Angels In Distress

I like this song -- enjoy!

2011-08-08T13:00:00.001-07:00

	Pizzicato Five - Baby Love Child .mp3

	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Lawrence D. Foldes' YOUNG WARRIORS (1983)

2010-12-14T16:20:00.000-08:00

“What do you get if you cross Animal House with Death Wish?"

That previous statement is not a phrase found in the satirical online newspaper The Onion but comes straight off of Young Warriors video box copy. Young Warriors remains the favorite of director Lawrence D. Foldes’ earlier features, cramming in lots of production value, action sequences, name actors and challenging themes. While technically polished, Young Warriors also tends to overreach itself in the manner of Foldes’ much-dismissed Don’t Go Near the Park (1979). Never released to DVD, Young Warriors can be found in the rare store that still carries VHS tapes.

James Van Patten stars as Kevin, a petulant film student attending college in Southern California. He hangs out with his frat buddies, whose chief concerns are getting laid, drinking beer and subjecting pledges to sadistic, homoerotic hazing rites. Van Patten’s hedonism comes to an end when his teenage sister Tiffany (April Dawn) is brutally raped and killed on the night of her prom. Enlisting the aid of his friends to bring the killers to justice, the collegiates begin hanging out in waterfront bars in order to stakeout the city’s various underworld connections.

Alas, Van Patten and company fail to heed Friedrich Nietzsche’s admonishment, "Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster -- and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Things go from bad to worse, innocent people die and Van Patten kills himself and the remaining cast members by dropping a live grenade into an ammo box, sending the frat house up in a fiery conflagration.

An American and Canadian co-production, Vancouver’s skyline very unconvincingly stands in for Los Angeles during a funeral scene. Foldes was so impressed with Linnea Quigley’s friendly demeanor on the set of Don’t Go Near the Park that he rehired her over a young unknown by the name of Vanna White, who was willing to do the nudity required for the role. Foldes would later kick himself over the potential residuals lost with that casting decision.

Two aspects of Young Warriors would return in a big way to Foldes years after the film was shot. While the film has definite camp appeal, the rape scene at the beginning is as harrowing as the ones shown in Irreversible (2002) and I Spit On Your Grave (1977). The sequence is so potent and relentless that it originally tagged the film with an X-rating.

Foldes enlisted the help of teachers and clergy to write letters to the ratings board arguing that the act of rape is ugly and horrifying, and needed to be depicted as such in the film. Controversy also swirled around the fact that actress April Dawn was underage, although the more revealing parts were accomplished with a body double. The ratings board let the film slide with an "R" rating after a few token cuts.

Adding to the film’s production value is a scene of a helicopter crashing into a used car lot, setting off a series of explosions. Foldes and crew accomplished the scene with the aid of a junked helicopter found by former wife Victoria Paige-Meyerinck in Oregon. Shot on an exterior set built near Valencia, the sequence only lasts a few seconds but cost Foldes $50,000 to shoot.

The aforementioned scene would later haunt Foldes and company when the ethically-challenged producer Menachem Golan would use this scene whole cloth in Exterminator 2 – but that, as they say, is another story …

O, SUZZANNA!

2010-12-09T15:21:00.000-08:00

Southeast Asia's reigning horror diva

The death of Indonesian actress Suzzanna in 2008 went largely ignored by the western press. Interest in her films had gained a foothold with Pete Tomb’s Mondo Macabro book, which breathlessly told of all the very special treats that Indonesian horror and exploitation films had to offer the adventurous viewer. Described by Tombs as "southeast Asia's reigning horror diva," Suzzanna starred in a series of pictures involving an evil goddess from folklore, "The Snake Woman" or "Snake Queen."

Suzzanna called to mind Imelda Marcos crossed with later-day Elizabeth Taylor, radiating evil and sultry sex appeal. Tragically, she left the world far too soon at the age of 66, after starring in her comeback feature, Hanta Ambulance (2008) shortly before her death. Her many fans were reportedly cheated a final glimpse of their heroine with a funeral that did its best to block public access.

While acting in films as a teenager, the first notable time Suzzanna was introduced to the English speaking world was Queen of Black Magic, also known as Black Magic III, in 1979. The film was retitled Black Magic III in order to associate it with the successful Shaw Brothers’ “Black Magic” series, Hong Kong horror that found a welcome home in grindhouses showing martial arts movies.

