Tucked away inside the old Virginia Department of Taxation building on Broad Street is, incongrously, a Mexican cantina.

A turquoise-encrusted steer's head stands guard on the wall. Half-empty bowls of spicy peanuts sit on the dusty tables. Scattered here and there are bottles of an unrecognizable brand of Mexican beer, La Leche de Cabra Cerveza.

The fake bottles -- that's "Goat's Milk Beer" in Spanish -- are one sign that the cantina isn't real, that this somewhat grubby bar is just a set of a movie.

"The art department didn't fool around," said Lucas Krost, producer of the movie "Border Town," which ended its filming Saturday.

The locally made film tells the story of a man whose daughter has been kidnapped by human traffickers in Mexico. The man, played by well-known Richmond actor Mark Joy, takes blazing guns in hand to rescue his daughter, who is played by Joy Glass.

"Border Town" has a budget of about $450,000, said executive producer Adam Sledd. That's many times the budget of most locally made pictures. It allows for a relatively sane shooting schedule of three weeks, and for 11 weeks' worth of visual effects added afterward.

The visual effects will add a dark, stylish sheen to the film, making it look like a cross between a film noir and a graphic novel, Krost said. More important, perhaps, they will make Richmond look like the desert Southwest.

In one scene, a man crosses an ancient cobblestone street and walks into the courtyard of a hacienda. But it's all done with visual trickery -- the actor was actually filmed walking across Monument Avenue and alongside a house. All traces of Richmond have been erased on a computer and replaced with appropriately sun-baked, dusty scenery.

The $450,000 budget is still considered tiny; "Iron Man," for instance, is reported to have cost $186 million. Even so, it gives the filmmakers a little room to maneuver. Sledd said the budget could have allowed them to hire a B-list actor whose name might have helped sell the project, or to give the film an extraordinary visual look.

They decided to go for the visual look.

"If we could have raised more, we would have raised more. But this is what I could get," Sledd said.

Some of the Virginia investors were eager to help the Virginia film industry, though many of the people the filmmakers approached were scared off by the company's inexperience (director Chris Williams is making his debut in a feature film after years of directing commercials). So Sledd also approached investors in other states who have had success in backing micro-budgeted films.

One goal, he said, is to prove that filmmaking is viable in Virginia.

The budget allowed the filmmakers to make over the old "John Adams" backlot in Mechanicsville, changing the Colonial-era building fronts into a Mexican town. Some of the interiors were borrowed from the "John Adams" set as well. A lot of things were borrowed for free in making this film, including a $90,000 Mercedes and the old Department of Taxation Building.

What couldn't be borrowed had to be created, like the cantina (a local bar was offered for the filming, but it didn't have the right look). And because the script calls for scenes in two different hallways, the crew saved money by constructing just one hallway. One side looks like a hall in the cantina, the other looks like a hall in the villain's compound.

"Our crew is awesome. We don't even deserve our crew," Sledd said.

The cooperation of local merchants and organizations helped leave money to support a crew of 57, plus a large cast earning Screen Actors Guild wages -- the largest expenditure on the balance sheet. It also helped fund a lengthy pre-production period, in which artists designed the film's overall look. Elaborate sketches were made of sets and costumes, and some scenes were drawn out in advance on what are known as storyboards, to act as a template for their filming.

The more precise the pre-production planning, the smoother and quicker goes the costly filming.

But not everything goes as planned.

Last week, they were shooting a scene inside the villain's car, with the villain (Ricardo Melendez) and the daughter, who has been drugged. The car was sitting on the driveway beside the Taxation building, in front of a small green screen. The green screen will later be used to create digitally the passing Mexican countryside.

At the moment, the green screen was also helping to obscure a view of the Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken restaurant next door.

A bright orange-yellow light helped replicate the Mexican sun, and a crew member waved a board in front of it at intervals to simulate passing shadows. Above the car, a tarpaulin, stretched tight, kept out the rain.

But the rain still came. And the scene is supposed to be set in sunny Mexico. Where it rarely rains. The sensitive microphone picked up the sound of the rain on the tarp.

So the actors had to head upstairs in the Taxation building to re-record the dialogue.