The Alibi started with a simple idea. A perfect plan that depends on the wrong guy.

The script came from Hank Della, based on a story he had written back in high school in the 70s. When Daryl picked it up, it lined up with the kind of crime stories he and Ray Revello had been chasing for years.

It was designed to fold into the growing Dead Right world, with Chico Mendez sitting just outside the Trenton brothers’ story, operating on his own track.

Casting followed instinct more than accuracy. Chico was written as a hulking, Bronson-type presence, but Chris Cairo got the role anyway. The explanation became its own running joke. Chico didn’t come out of prison hardened. He came out heavier. According to Cairo, he had been living on nothing but ramen the entire time.

Chris Ross, who had previously played a hitman in the same universe, flipped to the other side as Detective Hickey. The role of Murphy was rewritten for Christy Moxley as part of a conscious push to bring more women into what had been a mostly boys’ club. Christy came in through Cairo and Mitch Martin, and she fit immediately. She had a natural presence on camera, confident, sharp, and carried the kind of charisma the role needed without forcing it.

Ray played Louie as a loose impression of Donald “Donny” Flores, one of the original Dollars & Donuts members. Louie carries that same loud, overconfident energy, with a fixation on guns and Clint Eastwood movies. Hank had already written the character in that direction, using Louie as a way to slip in a few inside jokes about his favorite actor, with Ray pushing it further into a familiar cadence everyone recognized.

Production ran through the 2013 holidays and into early 2014, shot mostly on the streets of San Francisco without permits and with just enough coordination to keep things moving. The biggest upgrade came quietly. Daryl “borrowed” a Canon C300 from his job at Wikia, which gave the film a level of polish it otherwise wouldn’t have had, especially in the night exteriors.

The shoot itself had the usual improvisation. The film’s most explosive moment, Lance Louie’s accidental suicide, required building a false wall inside Jonathan Cairo’s apartment to catch the blood effect and avoid destroying the space.

Post-production took longer. After moving back in with his parents, Daryl found himself working out of a cramped space with no real momentum. The edit stretched close to a year, overlapping with After the Jack, and turned into the kind of project that was always close, but never quite finished.

The Alibi was originally meant to connect more directly into Dead Right: Part Three, with Chico and Louie crossing paths with the Trenton brothers and tying into Rooker losing his hand. That version shifted over time. The dismemberment footage was shot, but the story moved in a different direction, and Chico’s role in that thread was dropped.

What remained was The Alibi itself. A clean setup, carried out exactly as planned, built around a character who was never going to play it safe.

The biggest issue was the score. Arbel Bedak delivered the original music, but the tone never fully lined up with what the film needed. It worked in places, but it never felt like what inspired it, and that gap lingered for years. The 2025 Redux finally fixed that.

Using Suno, Daryl rebuilt the soundtrack from the ground up, giving the film the drive and attitude it had been missing. For the first time, the movie felt complete and carried the grindhouse tone it had been aiming for all along. The Redux didn’t change the film. It just let it land the way it was supposed to.