Directed by J. Sudjio, Queen of Black Magic opens with the wedding of a village prince. The ceremony is interrupted by mysterious winds and his bride-to-be is beset with horrifying visions. Black magic is to blame, and Suzzanna, who plays the secret commoner concubine of the prince, is singled out, her mother murdered and her house set on fire. Left to die in the jungle, she is befriended by an evil wizard who arms her with incantations and spells to attack her tormentors. A visiting Muslim priest, goody-goody in the extreme (remember, Indonesia is a curiously Islamic nation in the middle of Asia) is impervious to her charms; like in all films of this type, those who use live by black magic die by black magic and those who fight evil with evil all die terrible, protracted deaths.

Queen of Black Magic has silent movie melodrama to spare and some extreme gruesomeness akin to the old Hong Kong school, i.e. cursed people develop bleeding boils and puke up scorpions and maggots. Entertaining on its own terms, it lacks the distinctive "voice" that films from Indonesia had yet to develop, but fans of old-style Hong Kong horror will find plenty to enjoy.

Suzzanna would strike again in Hungry Snake Woman (1982), the most lavish Indonesian genre picture this writer has come across, with wild special effects, elaborate sets and go-for-broke set pieces. The Snake Woman of the title offers her followers wealth and prestige in exchange for human sacrifices. Our ne'er-do-well anti-hero Brian agrees to her terms, which includes the murder of three women concluding with a feast off of their breasts! At this point, Brian affects a pale face, a Dracula cape and vampire fangs and goes about Jakarta biting women on the neck -- and then biting their tits off!

Our first glimpse of the Snake Woman is when a passageway magically appears inside a grotto. Her throne glides through a series of alcoves that light up in different colors, ending when her throne is held aloft in the air on a cushion of billowing smoke. She asks the brash human interlopers, "Why have you interrupted the concentration of our meditations?" As the 'bots would exclaim in "Mystery Science Theater 3000," "this looks like the most boring ride in Disneyland!"

Snake Woman’s glitzy visuals recall the excesses of Hindu art, and a scene where the hero consummates his relationship with the queen on a revolving round bed has all of the odd poetry of Jean Cocteau. The film remains an absolute must-see on the Indonesian terror tour.

For an infinitely darker take on the same material, Suzzanna would repeat her role Snake Queen. In this continuation of the series, Suzzanna plays three roles: the Snake Queen of the title, the worldly second wife of a rich man and a grotesque old crone. This film has a definitely nasty edge to it; this is NOT your father's Snake Queen. As usual, the Lizardly One promises riches and fulfillment beyond her follower's wildest dreams in exchange for human sacrifices.

In one especially gruesome vignette, an unemployed lay about seeks the Queen's services; she bids him to eat the severed hand of a baby as down payment. He rushes home to tell his wife the good news ("Did you get a job?" she hopefully asks) -- when, wait a minute! What's wrong with the baby....?

These strikingly indigenous morality tales offer the viewer a sharp lesson: Work hard, pay your taxes, be a good citizen and you WON'T have to use the services of the Snake Queen!

Another film starring Suzzanna this writer has seen is the other-worldly White Crocodile, a delirious mélange of special effects and set pieces. The chief beastie would raises the level of the similar monster spied in Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive (1975) to CGI levels! Unfortunately, the only print I have seen of this particular title was without English subtitles or dub track, so much of the film – which includes scenes Suzzanna snipping off the graying pubic hair of an older gentleman as part of some arcane ritual – remains “lost in translation.”

Along with Barry Prima, Suzzanna offers a friendly, familiar face to brave Westerners taking their plunge into wild and zany Indonesian fare. You’ll laugh, you’ll be amazed, you will be dazzled, but you certainly won’t be bored!

THE SLIT-MOUTHED WOMAN (2005)

2010-11-28T17:15:00.000-08:00

(aka Kannô byôtô: nureta akai kuchibiru, 2005)

Directed by Takaaki Hashiguchi

Whenever horny doctors and nurses have sex in a disused plastic surgery clinic, this spooky Japanese ghost with long black hair and a Black Dahlia-like smile comes along and scares them. Why? I don’t know. This very same ghost comes along and disrupts other couples who are having sex who are not connected in any way with the plastic surgery hospital. A plucky female journalist is out to find out, and traces the fish-mouthed phantom to a big-time politician. The poor young woman in question turns out to be the daughter of said politician, who was addicted to plastic surgery who became tragically maimed in an accident that her surgeons were unable to repair. Huh? The doctors can remake her face to her heart’s content but when push comes to shove they can’t even take care of a few superficial scars? The plucky female journalist quells the restless demon with a few kind words of encouragement, until she too, tries to have sex and – WHOA! Nobody saw that coming, chiefly because most viewers will have given up on this title well into its brief running time …

Redemption U.S.A. has come out with some rather weak entries for their initial forays into the stateside DVD market (see also The Witching Hour). Director Hashiguchi films all the sex scenes with a detached, indifferent style and all the scenes involving the ghost try really hard but just aren’t that scary. The budget for this outing appears on the same level as the most poverty-stricken Hong Kong Category III three-day wonder, with a normally bustling, densely populated Japan depicted as a ghost town with about 15 people.

