Local filmmaker Kris McMenamin presents Misfits

Wrestling with grief

McMenamin, who grew up in Willow Grove and Warminster and lived for many years in Hatboro, spent most of his professional life as an IT manager, although he also works at a local haunted hayride, so he’s in the orbit of some creative people.

“I have all those kind of actor friends that want to show off. And one came to me like, ‘Hey can you help me rewrite this? You’re funny, you're relatively well spoken,” he said. “So I helped him rewrite a thing that he was doing. And then I was like, we were kind of talking about an idea. And then I wrote a little thing for it. We were just going to do it for funsies. And then I kept writing, and then I kept writing, and layers upon layers kind of got tossed on. And before I knew it, in two months, I wrote a 174-page script.”

Around that time, McMenamin lost both of his parents, and his wife encouraged him to “do something” and launch a creative pursuit. “She encouraged me to take a real shot at it,” McMenamin said. “And so I talked to a couple of friends, and they were in and then put up a Backstage ad for casting and crew.”

Fitting in

The result is Misfits, which tells the story of a group of friends who had a rough childhood, “That bond kind of forges where you get that found family,” the director said. “It's a lot about grief, a lot about trying to be a parent and moving on and… this kind of found family,” McMenamin said, referring to the resulting family arrangement as “Full House-ing it.” One of the characters ends up signing up for a holiday-themed pro wrestling contest.

The film will have its world premiere this weekend at an undisclosed location in the Philadelphia suburbs. “It fit the theme of the movie, [we put together] this weird misfit group of professionals,” he said. The film, which took around a year and a half to film, cost about $60,000, he said, with most of the film taking place on weekends, as most of the cast and crew shot “more professional” projects during the week.

The film was shot around the Philadelphia suburbs, including Hatboro and Levittown, although the major wrestling event at the end was shot in Lancaster. Influences include Clerks, Little Miss Sunshine, and the famed Philadelphia pictures Rocky and Silver Linings Playbook.

The premiere is set for September 20, although it’s not a public event. After that, McMenamin is planning to submit the film to festivals, with a hopeful eye towards distribution.

“We're hoping that one of the distribution or sales agents that we've talked to loves it as much as we do and wants to either license it themselves and package it, or they want to just represent us and get us in front of hopefully some of the [streamers],” the director said.

“We all worked extremely hard and have made an amazing studio-quality film with a very small indie budget and are damn proud of it and want to share it with the world,” the director said in a press release about the film.