy to local filmmakers because they know the rules, and if it's a favor, you say, 'Oh, OK. On Thursday at 11, screen it,' and nobody hears about it again."
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But Allen Theatres banned the movie across New Mexico.
"(Russell Allen) watched this movie and said, 'It's too political,'" Mitchell said. "I looked at his roster that day. He had seven out of 10 films were extremely violent movies. I thought, 'This is really interesting. He doesn't mind showing blood and gore and guts and violence all the time.'"
He said maybe the movie was banned because his film includes an Alamogordo church that is a famous Harry Potter book-burning site.
"In the movie, this preacher is burning Harry Potter books in the beginning," he said. "He may have seen that and thought, 'Oh, that's too close to home.' I don't know. He didn't say anything else, just it's too political."
The comedy, set in the future, is about two scientists researching rats to make them not be attracted to the opposite sex. No one realizes that the formula makes people attracted to their own gender.
"And the president has just been elected to the White House, who is a religious fanatic, and his campaign theme is the war on sex," he said. "So he's a fanatic that thinks sex should only exist within a Christian marriage. He hates all the college kids having sex. He thinks he can take this formula these guys are working on for rats and apply it to humans."
So the president steals the formula, and the Pentagon has stealth bombers shoot it out all over the world. In the course of a few days, gay and straight people switch places.
"That's when the fun begins," Mitchell said. "And everybody goes crazy at first.. This preacher has an exorcism because he thinks he can get rid of his gayness that way.. It takes a couple of years to find the antidote."
After everyone gets over the initial shock, he said, they find it a preferred lifestyle.
"It takes the president and vice president and lampoons them," he said. "They started as religious fanatics who hate sex. They end up turning gay and having sex in the Oval Office and so, within the structure of the story, the political satire gets incorporated because they get what they deserve. They try to do something powerful, and it ends up backfiring on them in a funny way."
'Horror in the Wind'
Friday, 11 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, 1 p.m.
The Guild Cinema
3405 Central Ave. N.E.
$7 general, $5 with student I.D.
