A wild bachelor party gone wrong doesnt always follow the plot of The Hangover. Consequences can be serious and even life threatening. Texas filmmaker Rowdy Stovall uses this premise in his film Mexican Sunrise, based on true events.
The plot of Mexican Sunrise can be described as The Hangover meets No Country for Old Men. In the film, a group of young men travel to Mexico for a bachelor party that offers a wild night of drinking. But the men don’t just wake up with hangovers. They wake up as collateral, for a drug deal involving one of the partygoers gone sour, and with one of their own dead. Not just missing, dead!
Stovall said he based the core concept of his film on a variety of sources. He is a self-professed fan of coming-of-age and buddy films and got the Mexican setting from his own personal experiences, from frequent trips to south of the border.
“Those films were definitely lurking in my subconscious while I began my first film,” Stovall said. “I spent a lot of time in my 20s visiting family friends in Del Rio and hanging out with my Mexican friends in Ciudad Acuna.”
Stovall’s relationship with the film industry traces its roots to an early love for movies. From a young age, he began auditioning for commercials and taking high school drama classes. After that, he went to college, worked a number of odd jobs before eventually moving to Los Angeles to learn filmmaking.
“I had always been interested in movies,” Stovall said. “When I was 10 years old, I asked my mom if I could be in commercials. In high school, I took a drama class and loved it. After a short while, I moved to LA and decided I needed to learn the nuts and bolts of how to make a film.”
Mexican Sunrise stands as a cautionary tale for anyone seeking a party. Stovall has stated that the on-site production of his film was actually incredibly dangerous, and that if he had the option to film it again, he wouldn’t.
Larson Johnson, an employee at Premiere Cinema in Bryan, said Mexican Sunrise is an incredibly appropriate film for the college-age population of the Bryan/College Station area to view.
“It’s a really interesting take on it cause people like to think you can have a night like The Hangover and have no repercussions,” Johnson said. “That it’s based on a true story makes you want to rethink doing something that could end horribly like that.”
The film is already starting to generate buzz among the local community because of its premise. One student is attracted to the film because of its serious take on party-gone-wrong movies.
“[It] definitely sounds like something I would want to see,” said Bradley Zemanek, senior construction science major.
Mexican Sunrise is currently having regular screenings at Premiere Cinema 16 in Bryan, on the Earl Rudder Freeway.