Cleaners

Douglas Reese is a no-budget, non-profit viral filmmaker from Cincinnati, Ohio best known for sharing his personal film work on websites such as Youtube and Vimeo. He has noted that he doesn’t make films for the sake of fame or attention and is not interested in money, but just using digital video as a way to capture his feelings and ideas so that he can express and share with those willing to view them. He’s mainly known for his guerilla-style of filming and using close family and friends for cast and crew and their personal homes for locations.

Outside of the many short films he has directed, Reese has made both feature narratives and documentaries. His first film, the documentary “Home Videos”, was released late 2008 on Youtube – a nearly three-hour montage of home video footage that Reese used to tell the cause-and-effect reaction his family took following the death of their patriarch. That same month, Reese released his second feature documentary called “Family Bonding” – another home video piece that gave an intimate view into the summer he spent with his obese cousin in a rural Ohio apartment after he quit high school and fled his parents’ home. His third feature was his first narrative – the 2008 Youtube released “The Supporter”, a comedy about a girl trying to convince a stranger not to commit suicide. The film is most noted for the Hitchcock-inspiration of being completely filmed in one, unbroken take.

Reese spent the entire year of 2009 creating short films – most of which Reese himself described as “comedy sketches with art-house intentions” before releaseing his fourth feature in the summer of 2010 – the documentary “Mother’s Day Birthday” in which Reese focused on his family’s current condition in the days surrounding a trip they make to a local zoo, months prior to their familial downfall. It’s best noted for its dark undercurrents involving the family’s dysfunctions and the anticlimactic, disturbing final scene involving a monkey. That same year, Reese directed three back-to-back comedies – the “meta”-satire “Digital Invasion” (about Reese trying to create one of his no-budget works with an alien actor), the “Lynch-meets-Waters-inspired” flick “Admiration of the Casual Fuck” (which featured such bizarre comedic moments like a surreal sequence involving a girl making love to a vacuum cleaner) and “The Vaughn Sister” (about two brothers discovering they had a sister they never knew). The latter was met to some positive online word following its Youtube posting.

2011, however, is considered the year in which Reese claimed the title of what one online critic referred to as a “guerilla auteur”. His triple whammy of the documentary “Clermont County” (in which Reese examined his vulnerability as a “nobody, loser filmmaker”), the psychological horror experiment “Snake” (shot entirely on laptop webcam – in which Reese tried to visually showcase the instability of a man following his father’s death) and “Cleaners” – a mood piece that garnered feedback from respectable artists of the film world, online film reviewers, and was even named as one of the year’s best films by a few critics. The film caused legal trouble for Reese, however, when the film was investigated for its depictions of drug use (which were simulated) between the two lead minor actors.

So far in 2012, Reese has released another feature horror piece called “Illumination” (about a boy being stalked by a killer, which turns out being the director himself), the Godard-inspired “montage piece” called “Avëux” (an avant-garde “message” to his best friend in which Reese edited nearly 100 film clips and nearly 50 songs together), and the narrative “Black Rain, White Rain” in which Reese wanted to “remake the same themes of [his] earlier film “Snake”, only with a less experimental and more comfortable filming perspective”. The latter is not available to view online, but is capable of being attained free on DVD through personal contact with Reese himself.

His upcoming projects include the documentary “Son of Lucifer”, an experimental feature called “Snapshots of Demon Brothers”, a feature-length narrative horror film and a few other comedy shorts to be released throughout 2012 and the following year.