Before the disgruntled customer reaches for this DVD as a hot drink coaster, be aware that among its extras is the remarkable short film Birds of Prey (1998). This short subject follows the plight of a persecuted British old age pensioner who secretly tends to his pet falcon in his dismal soundproofed flat. When he returns one day to find his beloved birdie gone and his apartment ransacked, the pensioner traces it to a flirty stripper at a nearby pub and enacts his revenge. It’s a very depressing short, but succinct and to the point – quite unlike the main feature.

With vengeful Japanese wraiths at an absolute premium, you can certainly skip The Slit-Mouthed Woman. Read a book instead!

THE BOOK OF LORE with GRAVE MISTAKES (2010)

2010-11-20T16:50:00.000-08:00

Directed by Jimmy George and Chris LaMartina

Shot-on-video (SOV) horror is a genre unto itself. Cluttering up shelves along with their shot-on-film, but still straight-to-video horror brethren -- in addition to shot-on-film, then went-to-cable horror movies, these aforementioned titles are essentially “fanzine” features. Usually made by fans for fans without money, these projects have a fresh eagerness to entertain game viewers. Simultaneously, one can’t totally discount these features, as they are tapped in to the deeply personal, no-frills frissons they’re capable of generating. Both The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) were cut from the exact same cloth as these camcorder features, and both raked in millions of dollars with audiences eagerly waiting in long lines around theaters to see them.

The home-brewed horror feature The Book of Lore, along with its companion anthology feature Grave Mistakes is a shining example of all that is good and bad about SOV horror. Lore is heartfelt, ambitious and has an earnest story to tell – but its makers are far too young (in the DVD interview supplements, directors Jimmy George and Chris LaMartina don’t look a day older than 20) and inexperienced to mount a wholly successful feature film.

Lore focuses on community college student Rick. Things are not going that hot for him; he’s living with his loving but dotty aunt after both of his parents have been incarcerated for methamphetamine production. Even worse is that his girlfriend has turned up missing and the unshaven, doo-ragged sheriff is none too enthusiastic about finding her. His girlfriend is later found horribly mutilated, and a friend points him to the Book of Lore – a handmade composition book that foretells the town’s murders. Years earlier, a killer by the name of the Devil’s left hand (known as “DLH” to his friends) had blown through Rick’s one-horse town and abducted and killed eight newborn babies … is there a connection?

The Book of Lore is to be commended for corralling a fair amount of amateur actors and locations to tell its complex, twisting story, but it suffers the same fate as many other projects of its ilk. Namely, it doesn’t know when to quit. Working with largely unpaid talent, the directors left a lot of talky scenes of exposition that doesn’t further the story, making for a dull viewing experience. Having worked in semi-amateur film projects such as The Book of Lore, this writer suspects these scenes were left in because the producers didn’t want to hurt the actor’s feelings.

Grave Mistakes, the anthology second feature included in the DVD is more successful, largely due to the abbreviated nature of its stories. The four stories and wraparound tale that comprise Grave Mistakes ain’t no big thang, but they benefit from much better acting, including a part for perpetual indie horror ham George Stowver, Mr. Gravel in John Waters’ Desperate Living (1977) as well as countless Don Dohler features. There are plenty of non-actors in important roles, seriously hampering some sections, and the brevity of the stories don’t always work in the film’s favor. One segment, involving a vampire infestation at a hospital ends abruptly at the halfway point without explanation!

There are extras aplenty on the Camp Motion Pictures DVD. Both LaMartina and George contribute commentary tracks for both films. There is also a gallery of stills for The Book of Lore, a radio interview and a making of feature from a local cable TV station. There is even an Easter egg, a promotional video that the filmmakers made in order to entice local restaurants to provide catering services.

The best extra feature on the DVD are trailers for Camp Motion Pictures’ many other SOV horror films, the type found in Mom-and-Pop video stores in the Eighties. Time has been kind to such deteriorating magnetic tape features such as Video Violence, Video Violence 2: The Exploitation (both 1987), Woodchipper Massacre (1988) and Cannibal Campout(1988). These once woebegone semi-movies, usually found at the bottom of video store rental shelves are now questionably called “retro-chic” and even have the word “classic” applied to them in some circles. The Book of Lore and Grave Mistakes can be cautiously recommended to the die-hard horror fan that they’ve already seen much, much worse, pal!

