“The Younger and the Last of the Vengeants” stars, from left, Brandon Draper, Eliab Rice, Cayden Quinn and Caleb Phay. Rice wrote, filmed, directed and edited the movie, which screened at the 2020 BendFilm Festival’s pop-up drive-in.

BendFilm Festival will look a little different this year. Founded in 2004, the independent film festival kicks off this year with films streaming online and a limited selection screening at BendFilm’s pop-up drive-in at Deschutes Brewery facility. One of the films screening in the latter category is 20-year-old Prineville filmmaker Eliab (“Eh-lie-ub”) Rice’s first entry into the film festival world: “The Younger and the Last of the Vengeants,” a feature-length, campy sci-fi adventure about four friends who make a business of wizardry but mostly end up doing odd jobs for strange townspeople in their fictitious hometown of Perkley. Things happen and soon go from quirky to creepy once they unleash a creepy interdimensional vampire, as one does.

To anyone familiar with Central Oregon, Perkley is recognizable as Prineville. Likewise, the film’s forest scenes, shot in what is clearly, to Central Oregonian eyes, the Ochocos.

“The Younger and the Last of the Vengeants,” which will screen Saturday evening at BendFilm’s drive-in at Deschutes Brewery, began with an idea Rice had at 14, when, he said, “I realized all I wanted to do was make feature films.”

He became “enveloped in Youtube,” he said. Rice was influenced by Jake Roper’s vsauce3 channel, which has nearly 4 million subscribers.

“I always loved movies,” Rice, now 20, said last week. “It’s not just movies, but just, like, stories in general. I’ve always been a visual artist, so I always drew a ton … so stories, and visual art and movies.”

“He would do science videos, but (the science is) compared to movies and characters. I just thought it was so cool. I was like, ‘You know, what, I’m going to start a Youtube channel, and I’m going to do science stuff,” said Rice. He created a channel, eliabvice, for his short films.

“I soon discovered that the science part was not quite my favorite part. It was just making the videos,” he said.

After a few years of making music videos and other shorts, Rice figured the time was right to pursue the movie idea he’d harbored for three years.

“I always had that story in my mind, I guess, and I was like, ‘You know what, I better get on this sooner than later. Might as well do this,’” he said.

Rice began to write the script, not letting the fact that he didn’t know how stop him.

“The script is kind of super messy. It kind of doesn’t make any sense to anyone but me,” he said. “It took four months, which now, looking back, that’s not very long.”

The actual filming took about a year, with shooting primarily taking place on weekends and weekday afternoons.

“Some people could make it, some people couldn’t, so you had to work around schedules,” he said. With rewrites and reshooting of scenes, he was 18 by the time he and his friends that make up the cast wrapped up filming. Rice not only did the directing and camera work, too, he also tended to the editing and whimsical hand-drawn special effects.

“It was, like, me,” he said. “I was the cameraman, and I was in the movie, so a lot of the stuff, I was kind of like, ‘All these shots are still shots, because I’m setting it up on a tripod.”

“I kind of got my inspiration from ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,’” Rice said. “I have a 2016 Macbook Pro, so there’s no way it’s running any 3D rendering software. I was like, ‘I love animation, I love that hand-drawn feel, and it fits the movie well, so I’m just going to do that. It worked really well. I think.”

It does. There are moments when you watch the film that seem amateurish, even self-indulgent, but on the whole, “The Younger and the Last of the Vengeants” belies the filmmaker’s young age. Particularly its visuals, which are stunning at times.

“It was a lot of work, for sure,” said Rice.

Just as he did at 14, Rice still wants to become a professional filmmaker. However, he is not interested in film school, he said. As for the results of his first feature-length effort, he’s self-deprecating and philosophical about the whole endeavor.

“I just knew that I had to make it, I guess,” Rice said. “I didn’t expect it to win anything (or) to go anywhere. It was just one of those things that I had to accomplish for myself. … It’s just a passion project for me, really. I’m really attached to it. And it’s not something that’s to be criticized, because it’s kind of terrible in my opinion. It’s like a teen music video, almost. It’s kind of garbage but, you know, lovable in a way?”

What: “The Younger and the Last of the Vengeants”

When: 6:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: BendFilm Festival Drive-In, corner of Shevlin-Hixon Drive and Columbia Street

Cost: $35 plus fees

Contact: bendfilm.org