Two Movies With Anti-abortion Messages Seek Distribution

The LA Times:

Mainstream Hollywood rarely tackles the subject of abortion, and when it does, it’s usually when a character quietly opts not to have one. But two new independently financed movies — a small-town mystery and a psychological thriller — are bringing an emphatically anti-abortion slant to the hot-button issue.

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“Doonby,” a $2-million film backed by an anonymous financier, tells the story of a mysterious drifter played by John Schneider (Bo Duke from “The Dukes of Hazzard”) who quickly makes himself indispensable to a small Texas town. The secret of Doonby’s past lies in the only person in town he doesn’t like — a gynecologist named Dr. Cyrus Reaper (Martin Sheen’s brother Joe Estevez).

Meanwhile, “The Life Zone,” a $1-million thriller written by New Jersey Republican State Senate candidate Kenneth Del Vecchio, follows three pregnant women who have been abducted from abortion clinics and are being forced to carry their babies to term by a shadowy jailer (Robert Loggia) and a barren female physician named Dr. Wise (Blanche Baker, perhaps best known as the older sister in “Sixteen Candles”).

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Both films have supernatural themes and a third-act twist that conveys an anti-abortion moral. Neither of them yet has theatrical distribution.

“The clear message I’m sending as the filmmaker is that abortion is evil,” said Del Vecchio, who is also a lawyer, former judge and an author of legal books and novels. “Generally speaking, filmmakers, executives and actors hold very liberal points of view and this isn’t a topic that’s of interest to them. But I don’t care what Hollywood thinks.”

Read the full piece here.