E-Mail This Article to a Friend Attack of the B-movie director Things get a little bloody when local cult filmmaker Warren Lynch decides to satirize a harmless consumer fetish BY CAMILLE DODERO

Last summer, director Warren Lynch e-mailed a local film newsgroup looking for two things: a 22-to-35-year-old brunette or redheaded actress with "no visible tattoos or piercings" to play the part of "Sue," and an assortment of My Little Pony figurines. The 30-year-old auteur was setting out to make Pony Girls, a no-budget farce he described as the tale of a "My Little Pony fan club that goes too far and ends up sinking into cannibalism, necromancy, having sex with severed heads."

Although Lynch found the actress, he came up dry on the ponies. But that didn’t stop him from shooting a preview demo, a sample reel of his flick. Renamed Pony Trouble, it’s both absurd and fanciful, laughable and demented, phantasmagoric and gory. Working with the tech staff who helped the Boston resident make his last film, Eyes of the Forest, unpaid performers he found on Craig’s List, and strangers that he, co-director Carolyn Wautaull, and co-producer Irina Peligrad recruited at parties, Lynch assembled a small cast and crew that include a nanny studying part-time to be a minister, a professional doctor and drug researcher, and the lead singer of local hard-rock band.

The plot of Pony Trouble is simple — sort of. Toy company Hasbro — or "a Hasbro-like company," Lynch once noted, sensitive to the dangers of corporate defamation — holds a "Why I Love My Little Pony" essay contest. The grand-prize winner is Cindy, a spacey blond candy-raver who submits a compelling dissertation about her 11-person My Little Pony fan club. The toy manufacturer dispatches two young documentarians, Bob and Dave (played by Lynch), to collect footage of Cindy’s group for a short film. They soon learn, however, that these Pony enthusiasts aren’t simply a harmless gathering of prepubescent horse lovers, but obsessive freaks who conjure spirits from their equine playthings, perform orgiastic rituals, embark on stimulant jags, engage in frenzied live-action role-playing (LARP), and eventually partake in a flesh-eating feast, with the feckless Bob serving as the main course, while a drugged-out Dave gets it all on film to the ethereal, echoing whispers of electro-pop trio Freezepop’s "Outer Space."

The acting — or, as co-writer Gabriel Boyer describes it affectionately, "non-acting" — is campy. But as the scantily clad fan club chews on Bob’s stringy, pink-and-red intestines while he hollers on a table, his entrails look almost real. Turns out, they were made of fake blood, Karo corn syrup, Vaseline, food coloring, and sausage casings stuffed with hamburger. But the essential ingredient was sparerib barbecue sauce. "That was the killer ingredient," recalls Scott Matalon, the lead singer for Daisycutter, who cooked up the bowels. "That was the tang."

Lynch didn’t mind raiding the kitchen cabinets for intestinal-bricolage materials. As he declares in a no-budget manifesto posted on the Eyes of the Forest Web site, "I believe that you can say more with 50 cents and some old straw hat than you can with a diamond." Lynch’s primary intention behind Pony Trouble isn’t to skewer Hasbro or My Little Pony specifically, but to mock consumer culture generally, the American tendency to forgo individual creativity in favor of mass-produced commodities. And the film’s low-budget production supports that sentiment.

But co-director Carolyn Wautaull doesn’t see Pony Trouble simply as criticism; she talks about it as an extreme expression of social estrangement. She likens the character of Sue, a yuppie microbiologist who moonlights as a Pony cultist, to the dual lifestyles of many professionals. "So many people have nine-to-five jobs, and they come home, put on their drag and club clothes, and go wherever the hell they go to be themselves," explains the 18-year-old MassArt student. "They find refuge. They’re freaks. And they find comfort and sanity in this insane world of their own construction. Which isn’t so terrible." She pauses. "Except, you know, for the cannibalism."

MY LITTLE PONY, of course, is Hasbro Industries’ line of pastel plastic horses with synthetic manes and feminine names like Bubbles, Snuzzle, and Blue Belle. The toys spawned both a television show and My Little Pony: The Movie (1986), a full-length feature with voice acting by Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. Nearly two decades later — after the ponies had been removed from American shelves only to be returned due to fan outcry — the figurines gave rise to a self-described "Pony community" who trade the horses online, share tips on, say, the best way to "reroot" hair in bald ponies, and actually convene in "Pony groups" where they call one another by alternate "Pony names." One mother and daughter from Texas who sell Pony paraphernalia on eBay call themselves, respectively, Sparkle Pony and Cool Breeze.

The idea of turning the compulsive habits of My Little Pony collectors into cult-film fodder grew out of a collaboration between Lynch and writer/actor/musician Gabriel Boyer. Lynch’s own moviemaking avocation started a couple of years ago, after he produced "Whimsy," a variety-cabaret night at Cambridge’s Zeitgeist Gallery, which he describes as a place "where the most alienated people could express themselves on a stage, no matter in how weird a form." After organizing the weekly event for a year or so, he decided to bring film to the fringe. "I thought that the ragged weirdos should have movies too."

His first act of celluloid generosity to the ragged-weirdo community was to form a no-budget production company, which he named Pixy Glamour Productions. "I always want my movies to have fairies in them. I always wanted to do something to increase people’s faith in magic, silliness, fairies, and unicorns," he says, laughing. "So that’s why I started a movie company: so I could make fairy-propaganda films." Under the Pixy Glamour rubric, Lynch produced Eyes of the Forest (2003), a 40-minute "medieval fantasy about this knight who goes off in the woods to transport a noble lady somewhere and they get ambushed by brigands." Lynch spent $300 and a year of his life on the project. "As is usual in my movies, everything goes terribly wrong." There was no cannibalism in Eyes of the Forest, "but there was nudity," Lynch says with a chuckle. "And there was a guy getting slapped in the face by a penis. And of course, fairies too. There were fairies."

After Eyes of the Forest screened at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and then played at the Liberation Film Festival, which Lynch hosted himself just to show his movie again ("Yeah, I lost a ton of money on that"), the filmmaker was hunting for something else to direct. A while back, Boyer had hosted something called Bedroom Theater, weekly theater performances staged for friends and acquaintances in his Jamaica Plain loft bedroom. One time, Lynch showed up carrying a My Little Pony lunch box. "It was funny to me," remembers Boyer, who is also editor of local indie publisher Mutable Press. So when Lynch asked Boyer to write him something, he recalled the My Little Pony lunch box and says, "The idea just came to me in a flash."