Buffy & Star Trek Alums Kick Off Kickstarter ‘APOCATIPS’

LOS ANGELES - Oct. 23, 2013 - PRLog -- October 23, 2013 - Los Angeles, CA – Harry Groener and Armin Shimerman, two of the stars of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Star Trek,” reunited for a video to promote the Kickstarter campaign for the film “Diani & Devine Meet The Apocalypse.”

The video is part of a series of thirty shorts called “Apocatips: For a Better End of the World” that will be released once a day over the course of the next thirty days. Other “Apocatips” will feature Tony award-winning Barry Bostwick (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Spin City), Janet Varney (The Legend of Korra, Burning Love), and the writer/directors Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine.

“We wanted to give people fun new content every day,” Diani said, “It’s no fun to post the same video every day for thirty days and hope someone new will watch it. The idea is to entertain the backers we have and hopefully pull in a couple more for the ride.” There are also separate humorous appeals from Groener and Shimerman, Bostwick and Varney that appeal directly to their core audiences. Bostwick shot a home movie on the set of a movie in Romania, Varney dresses up as the character she voices on The Legend of Korra, Groener and Shimerman make some not so subtle nods to their Trek and Buffy work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taS1FUPsC8Y&list=PLoOt...



In return for donating to the project, backers will receive rewards that range from DVDs to Skype conversations with Shimerman, Bostwick and Varney and include MP3 commentaries from Bostwick on the cult film “Megaforce” and from Shimerman on two of his “Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episodes.”

“Diani & Devine Meet The Apocalypse” is the story of a struggling comedy duo (Diani & Devine playing versions of themselves) who discover that surviving the apocalypse is almost as difficult as surviving Hollywood.

This marks Diani & Devine’s third Kickstarter campaign. Their first, a satiric book project called “Replacing the ‘N-word’ With ‘Robot’ in Huckleberry Finn,” went viral after its launch in 2011 and ended up raising over 400% of its initial goal. They followed up in 2012 with a successful campaign to fund a limited theatrical release for their first film, the award-winning supernatural comedy called the “The Selling."

Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine are award-winning actors, writers, and comedians who are often compared with classic comedy teams like Nichols and May and Burns and Allen. They have performed at comedy festivals all over the country, raised over $30,000 on Kickstarter to replace the “N-word” with “Robot” in Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and garnered over 1.3 million hits on their web series Mary Olson. Gabe wrote, produced, and starred in the horror comedy feature film THE SELLING which played at over 30 film festivals, was in the Top 10 of About.com’s Best Horror Movies of 2012, and received rave reviews from The Huffington Post, Ain’t It Cool News, and FilmThreat. Co-produced by and co-starring Etta, the film is available on DVD/VOD and through Fearnet On Demand.