AFTER LAST SEASON (2009)

2010-11-17T15:49:00.000-08:00

AFTER LAST SEASON (2009)

Directed by Mark Region

“The end of a season means … the beginning of a new one.”

Characters are framed in the camera dead center, overwhelmed by surrounding blank space, lit harshly full-on with floodlights. “It’s been many years since I’ve been in the area,” one performer says. Plastic boxes are pulled across a rug with fishing wire. A ruler hangs in the air, held aloft by dental floss. “Oh, I've never been to that town, but I've been through it,” another character says. One female actor has her hair brushed in front of her face in an attempt to disguise her participation in the motion picture at hand. “There are some printers in the basement you can use,” says the male lead. There is no musical score, mostly just the faraway sound of gurgling on the soundtrack that recalls a toilet flushing two doors down in an apartment complex. Mostly, there are lots and lots of crude computer animation as composed on an Amiga computer circa 1986. Lots and lots and lots of it.

The viewer has stumbled into the bizarre world of After Last Season, one of a quartet of films that is hot on the current WTF? Circuit. The midnight movie has recently enjoyed resurgence in the 21st Century, but audiences this time aren't flocking to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) or El Topo (1971). A new type of film is lighting up the nights at ye olde repertory movie theater – misguided, personal projects from renegade filmmakers who don't get that the joke is on them.

The late John S. Rad's Dangerous Men (2005, covered extensively in Screem #12), James Nguyen's Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2008) and Tommy Wiseau's The Room (2003) are all drawing hipster crowds to laugh hysterically at beyond bad motion pictures. Free of major studio constraint, these film-fans-turned-directors crank out monumentally inept flicks that have to be seen to be disbelieved. Happily, these self-proclaimed auteurs adopt positive attitudes, delighted that their films have found audiences and enthusiastic theatrical play.

Of this current crop of motion pictures, After Last Season is by far the most obscure, difficult to see and the least accessible. It's unquestionably the most bizarre of the four films. Minimal in the extreme, the shot-on-35mm epic played in only four move theaters in the United States (Lancaster, California, North Aurora, Illinois, Rochester, New York and Austin, Texas) for a single week, with exhibitors allegedly told to burn the prints in lieu of sending them back to save on production costs.

Season first garnered interest in a trailer posted online that posed more questions than it answered. Many had assumed it was just part of a viral campaign for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are (2009).

After Last Season's first scene, involving an MRI machine that is most decidedly is not an MRI machine sets the tone of what's to follow. The machine is a cardboard box, cut with scissors and dressed with butcher paper. Furthermore, the paper is affixed with highly visible masking tape. The room is a spare bedroom with pink walls and a ceiling fan. As if to hammer home this fact, the ceiling fan is awarded its own close-up. The final bit of art direction is 8 x 10 pieces of paper taped to the top of the wall to obscure wallpaper borders, affixed sloppily and threatening to fly away with a gust of wind from the aforementioned ceiling fan.

Contrary to what has been written about the film, After Last Season does have a story, albeit one told so ineptly it's easily obscured. There are a plague of murders affecting a small college town. The Prorolis Corporation (an indifferently framed building with the words burned into the film) is conducting mind experiments. Season's two main characters, Matthew (Jason Kulas) and Sarah (Peggy McClellan) commence to experimenting and stumble across the brain waves of the killer. The majority of After Last Season's running time consists of Matthew and Sarah’s mind experiments that are represented by the aforementioned computer animation. Countless Internet reviewers have tried to wax eloquent on Season’s allure, the most accurate being that is “an accurate representation of how an autistic person sees the world.”

Baffling, obscure and enigmatic, Season – now on DVD thanks to its production company Index Square entrances the viewer in the hopes that the audience’s patience will be rewarded with a coherent conclusion. There is a conclusion, but told so ham-fistedly it’s easy to miss. Think of the old “avenging ghost” story and listen carefully to the gal with her hair brushed in her face at the very end and you will “get” the film, but don’t feel like it was worth wading through the preceding to reach it.

An interviewer with director Mark Region appeared online in Filmmaker Magazine, and again, the interview raised more questions than it answered. “We made the sets simple,” Region told Scott Macaulay. “I used shots of walls to show the passage of time in some scenes and to show that something is happening at a different location in other scenes. For the rest we tried to keep the sets simple because of the budget.”

