By Nathan Duke
Shot during a period of three weeks amid the 10-day blackout of July 2006 in a sweltering warehouse at the corner of 38th Street and 23rd Avenue in Astoria, “The Sickness” is a horror film that tells the story of five lab technicians, all played by borough natives, who suffer dire consequences when the dangerous chemical they are studying is accidentally spilled. Paolino, a Whitestone resident who has worked on special effects and prosthetics for feature films since the late 1970s and teaches makeup and visual effects at Manhattan's School of Visual Arts, said he has put the finishing touches on the editing of his feature debut and is now in the process of screening it for distributors.”My goal was to create something a little more intellectual than your typical horror film – something with a little more substance,” he said. “But horror movies are at the top of the box office every weekend, so I had to make something that was also commercial in order to get it distributed.”The filmmaker previously created the Canadian stop-motion-animated sketch comedy show “The Wrong Coast,” created puppets for MTV's “Celebrity Deathmatch” and worked on independent films such as “Personal Velocity.” His prosthetic work will also be seen later this year in the Sundance Film Festival entry “Pretty Bird” and the upcoming adaptation of David Foster Wallace's short story “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.”Most of the film is set in a small warehouse in which the characters fight to contain a virus that is slowly infecting them, causing hallucinations and paranoia as well as pitting them against one another. Paolino said the three-week shoot was an intense experience because of the blackout, which occurred on the second day of filming and forced the director to purchase a generator to keep the lights on.”It was a nightmare,” he said. “There were people around the corner from [the shoot] handing out bags of ice and we had to create an air-conditioned plastic tent in the warehouse to allow actors to cool off and have makeup glued to their faces.”But Paolino said the difficult filming conditions may have positively added to the film's content.”It was a stressful situation, but the whole movie is about stress,” he said. “The actors were all sweating profusely because it was 100 degrees in that place, so it made them look stressed out. I had originally planned to walk around with a spray bottle to squirt them before specific scenes, but I ended up not needing it.”The film's set was also flooded by the massive rainstorms that originally knocked power out in western Queens before high temperatures became prevalent in the third and fourth days of the blackout.”We were swabbing the decks – it was horrible,” he said.The film's $150,000 budget was increased by an estimated $10,000 during the blackout after the film's producers were forced to rent a generator and bring in bottled water by the case, the director said.Now, Paolino must undertake a step equally as grueling as his 2006 shoot – shopping “The Sickness” to distributors. He said he has decided to bypass the typical festival route for a low-budget independent feature.”I'm not looking at festivals any longer – I need to sell the film,” he said. “You can spend months or years hoping for a festival to pick up your movie and it's wonderful if they do. But this film could be successful right now. It's topical and with the Writers Guild strike going on, there's not much in the pipeline.”Paolino has held several screenings of the film in Manhattan so far and will show the film to various distributors in Los Angeles in March.In the meantime, the director has already written a sequel to “The Sickness” and has another comedic horror film in the conceptual phase. While Paolino does not want to be pigeonholed as a horror filmmaker, he said he thought it would be a smart move to make at least one more entry into the genre.”If this gets picked up, it's probable that my next film will be a horror film,” he said. “You build a fan base that way.”
