April Monique Burril a.k.a. chainsaw sally

I'm sitting here with Chainsaw Sally, how are you tonight?

I'm doing wonderful, thank you very much.

So, you're hosting Fish Head Cantina's Halloween Massacre Party.

Yes but they wouldn't let me have a massacre. I tried to get them to let me do it but I guess there's regulations against that thing. So, yeah, just costume contests tonight but no blood.

No blood? No fun!

I know. I know!

How did you get involved with this evening? From my understanding, you are familiar with one of the bands in particular?

I am. I work with Wind Up Toy. I call myself a prop. They are an Alice Cooper tribute band. They do all of the theatrics, the guillotine, the death scene, all of that. I play a crazy nurse in the band and sometimes I do other things. I play a doll that winds them up but tonight I'll just be a nurse and there's a crazy doctor with us too played by James Watkins. He's the band's manager and he's also a prop like me.

When it comes to life outside of Wind Up Toy, what's going on in the world of Chainsaw Sally? Don't you have a new project coming up, The Life And Crimes Of Chainsaw Sally?

Yes, we were actually intending to shoot it this fall. The Life And Crimes is basically; Sally's been out of the picture for a while and it picks up after she has left Porterville. I don't really want to give the plot away. I can say that fans of Sally will in the first ten minutes be really annoyed and upset at how Sally has turned out but they will be very happy about half an hour in because it gets wonderful. It's, kind of, an interesting development but we are probably going to be filming that this spring now because life got in the way this fall and it didn't work out, to many other things going on.

That's coming up and we are hopefully, hopefully going to be shooting a non-Cainsaw Sally project. Just a scary movie called D-Lo. It's about hauntings and ghosts and it's actually based on the writer, my husband Jimmyo Burril, grew up in a haunted house when he was about seven. So, of course, this is going to be greatly dramatized because the real life story wouldn't be that good as a movie, though it is pretty spooky, but it's going to be based on that and it's going to be a really, really good, solidly scary, serious movie and it's my favorite script so far. I don't know when we get to film that.

What's the origins of Chainsaw Sally? How did that film come about?

Chainsaw Sally was born way before the movies ever existed. We used to run a theater troupe where one of our main productions was an original production called Silver Scream. It's basically a horror musical that would take you through a bunch of different horror movies on stage and all the humor and all the fun of it was really geared towards horror fans but when you tell horror fans that there's a musical they run really fast in the other direction. I mean, I'm one of them. There's some musicals I like but generally no, I wouldn't see it. So, we created Chainsaw Sally as a hostess to, kind of, rope people in to get them to understand what it was because it really is awesome. Horror fans that do come to see it love it. And then, Sally, kind of, took on this life of her own and we weren't sure what we wanted to do with it. We were using her for a horror hostess online and doing interviews and then eventually we made a movie of Silver Scream the play and then after we got done with the movie we were like, "This is, kind of, fun. Instead of live stage lets do movies for a while." and the next logical movie was Chainsaw Sally because most people thought it was a movie already, anyway.

You and I and Jimmyo had a cool, little conversation earlier. For the fans that don't know, there's the original movie which had to be, for lack of a better term, edited to achieve a certain rating but you do have an unrated version that you two have released, that's in a dual-pack.

Yes. It's in a dual-pack with another one of our movies, The Good Sisters. It's starring Debbie Rochon and that one's all about witches. We're sisters, we're witches, we're not actually good at all. That one's a very psychological thriller.

But yeah, Chainsaw Sally, that's paired with that, has been digitally remastered and a lot of the scenes were cut because the gore had to be cut down to get an R-rating, the gore scenes have been extended back to where they were originally supposed to be. There were some scenes that were deleted just for time that are put back in like a whole other character who was in the library. There's a lot of good stuff in it.

When it came to The Chainsaw Sally Show and Troma, how did you get involved with them?

Well, we started doing it just completely on our own. With The Chainsaw Sally Show, we were done trying to get funding for anything and we just decided to go completely gorilla and make our own thing for absolutely zero budget which was really, kind of, fun and we did and we sold it on our own. So, we sold it on our own for a little while and selling the movie is really not the fun part, the fun part is making it. So, Troma asked us if we'd be interested in distribution and we weren't, really, at first but we were, kind of, sick of dealing with it. We were like, "Yeah know, if we go with Troma we won't make any money but they are known worldwide." Like, I will pick up a movie just because it has a Troma label and I know a lot of other people are like that. There's people in Australia that have bought our stuff now because it had a Troma label on it. It was worth it for the exposure. For other indie filmmakers out there, if Troma offers you something, don't do it for the money because you're probably not going to get any but it is worth the exposure. It's really good exposure.

You have two seasons of that, is there a third season coming?

Well, we kept on toying with that and I think that's where Life And Crimes has come up because we were toying with a season three and, sort of, had it written and we started toying with doing the cartoon (Chainsaw Sally: The Animated Series,) which is not off the table yet, it's just hard to get a cartoon made. But, Life And Crimes, we're trying to decide if that's going to be a series or a whole movie by itself and Jimmyo said, "I'm just going to start writing it and we'll see what it looks like." and it looked like a movie so it's going to be a movie. That's how it goes and hopefully, there will be a few more after that.

And, since we are out at a show/concert environment, what's in Sally's iPod?

A lot of different stuff.

What does Sally kill to?

Well, I kill, usually to, The Damned and that, kind of, punk rock stuff. Some Cramps, there's some Alice Cooper in there because he's the root of everything, honestly, I love him. There's some Doors and some Led Zeppelin and there's some Alice In Chains, I guess I just like Alice's. I've also got Beats Antique because I'm a belly dancer too, so there's that type of music in there. There's a lot of different things in there.

Sally, thank you so much for letting everybody into the world of Chainsaw Sally. What you've done, what you're doing and what you're doing this evening.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.