James Marsters

James Marsters (Dragonball Evolution) told SCI FI Wire that he’s completed filming on the upcoming SCI FI Channel original movie High Plains Invaders, in which voracious alien bugs invade an Old West town.

Marsters plays a guilt-ridden, lovelorn man who’s preparing to die when he’s called upon to be a hero and help save the town.

"That was a fun shoot," Marsters said last week in an exclusive telephone interview to promote Dragonball Evolution. "We filmed that in Romania. It’s a love story in a cowboy town. It’s about a man who killed too many Indians. He burned too many villages and couldn’t live with himself anymore. He comes into town to get hanged, because he’s also been robbing trains, and he finds that the woman he abandoned is living in that town."

Just before Marsters’ character is about to be hanged, the invasion happens, and he finds himself the reluctant leader of a small group of people trying to survive and get out of town.

The alien bugs come to Earth to gorge themselves on the town’s uranium deposits. Richard Beattie (Cold Comfort, Almost Heaven) wrote the screenplay, and KT Donaldson (aka Kristoffer Tabori) directed the telefilm, which also stars Cindy Sampson as Marsters’ love interest, a nurse named Abigail; Sebastian Knapp as Jules, the scientist who discovered the uranium mine; and Sanny Van Heteren as Rose, a fast-talking, fast-shooting bounty hunter.

"The SCI FI Channel had been sending me scripts for a while, and this is one that stuck out and that I thought could really move," Marsters said. "The director and I were really clear on [the idea] that the whole thing was all about propulsion, that it was about getting from A to B, that it was all about huffing and sweating and panic. We didn’t want to be safe and calm about how we shot it. So, frankly, we really had to count on the camera crew to follow a lot of motion. It just meant a lot of cuts and bruises and dings. But I think we got it. I saw quite a lot of it when we went to do some looping, and it looks pretty panicked."