Outer limits

Better update your Netflix queues, B-movie maniacs: Mike Conway's sci-fi/horror film War of the Planets is slated for a Nov. 15 release courtesy of Lions Gate Entertainment.

The saga of War of the Planets begins in the late '80s, when Mike Conway was a college student in Ohio. During summer break he was instructed by his roommate to care for his pet tarantula, named Satan, which inhabited a terrarium.

"He told me to feed Satan some crickets," recalls Conway. "So I did. The crickets would crawl under Satan and just sit there. I'd go to bed, and in the morning they'd be gone. It was creepy."

Conway hit upon the premise of placing humans inside a terrarium. But Conway didn't start writing the screenplay until 12 years later. After moving to Las Vegas, he had just completed a short film called Roadkill, shot on 16-millimeter film for five grand, and was looking to sink his teeth into a feature-length project. He decided to max out his credit cards and bear the production costs himself after his original financial backing fell through.

He began writing in January of 2000 and had a final draft by summer's end. In it, 12 characters, trapped in their failed "cryo-beds,' are attacked by a carnivorous monster. Conway called the movie Terrarium, and settled on his backyard as a shooting locale, constructing a spaceship out of chipboard. "Sixty-four feet long and 12 feet wide, it was bigger than a lot of my friends' apartments," says Conway. To create an alien landscape, he trucked in 20 tons of sand and several expensive boulders. Naturally, his neighbors hated him.

The cast includes a few of his inexperienced co-workers at Treasure Island and actors who answered a newspaper ad. Production began in September and October of 2000 with a silent-film camera. "Because it was cheaper that way," says Conway, laughing at his own cost-cutting. Cinematography involved lots of handheld camerawork and one-light setups. He spent the next year dubbing the actors' voices then another three months composing the electronic score.

Still, he wasn't done. He built his own dual-processor computer so that he could screen Terrarium on the cheap, instead of renting a $250-per-day video projector. Terrarium premiered at the Paradise movie theater (now called Tropicana Cinemas) in January 2002.

After being told he needed more FX, he hired an ex-Westwood Games FX artist and another computer-graphics expert he met online to create 18 shots, all of which Conway added to Terrarium in early 2003. Finally, an independent film rep whom Conway also met online managed to get a screener copy to Mainline Releasing, who sold it to Lions Gate. Lions Gate had one condition, though: Change the title to War of the Planets to capitalize on the DVD release of Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

"We didn't make a lot of the money on the deal," admits Conway, "but at least we got our indie movie on the shelves of Blockbuster and Hollywood Video."

Conway is maintaining his momentum. Last week, he premiered his superhero/techno-thriller The Awakening at Highland Office Park. Conway feels it's his best work to date.

"By that, I mean there's always something going on -- gunplay, superpowers, explosions," he says. "It's not your average supergirl movie."