An indie horror film based in Provo confronts stereotypes about AAPI culture

Imagine an abandoned board game — a battered Polynesian version of Candyland from the 1970s — pulled out of hiding for a yard sale. A group of four friends picks it up.

The casual purchase sets off a series of eerie events that will haunt them.

This is the premise of a new coming-of-age horror film — “Kalamasa’s Revenge” — shot entirely in Provo.

The film is based on experiences of the cast and crew, all Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University graduates living in Provo and members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.

“I really wanted to kind of unpack that struggle that we’ve lived through, the horror of living in a post-colonial era,” said director and writer Kā'eo Drumright, “living in a place like this that has been colonized and understanding [how] … colonization continues to affect us.”

Drumright, a native Hawaiian who is also Filipino and attended BYU, said they had to figure out how to “conform and assimilate to the dominant culture” after moving to Utah, even as someone who was raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The narrative within the world of the board game, also named “Kalamasa’s Revenge,” reflects that idea. Drumright said the game follows a group of white explorers who land on a fictionalized island called Hafanui, which has not been, as he put it, “quote, unquote, ‘civilized.’”

The idea of the game, Drumright said, stemmed from exploring how “culture can often be appropriated and used in a pageantry kind of way.”

For example, they said, the characters in the film are reckoning with an evil ruler named King Kalamasa who embodies “very outdated” stereotypes of Pacific Islanders and Polynesians, like witchcraft and human sacrifice. The cast and crew have said they experienced modern variations of such bias in Provo.

“The film kind of posits that this lost board game … was created by a company called Thurston Dole Limited,” Drumright said, “which is kind of an inside reference to the people who participated in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, Lorrin Thurston and Sanford Dole.”

Queen Lili`uokalani was overthrown in January 1893, forced to abdicate by sugar planters and businessmen, including lawyers Thurston and Dole.

In the game, Drumright said, players “roll a dice, move your character across the tiles until you get to the treasure at the end, and along the way, you stumble upon these question mark tiles that are kind of like chance cards.”

Those cards spur events that “reflect these stereotypes,” and “kind of haunt our characters,” Drumright explained.

For Drumright and many others involved in “Kalamasa’s Revenge,” this is their first experience making a feature film. They collaborated with a graphic designer in Provo, John-Ross Boyce, to make the actual board game, which they did by wrapping an existing game with the artwork. Then they “aged it” by kicking it around in gravel and dumping coffee on it.

“It is very homemade. We want to try to give it that feel that it’s very practical, very old school and very kind of beat up and well-loved,” Drumright said.

One of the actors in the film, Mari Joy, attended BYU as an international student from the Philippines. She is not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and that came in handy when preparing for her role, she said.

“It was so homogenous, when I landed in Utah from the Philippines,” Joy said, talking about her memories and feelings from her time at BYU. “This character just had so much of [those] experiences that at this time of my life I could pull from.”

As such, Drumright said, setting the film entirely in Provo was akin to having “an additional character” in it, one that “expresses itself and interacts with the characters and affects them throughout the film.”

There are iconic spots in Provo that will make an appearance in the final cut, Drumright said, like Y Mountain.

The crew finished shooting in September. Drumright said they are anticipating it will take a year or so to complete production before they try to take it on the festival circuit to share it with the world.

Recognizing that there is a deficit in representation of their community, Drumright said, “We wanted to create a film that says, ‘Hey, look at us. We’re here.’”

The No. 1 priority, they said, “is that we can build community with this film, that we can put something on screen that people can identify with [and] can see themselves in.”

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