UNLV Film Professor David Schmoeller Receives Lifetime Achievement Award

Las Vegas, Nev.  –UNLV Department of Film Associate Professor David Schmoeller recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in World Cinema.  The event took place at the Fantaspoa Film Festival in Porto Alegre, Brazil – the largest genre film festival in South America – and featured the world premiere of Schmoeller’s 10^th feature film Little Monsters (2012), shot on location in Las Vegas with a crew comprised of UNLV Department of Film graduates and local professionals. The feature film tells the story of two boys who are released from prison on their 18th birthdays after killing a three-year-old boy when they were 10.

Fantaspoa also screened five of the most culturally impactful feature films by Schmoeller, including his first feature, Tourist Trap (1978), which was recently selected as one of the 130 landmark horror films of all time in the Jonathon Rigby book Studies In Terror: Landmarks Of Horror Cinema ( 2012).  Tourist Trap (1978) was cited as the favorite film of master storyteller of modern horror, Stephen King in the jacket of his book Danse Macabre.  

Also screening at the festival was Puppetmaster (1989), starring Academy Award nominee William Hickey (Prizzi’s Honor) and Golden Globe winner Paul Le Mat (American Graffiti and The Burning Bed).  Puppetmaster is considered one of the most successful horror film franchises in cinema history, spawning 9 sequels.  

A program of short films by Schmoeller screened at Fantaspoa, including The Spider Will Kill You, his thesis film from 1974, which was nominated for a Student Academy Award as well as a number of award-winning short films Schmoeller made during his tenure at UNLV.

Schmoeller was previously honored in Paris in 2007 by the Cinémathèque Française with an homage to David Schmoeller, screening the cult classic films Tourist Trap and Crawlspace as well as his celebrated short documentary on directing enfant terrible Klaus Kinski: Please Kill Mr. Kinski (1999).