Conjuring full-bore terror with 'Pig Hunt'

There's Wine Country, and then there's swine country.

Where the two overlap stands one bodacious 3,000-pound boar named the Ripper, terrorizing the wilds of Boonville.

When Robert Mailer Anderson dreamed up the tale of "Pig Hunt," his debut horror flick premiering Thursday at San Francisco's Clay Theatre, he wasn't even aware of the legend of Hogzilla -- the ginormous walking bacon platter that stirred worldwide interest when it was shot in the wilds of Georgia a few years ago.

"On my property in Boonville we were being inundated with wild hogs that are a huge environmental hazard. They're not indigenous and they're pretty big and pretty scary," said the Mendocino County native and author of the novel "Boonville." He now lives in San Francisco's Pacific Heights with his wife, Oracle heiress Nicola Miner, and four children.

"A friend of mine was turning 40, and he'd never killed anything. And I'd only really shot birds and guns out in trucks after the 12-pack's gone. So we were forced to go out and hunt these things. For my friend it felt like a real rite of passage. He'd never fired a gun, and now he was going to kill this thing. We thought, there's some real drama here."

Filmed in 31 days on location in Boonville for a paltry $6 million, "Pig Hunt" is a rural terror ride through the genres. On the surface, it's another wild animal rampage for the drive-ins, like "Grizzly" or "Jaws." You can hear the dueling banjos of "Deliverance" as the main character invites his buddies (one African-American, one Chinese, another "sexually ambiguous") from the city up to the backwoods of Boonville for a weekend of fun with guns.

Along the way, the hunters become the hunted, whether by a topless hippie cult or a redemptive, snaggle-toothed preacher played by Primus bass player Les Claypool (who broke a finger during the shoot). Geyserville blues harp player Charlie Musselwhite sets the tone as a corner-store sage who whips out a buck knife to draw a hunting map on a naked woman in a centerfold spread. Local marijuana growers perpetuate the myth of the Ripper to protect their gardens. But when it turns out the pig is only too real, it's bloodbath time -- in the jaws of a remote-control animatronic pig the size of a Volkswagen.

When it premiered in July at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, Anderson, who co-wrote the film with his cousin Zack Anderson, told the crowd, "Except for the pig, it's really like home movies."

A nephew of Anderson Valley Advertiser publisher Bruce Anderson, he even lifted a few lines from his childhood growing up in Boonville.

When a white character tells his black friend about the rodeo, his friend replies, "I don't know, something about white people with ropes I don't trust." It was the exact exchange he had with his childhood buddy Creedence.

A deal with one of the major film distributors is on the table, Anderson says, which will hopefully lead to a national release. Then the big challenge will be how to market it.

"When we watched it with the horror crowd (at Fantasia), I realized it's going to play so well with the gun crowd. Hunting is a $23 billion industry in the United States, according to U.S. Fish and Game. Anybody who's ever bought a truck or a 12-pack or stomped down a game trail is going to love this movie -- way more than the horror crowd."

Make no mistake. He may live a few mansions down from the Gettys, but Boonville's in his bones.

"I have a cameo in the film. I'm one of the rednecks and that's not by any mystery. That's where I feel at home. That's whose team I'm on."

Staff Writer John Beck writes a pop culture blog at pop.pressdemocrat.com.