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“Mandao of the Dead” is a fun and surprisingly laid-back fantasy flick, a sort-of buddy movie that makes the most out of its limited budget and charismatic cast. It may not look like a particularly ambitious film, but it’s charming, funny and smart enough. I had the opportunity to exchange e-mails with the film’s director, Scott Dunn. What follows is a brief interview in which he tells me a little about the pre-production process of the movie, as well as his stories related to the paranormal, and of his chief interests: astral projection. How did you come up with the basic concept for Mandao of the Dead? I wanted to tell my own time travel story. I had the characters more or less from...

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Some filmmakers believe that, in order to make a fantasy or science-fiction picture, you need a gigantic budget, fancy special effects, or big-name actors. Movies like “Mandao of the Dead” are proof that you actually don’t need any of that. As long as you have a solid script, believable actors, and a story that doesn’t demand big set pieces or scenes of destruction and mayhem, you should be all right. After all, genres like science-fiction or fantasy-horror are all about ideas and imagination; you can convey quite a bit without showing it all, making the most out of your budget and sets and locations and stars. And whaddya know, that is precisely what writer-director-star Scott Dunn has done with “Mandao of the Dead”. Now, don’t...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...