Most filmmakers — even the likes of Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan — have likely had a “pinch me” moment on set when they’re watching some wild idea they once dreamed up come to life before their eyes. For Lav Bodnaruk, his moment arrived earlier this year in Australia while directing 1990s pop icon Vanilla Ice, who at the time was covered head to toe in blood and killing zombies with a drill.
“It was like, this is crazy,” he explains. “And Vanilla Ice was the same. He couldn’t believe that we were turning him into an action hero.”
The film in question, Zombie Plane, being sold at the AFM by Studio Dome and which Bodnaruk co-directed alongside Michael Mier, might not sound like it’s towards the serious end of the cinematic spectrum. And it isn’t. At all. And Ice isn’t even the only once big name appearing. In something of an unlikely on-screen pairing, 1980s action icon Chuck Norris also stars.
The — comically ridiculous — film sees Ice play himself, but an Ice using his music career as merely a front, disguising the fact he’s a top-secret ninja agent who saves the world from zombies and high-level supernatural threats. Norris, naturally, plays Commander Chuck Norris, his badass mentor and trainer in a plot where the plane Ice is on as a passenger is taken over by zombies, which he must dispatch before it’s shot down by fighter jets (to stop the spread, of course).
Incredibly, the idea is based on a true story. Sort of. According to Mier, the writer William Strong was watching TV one day and turned the channel to TMZ.
“And the main TMZ guy was literally on the phone to Ice, for several hours, because the plane he was on had been grounded due to biohazard of some description,” he says. “So I think he was just sitting there going, ‘this is great, but what if it was zombies?’ And with Vanilla Ice and zombies, you’re off.”
Joining Ice and Norris aboard Zombie Plane (which shot in Brisbane mostly in a purpose-built 60-meter long airplane) and also playing herself is Sophie Monk, the singer-turned-actress who Bodnaruk describes as “a darling of Australia,” having risen to fame back in 2000 on the local version of talent show Popstars. Monk was cast for the Australian market, but also because — like Norris and Ice — she taps into the nostalgia factor of the film (and there are a number of cameos yet to be announced that do so as well). She also, crucially, didn’t care about a script that mercilessly mocks its main stars. Actually, it’s Monk who reportedly dishes out most of the abuse in the direction of Ice, calling him a one-hit wonder and a has-been.
“I was actually shocked that he said yes to it, but he just took it all on the chin from everybody,” says Pier. “He’s so likable and such a genuine dude.”
Monk is also responsible for the film’s almost certain R rating for the U.S. “It’s not the blood or the gore, of which there is a lot, it’s the F-bombs,” notes Bodnaruk, who says that “she’s the darling of Australia, so what that means is that she has an F-bomb in every sentence she says.”
The director claims that at one point they pulled all the “fucks” out bar one, as per rules, but mischievously gave that one to an eight-year-old character. “And they were like, you can’t do an eight-year-old!” They put them all back in.
“You know, we decapitate animals, a chihuahua — a zombie chihuahua — we kill kids … you do all this stuff, but then you drop two F-bombs and suddenly it’s R-rated, so we were like, well, let’s embrace it and lean into it,” says Mier.
And for a movie that the filmmakers claim is laden with jokes and potential memes, there’s a line that perhaps helps unite both the worlds of extreme zombie-massacring violence, and 1990s chart hero Vanilla Ice – and could become one of its most repeated.
Says Mier: “Yeah, it’s: ‘Stop, decapitate and listen’.”
