Vancouver: Local director Michael Bafaro and production manager Chris Rudolf have returned to Revelstoke, B.C., to film The Barber.

It’s the first full feature shot in their mountainous hometown. (Big studio feature Double Jeopardy, with Ashley Judd, shot one day in Revelstoke back in 1999.)

Produced as the fifth feature by Vancouver’s Prophecy Entertainment, The Barber stars Malcolm McDowell as an Alaska town coiffeur who moonlights as a veteran serial killer. As an ‘offbeat’ psychological thriller, the story gets into his mind and his ability to lead a double life.

Bafaro (For a Few Lousy Dollars) wrote the script with Revelstoke in mind.

Costars are Jeremy Ratchford (Unforgiven), Garwin Sanford (The David Milgaard Story) and Brenda James (The Man in the Iron Mask).

With The Barber, Prophecy is continuing its relationship with Comerica Bank-California, which is financing the majority of the film’s $2-million production costs. Production wraps May 6.

As a specialist in the suspense thriller genre, Prophecy’s most successful outing is its fourth feature – Ripper: Letter From Hell, which got a private screening in Vancouver April 19. In it, a group of college students unravels the mystery of Jack the Ripper and his incarnation. According to the company, Ripper has generated $2.5 million in territory licence sales to foreign subdistributors. Remstar is planning a Canadian theatrical release, while Lions Gate Films is handling U.S. distribution.

In Q2 (ended Dec. 31, 2000), Prophecy posted six-month profits of $97,000 on revenues of $3.4 million, which surpasses tallies for all of fiscal 2000.

Over the year, shares have traded on the Canadian Venture Exchange between $0.60 and $0.23 and closed April 17 at $0.30.

Free range

Tom Rowe, a principal at Vancouver’s Sextant Entertainment, is overseeing production of Don’t Eat the Neighbours, 26 half-hours combining CGI and puppetry.

In a community of animals, the hip youngsters are committed to change while the old-timers still want to eat their neighbors. The comedy will debut on YTV in Canada and ITV in Britain this fall.

Rowe says while the series will involve mainly Canadian directors, British director Andy DeEmmony of Spitting Image and Red Dwarf fame will set the creative style.

Production in a Burnaby studio began in April and runs until September.

Other animated series include Micronauts and Aaagh! It’s the Mr. Hell Show.

TV movie tidalwave

As the strike deadline ticks closer, MOWs are mowing us down:

* Wasting no time after Greenmail last month, Sodona Entertainment producers Vicki Sotheran and Greg Malcolm are overseeing ‘cable feature’ Lone Hero, their third gig with Promark in L.A. and their first gig with cablecaster HBO.

Lou Diamond Phillips (Supernova), Sean Patrick Flanery (Adventures of Young Indiana Jones), Robert Forster (Supernova) and Canadians Tanya Allen (Tail Lights Fade) and Hugh Dillon (Hard Core Logo) star in the story about what happens when entertainers from a Wild West show encounter a ‘bad ass’ bike gang. It’s written and directed by Ken Sanzel, who wrote The Replacement Killers. Production wraps May 18.

* Vancouver producer Raymond Massey has taken crews to Victoria to oversee Black Point, a TV movie for Promark and HBO, starring David Caruso (NYPD Blue), Thomas Ian Griffith (For the Cause) and Canadian Susan Haskell (No Turning Back). Production runs until May 16 on the story about intrigue, laundered money, redeemed heroes and triple-crosses.

* Hidden Target is the three-quel to First Daughter and the shot-in-Vancouver First Target from 1999. Mariel Hemingway reprises her role as a secret service agent and Gregory Harrison returns as the president in the TBS MOW. Production runs to May 11.

Pre-June movie boon

Likewise strikewise, features in production now have June wrap dates.

Miramax is producing The Guest, a comedy by director David Zucker (Airplane, Naked Gun 33 1/3). In it, Ashton Kutcher (Dude, Where’s My Car?) plays a young man who, while house-sitting for his tyrannical boss, schemes to woo the boss’s daughter (Tara Reid of American Pie) only to be foiled by a bunch of unexpected house guests. Molly Shannon (Superstar) also stars. Production runs to June 14.

Original scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis returns for Halloween 8: Evil Never Dies – nor, so it seems, does the appetite for this slasher franchise.

Miramax is backing this feature, too, and production runs to June 20.

Meanwhile, the scared-of-the-dark independent U.S. feature They is in production until June 15. Laura Regan (Someone Like You) and Marc Blucas (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) star.

Detention attention

Daughters of Freedom is a one-hour documentary for WTN’s stream Through Her Eyes, hosted by Jann Arden.

Directed and produced by husband-and-wife team Chris Bruyere and Mary Bissell, Freedom retells the story of 100 Doukhobor children interred in the New Denver School Dormitory by the B.C. government in the 1950s.

Peaceful, communal-living Doukhobor parents who chose to home school their children battled the power of the state, which forcibly removed their children and imprisoned them in the school until they ‘voluntarily’ enrolled. In some cases, children were hunted like wild animals, says Bissell. Parents were able to see their kids twice a month, based on good behavior, through a chain-link fence.

Helen Chernoff Freeman and Kathleen Shlakoff Makaroff, imprisoned for about five years each, are the focus of the documentary, which airs May 10.

Ironically, Makaroff is now a nurse in the facility, which has been transformed to an old-age home.

A Bog in My Backyard, Bissell’s documentary on Burns Bog near Vancouver, aired on CBC’s Rough Cuts in February.

They’ve got game

Vancouver-made video game information show Electric Playground began airing its sixth season this month in Canadian syndication and on Space: The Imagination Station and in the U.S. and Europe through Discovery Communications and Gameplay.

Electric Playground is the premier broadcast source for video game information, says producer Chad McFarlin. Targeted at the 16-35 crowd, the show comprises reviews, news, previews, and interviews with designers from the game industry. Also, the series features celebrity game players from Hollywood, the music world, and professional sports.

Series creator and producer Victor Lucas and Tommy Tallarico are cohosts.

Test run

The one-hour pilot for the syndicated Paramount series The Dead Zone wrapped production April 19. Satisfying Cancon requirements, Canadians Michael Hall (Six Feet Under) and Nicole de Boer (Cube) star with Vancouver resident Michael Moriarty (Law & Order) in the storyline based on the Stephen King book and 1983 movie.

Surf’s up

For those of you who haven’t been to the invaluable www.playbackmag.com site, now is the time. The online vote asks you which of the Leo-nominated series – DaVinci’s Inquest, Cold Squad, Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, Outer Limits or Mysterious Ways – should go home with the hardware in May.

And while you’re there, check out the search function to find out how many times your name appears in the archives. If it doesn’t and you have news, you should be contacting me at iedwards@verus.com. *