By Anna Andersen

After previous experience acting in and producing local films, Key Tawn Toothman and Naythan Smith decided to get together with some friends and “try to make a movie in a weekend or two,” Toothman recalls. “Our main goal for me personally was just for us all to have fun.”

That goal didn't change, but the scope of the project kept expanding. The result is the pair's directorial debut, the upcoming “Stoned Inn,” a horror comedy starring Maximum James of “Seneca Street Liquor” fame, with a cast and crew full of local talent — plus a voiceover performance from “national treasure” Danny Trejo.

James plays Ash, a stoner who loses his dispensary job and enters a contest with a simple but intriguing premise: Stay inside a haunted house for a week and win cash and free weed! It's not as easy as it sounds, though — every day, he has to smoke a different strain, and the highs quickly escalate from a lazy good time to, as the film's website puts it, “a surreal descent into hallucinations, shifting realities, and psychological terror.”

“Making a movie is tough,” says Toothman, “and we were there for lots of days, many hours, nobody's getting paid for anything. So the important thing is we're all having a good time, we're all having fun.”

Beyond good vibes, though, Smith says the movie turned into “a showcase of production … This was kind of proving we could do something like this at this scale, because we have a great group of people. There's an impressive amount of individuals involved in filmmaking around here.”

As the two reached out to previous collaborators, Smith said, part of the project became figuring out “what can we can come up with despite having little in the way of resources? How far can we take this? And then kind of surprising ourselves with how far we actually traveled along the process.”

Early on in filming, Toothman wanted to include his white Bengal cat in the movie — and if there's going to be a big, beautiful cat in a movie, why not have it talk? 

“Then we decided maybe we would want someone somewhat famous to voice this character,” he says. First, he messaged Snoop Dogg about it, but while he did hear back, the conversation didn't go anywhere. 

“I had actually spoken to Danny Trejo and (his) agent maybe a year before, on another project that kind of fell apart, and one night it hit me in my mind, maybe I reach back out to Danny Trejo and see if maybe he would play the voice of the cat.” 

After months of back-and-forth, “we were able to get Danny on board, and working with him was great.”

Smith had the bright idea to name the cat character “Meowchete,” after Trejo's iconic character from Richard Rodriguez's “Spy Kids” franchise (2001-2003) and the grindhouse features “Machete” (2010) and “Machete Kills” (2013).

Also in the cast: local filmmaker Leif Jonker, who also provided aid and inspiration behind the scenes. “I don't know anyone in this city that's making a movie that Leif Jonker isn't trying to help,” Toothman says.

Former Wichita theater standby Don Winsor, who now lives in Australia, came back to film “a very, very cool, very high-level performance that's going to be a standout.” 

Besides Trejo and Winsor, out-of-town actors featured include martial artist Chris Casamassa, best known for playing Scorpion in the 1995 “Mortal Kombat” movie, and Jessa Jupiter Flux, a big-bosomed B-movie scream queen known for flicks like “Onlyfangs” and “Murdercise.” Flux's connections helped bring in Lloyd Kaufman, co-founder of Troma Entertainment, for a post-credits scene.

The filmmakers are aware of the irony of making a stoner comedy in one of the only states in the country where cannabis remains illegal. Smith jokes, “What's more hilarious and ludicrous than the federal prohibition of marijuana?”

“Stoned Inn” is currently in post-production, with no release date set, but will be announced in the October 30 Halloween issue of Scream magazine. 

“As of right now, we're just focused on trying to finish the film and adding these little things here and there to make it a little more interesting,” Toothman says. “We've got some pretty fun stuff planned.”

The film's website, stonedinn.com, is part of that fun, designed to look like a Windows 98-era website, with pixel art, a guestbook, and an “arcade” of movie-themed browser games; the directors are hoping to make some relevant physical souvenirs, too, like a Beanie Baby-style stuffed Meowchete.

Overall, says Toothman, “Stoned Inn” is “really meant to show that, hey, we don't need all of these things. We didn't need to raise a bunch of money. 

“We just want to show people, like, hey, if we had a bunch of money, imagine what we could do.”

Anna Andersen co-hosts Your Favorite Bad Movie Podcast with their husband. They have four cats named Brains, Hamburger, Twinkle, and Zazzle.

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