Greater New Haven | Movies | Stratford
In the short-film produced by Hang Out Films and Everyone Leaves New Haven, our city has a serious case of crabs.
Still from the short-film, CRABS
When you live in New Haven, answering questions about our pizza can sometimes feel like a nepo-baby talking about their parents. Yes, their family is well known, and for (hopefully) good reason. But, hey, we’re more than just our parents. We’re more than just pizza.
This topic has veered into local ad nauseam, literally, as the former Chief Marketing Officer of the State of Connecticut Anthony Anthony’s tenure was defined by pizza. Last year, Connecticut spent nearly $250,000 on an interstate pizza rage-bait campaign. Pizza makers, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, and U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, took an Avelo flight to Washington, DC, to claim status as the pizza capital. Despite an unusually strong nor'easter this past September, Taste of New Haven’s Colin Caplan organized a pizza costume party that drew over 700 people, where Mayor Elicker wore what looked like a drop-ship pizza costume.
That government pizza obsession reaches horrific heights in the short film CRABS, which premiered last Friday at Two Roads’ Pumpkin Fest. The Hang Out Films and Everyone Leaves New Haven production takes place in New Haven, where crabs have resorted to killing fishmen and pizza fans alike in retaliation for eating their clams. The Mayor, played by Justin Kern, holds a press conference and assures citizens that Chief Science Officer Herklin, played by the film’s producer and co-writer, Kris Wingo, will handle the issue. The Mayor guarantees that nothing will get in the way of a major New Haven pizza festival. That empty assurance turns deadly.
“It’s not even New Haven, it’s really the Connecticut government, who loves to say that, ‘We are a pizza place! We are the Pizza Capital of the World!’ But New Haven is more than that,” said CRABS Director of Photography and Hang Out Film’s Stephen Bisaccia. “This is a way of poking fun at that label.”
CRABS Director and Producer of Everyone Leave New Haven’s Ryan Licwinko wrote the short film back in 2019. He said the original script “is not an eco-apocalypse movie, but it’s not not that.” While watching the film, one has to wonder what happened to the New Haven shoreline that caused crabs to eat digested clams from human bodies.
As Licwinko got to know the local filmmaking collective Hang Out Films through the New Haven 48 Hour Film Project, the two groups saw an opportunity to make more zany films. Licwinko worked with Wingo to adapt the original CRABS script for the Two Roads short film competition. This is one of Licwinko’s many horror films he has created for the brewery’s nine-year-old film festival and beyond.
Although the short received second place from the Two Roads judging committee, prestige didn’t seem to be the goal for CRABS. The filmmakers wanted to make a hyper-local story with a hyper-local crew. “I moved here from Missouri, and I made a lot of stuff by myself,” said Wingo. “But then I came [to Hang Out Films], and suddenly, I have twenty people I want to make stuff with. It’s amazing. “
“It’s fun to be part of the team,” said Chris Huh, who helped with sound and special effects for the film. She meticulously strung fake crabs with fishing wire to create a moving crustacean army. This scrappy all-hands-on-deck production had smart and hilarious cinematography, from inching the camera down from The Mayor when the shorter Chief Scientist joined the televised press conference, to zooming in on blood splurting from pizza-greased fingers.
While the film is still being finalized for a wider public screening, Hang Out Films continues to gather interested filmmakers across the city. The next Hang Out Films event is FILM SKOOL on October 20th at GROUP PROJECT on 140 Bradley Street in New Haven, where small groups will watch and discuss short films. As Wingo shared, “We're just trying to get people connected to have fun and learn together.”
Photo of CRABS screening at Two Roads Brewery