Movie wants some really creepy actors

The anguished call has gone out to casting agents around Australia: bring us your cockroaches, and quickly.

The anguished call has gone out to casting agents around Australia: bring us your cockroaches, and quickly.

The makers of the film Cubbyhouse need to find thousands of the insects for a scene in which they fill an entire room. Normally they are distressingly plentiful in Queensland, where the movie is being shot, but at the moment they are in short supply because of the unseasonably cool weather.

Shooting begins on the film today, and so desperate are the producers to track down cockroaches that they have issued an emergency casting call, offering to pay 10 cents (4p) for each live specimen measuring more than 3cm long.

The film revolves around an American family who move to Queensland's Gold Coast from Los Angeles. Expecting nothing more serious than a culture shock, they discover an evil presence in a derelict children's playhouse (cubbyhouse in Australian slang) in their garden. This is where the cockroaches make their entrance. In a key scene thousands of them are seen crawling all over the cubbyhouse's resident demons.

Chris Brown, the co-producer, said that locating sufficient cockroaches was proving an expensive nightmare. "Universities and others who breed them for a living were wanting to charge us an arm and a leg.In the hope of getting them for a reasonable price, we have put out an all-points bulletin.

"Of course the major benefit of casting cockroaches is that they don't have agents."