In SHOPPING FOR FANGS, cinematographer Lisa Wiegand teams with co-directors Quentin Lee and Justin Lin to create a genre-blending "B-movie horror action thriller."
In an abandoned alley bathed in blue-black nighttime hues, a cocky young ruffian throws a lone woman up against a cold, brick wall. Suddenly, a lavishly blonde, dangerously high-heeled woman enters, pistol in hand. Caught from behind in an energetic handheld shot, she sends the lustful rogue scampering off with his tail between his legs.
This explosive scene sets the tone for the "GenerAsian X" film Shopping for Fangs. The feature debut of co-directors Quentin Lee and Justin Lin, the picture traffics in glib cultural references, mixes genres, sexualities, and nationalities with impunity, and deftly blends parody and pastiche. A postmodern psychological thriller, Fangs focuses on Phil (Radmar Jao), a loner desperate to fit into any societal mold, whose repression and angst manifest themselves as weird spurts of hair sprouting all over his body. Soon, Phil finds his uncontrollable animal urges leading him to a monstrous and potentially tragic fate. Meanwhile, Katherine (Jeanne Chin), a bored housewife prone to blackouts, finds herself being lured into love by Trinh (Chin again), who has been leaving a trail of romantic notes and photos. Fueled by jealousy and armed with a gun, Katherine's husband, Jim (Clint Jung), goes after his spouse and her lesbian lover in a wild climax which interweaves the tales of the film's three protagonists.
Lee is a Hong Kong-bred filmmaker who spent his adolescent years in Montreal, Canada, and studied film theory and criticism as a UC Berkeley undergraduate. After earning an M.A. in English from Yale, he did his graduate studies in film production at UCLA. Lee compiled his debut feature Flow from four student films produced during his first two years at UCLA, one of which, Four 1990, received UCLA's honored Spotlight Award.
Lin was born in Taipei and raised in Orange County, California. He has produced/directed a number of short films and videos, including Soybean Milk, which also earned the Spotlight Award at UCLA, where he first met Lee while studying film as an undergraduate. The duo's collaboration began when Lin presented Lee with a story-in-progress about a werewolf. Recalls Lee, "We were both trying to come up with something about a younger generation of Asian-Americans. A lot of previous Asian-American films have been didactic; we wanted to do something that would touch on certain themes, but put them into play. We decided to try to combine a couple of our stories."
A year later, the screenplay was finished and Lee began searching for production money. As a Canadian citizen, he was able to get a Canada Council grant to cover about 30 percent of the project's budget. From there, Lee solicited small investments from family friends, securing the capital he needed to get the film shot and edited.
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