Danny Lopes Movies
Writer/director Dante Tomaselli's horror picture Satan's Playground (2005) -- the filmmaker's third feature outing -- subverts horror expectations and genre clichés by deliberately suspending point-by-point logical threads, carefully steering around gore, and enlisting an acting ensemble not of teenagers, but of actors who are predominantly well into middle age. The picture involves the Bruno family -- siblings Donna (Felissa Rose) and Paula (Ellen Sandweiss), Donna's hubby, Frank (Salvatore Paul Piro), and autistic son, Sean (Danny Lopes), and newly single Paula's baby, Anthony -- who are en route to a vacation in the New Jersey Pine Barrens when their car gets stuck in the middle of nowhere. In an effort to solicit help, they inadvertently fall prey to a clan of white-trash, backwoods psychotics, while several are picked off, one at a time, by a strange, unknown predator from out of the night sky. Cast with veterans of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Evil Dead movies, Tomaselli pays loving tribute to slasher movies of cinema past. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Felissa Rose, Ellen Sandweiss, (more)
A merry band of young psychiatric patients, lead by Luck (Danny Lopes), escapes their mental hospital after shooting a guard and stealing a van. They rush to rendezvous with the seriously demented Rev. Salo (Vincent Lamberti) and his depraved wife (Christie Sanford), who, when not preaching nutty wisdom, have raised their daughter Grace (Lizzy Mahon) as a drug-addicted slave. When the mental patients show up, the reverend and his wife get more than they bargained for, and Grace develops a close relationship with her grandfather (The Amazing Kreskin) who fills her in about her family, but leaves out a pretty important detail about himself. Meanwhile, a devil-horned goat watches it all with a gimlet eye. Yes, a goat. ~ Buzz McClain, All Movie Guide
- 1999
In this offbeat and original horror opus, 16-year-old Bobby has been traumatized both by the death of his mother at an early age, and a brutally repressive Catholic upbringing. After Bobby accidentally causes the death of a nun, the boy finds himself sent to Hell, where he encounters his mother and causes a chain-reaction of terrifying spiritual and supernatural consequences. Desecration was the debut feature for 30-year-old auteur Dante Tomaselli. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Irma St. Paule, Christie Sanford, (more)
