NORTHERN OHIO - Internet sensation Raven Riley has taken the step over into the video realm with independent horror porn production Succubus from startup company Evil Motion Pictures.
Built entirely around Riley by her and her RavenRiley.com partners, Tom Leach and Jay Morris (of Third Pentacle and jaYManCash), EMP hopes to garner a whole new fan base for the starlet, and do so outside the Porn Valley system.
Succubus is the first venture in that plan, and a mighty bold one, indeed. Shot over 14 days in the heartlands of Middle America with a cast and crew of all non-industry folk, it was a daring endeavor for everybody involved ... so much so, that they prefer to keep the precise whereabouts of their base of operations below the radar, so to speak.
"We're trying to keep it low key," Leach told AVN. "We actually hired Louis Sirkin, Larry Flynt's legal counsel, and he's been our legal counsel for the film. There's been a few things that we were worried about, but he said go for it, and he'll stand up for us all the way. So I'm hoping that all goes well."
Legal pitfalls aside, though, just the logistics of shooting a porn movie where and with whom they did presented challenges aplenty. "We faced a lot of obstacles during the shooting," Leach said. "The cold weather, the temperatures ... Raven got really sick one day, and I just had to put a stop to the whole thing. I almost called it quits a couple times, but we really worked through it just to get this far.
"This was completely amateur," he went on. "The only aspect that was not amateur was Colin [Rowntree, of Rebel Motion Pictures] and his crew, that came in and helped us out. But other than that, everybody was just, you know, fathers holding mics and uncles coming in to help feed the crew, friends and people we know here that came together for a small salary and put on a good show. It was a lot of fun."
Whatever expertise the EMP camp may have lacked, they definitely made up for in gumption. An ardent horror lover, Leach feels that what they put together with Succubus is "a film that is a complete horror film, and we just took the aspect of that where they stop at a certain point, and just carried it out the rest of the way, and allowed everything to be shown."
The story of Succubus surrounds a hunt by Riley (as herself) for an ancient vampiress (fellow internet model Liz Vicious) who's arisen and begun terrorizing the little town of Leeston, Indiana. According to a fortune passed down through Riley's lineage, she is the only person who can stop the fearsome bloodsucker.
Admitting the great ambitiousness of setting out to execute such a project with his background, Leach humbly noted, "I was really kind of worried about coming into this arena, 'cause we really don't know a whole lot about it. But we just wanted to do something different. I didn't want to do the regular, everyday porno. I'm not coming into this saying, 'Hey, I know what I'm doing, I'm going to do this.' I'm saying, 'I have no clue what I'm doing, but I'm gonna give it a try.'"
On top of everything else, meanwhile, Leach and company are distributing Succubus on their own. "We're doing [distribution] ourselves online and in stores," he said. "We're actually slowly getting some stores interested. It's really a lot harder than I thought it would be. I know I was quite pretentious, [but] I ordered 20,000 copies. I may not sell half of them, but I'm ready to roll here."
To obtain one of those 20,000 copies, and for a whole lot more on Succubus, including the Hollywood-produced trailer, go to www.evilmotionpictures.com.
And look for Raven Riley to soon start taking the adult video world by storm. "That's exactly what I was trying to do," Leach remarked. "Get people to go, 'Wow! Where did this girl come from?'"
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