Actor Lucas Van Engen (www.LucasVanEngen.com) sent in this parody trailer he produced and starred in titled “Drago: The Movie”, an amusing take on the trailer for the upcoming “Creed” movie, but this time, putting the son of Ivan Drago in the limelight.
The well-produced video trailer, which cost $3,500 to shoot, was shot by cinematographer Kevin Schaefer and directed by Joshua Durham, whose film “Shadowboxing” (shadowboxingfilm.com) just premiered at the New York Film Festival.
Durham, a boxer in real life, also got some “reel” boxing experience working on a Golden Gloves documentary in addition to “Shadowboxing”.
“Rocky IV was my favorite Rocky movie growing up,” Van Engen says. “I can’t tell you how many times I saw that when I was young. I wrote the script for ‘Drago‘ and went through about 20 versions of it always getting it shorter, trying to get down to the 1 minute mark and include all the references, bouncing it off of friends and family for review.”
Props and costume manager Sarah Cogan jumped into action and helped find the gym used in the workout shots of the film, Gym X in Brooklyn, New York. Cogan designed the basement set and also created her own replica of Drago’s “punching machine”, displaying the PSI on a digital screen. You’ll remember that the Siberian Express registered a superhuman 2,150 PSI when he slammed his steroid fueled fist into the machine in Rocky IV.
“I scream a lot in this video,” the actor says of his role as the scrawny son of Drago.
“All of those screams and the exercises themselves took place in a non-stop 12 hour shoot day. You’ll also notice I’m cinematically sweaty. That’s because the make-up girl was dousing me with glycerin and water for 12 hours straight. Well, it turns out I have a mild glycerin allergy. Two days later I showed up to a voice-over job with blown-out vocal chords, a puffy face and sore muscles. I must have looked like I had a serious hangover. I pulled off the job, though.”
The trailer for “Drago: The Movie” is not to be confused with a proposed film screenplay titled “Drago”, a story which puts actor Dolph Lundgren back into the spotlight as Ivan Drago again as he battles Rocky Balboa’s final opponent, Mason ‘The Line’ Dixon. Read about the “Drago” screenplay here.