As for explaining the beneath-Edward D. Wood Jr. quality of the film’s MRI machine, Region says the “way it happened, first we made the MRI, and it looked pretty good from far away. We couldn’t tell it was made from cardboard or bits of plastic – it also has plastic. But when you shoot with 35mm, and sometimes because of the light, some lines across the front of the MRI became visible. When we shot, we couldn’t tell, but on film the lines are darker — you see it’s not a polished surface. That’s how the MRI came to be.”

To this writer, I was struck by Season’s striking resemblance to Paranormal Activity (2009) with its shared threadbare supernatural elements and mundane, ugly settings. However – whereas Paranormal Activity raked in millions of dollars on a budget for $14,000, After Last Season was produced for – gasp, choke -- FIVE MILLION DOLLARS, incurred largely by the investors who insisted on four-walling the movie to theaters.

After Last Season can be recommended to those on the search for something different – not good, mind you, just very, very VERY different.

Director Ti West is in THE HOUSE

2010-01-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

Director shares memories of helming his indie horror hit THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL

Eager to leave her dormitory to acquire her own apartment, cash-strapped coed Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) takes a baby-sitting job from an eccentric couple (Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov) at their isolated Victorian mansion. Once there, the husband confesses to her that the job involves caring for an elderly woman, but she “won't have to do anything” in exchange for a hefty fee. As the evening wears on, she does her homework, watches a little TV, orders some pizza ... but since this film is called The House of the Devil, things are not what they seem, bodies begin to pile up, horrible secrets are revealed and there's a blood-drenched climax followed by an abrupt shock conclusion.

In a genre marketplace cluttered with “torture porn” and self-reflective remakes of classic grindhouse fare, The House of the Devil earns its scares the old fashioned way, i.e. through story, characterization and suspense. Set in the Eighties, The House of the Devil takes pains to recreate a world of dial telephones and analog tape players but does so in the service of a story wracked with tension and nail-biting dread. House's director Ti West is especially proud of the film's credit sequences, which invokes a television movie-of-the-week circa 1973. “We worked very hard on getting those titles just right,” West beams.

With a budget set “under $1 million dollars,” West made sure that House's small cast included a lot of genre favorites such as Woronov, Noonan and Dee Wallace Stone (E.T., The Extra Terrestrial, The Howling). “I love Dee Wallace Stone, and although she has a very small part at the film's beginning, we were able to convince her to come up to Connecticut for one day's shooting and it was great to put her in a movie where she wouldn't be doing anything gross,” West says.

A longtime admirer of cult film queen Mary Woronov, West had to take a special approach in getting her to appear in the film. “She wasn't really acting anymore, she was concentrating on her painting and writing, but I was adamant that she appear in the film. I got her phone number and we met at her apartment. We had a really nice conversation, and I talked a lot about her Warhol days. Since we had a much more intellectual conversation, concentrating on her artwork and her association with Warhol, she agreed to do the part.”

Actor Noonan had worked with West prior to Devil, and actively sought out the director to sign on to the project. While his character plays the leader of a Satanist cult, Noonan and West agreed to play his part as that of a “nagged, hen-pecked husband.”

West says the project was something of a personal film for him, with a special identification for the film's hapless, down-on-her-luck heroine. “I had these friends in college whose parents paid for everything, and I had no money, just barely scraping by doing these movie projects. A lot of the film deals with what they call a 'quarter-life crisis,' when one is done with college and has to deal with the harsh realities of the real world,” West says.

While generally positively received, there have been some grumblings among some fans that the film has a long buildup until the final payoff. Characters do mundane things in almost real-time. West says that this is intentional. “We were playing with audience expectations. Instead of a character wandering into a room and making a horrific discovery, we have the characters go into a room, nothing happens, and we build up audience expectations even further.

“It kind of causes your imagination to do a lot of the work for me. It makes the audience active participants. Everyone is really post modern right now, they kind of know what's coming in a movie. Once the audience doesn't know what's coming next, it's kind of an exciting experience.”

In a bid to relieve the film's oppressive Gothic atmosphere, Donahue takes time to strap on her Sony Walkman to dance around the gloomy manse to the Fixx's Eighties classic, “One Thing Leads to Another.” In spite of House's limited budget, West saw to it that the music rights for this track were included. “That was in the script. I was very adamant about that. The person who owned the song, we called and begged and begged and begged.

“The title of the song has special significance. She knocks over the vase, the reason she's there. One thing really does lead to another. The song also had the right vibe also,” West explains.

“I was really nervous about that scene. It's sort of a bold moment in the movie, and thankfully it's everyone's favorite moment as well. It was something that we were shooting, where I thought 'I really hope this works.' We were sort of embarrassed to rehearse that, so we rehearsed everything except for that scene. I didn't know what the dancing was going to be like. She comes dancing through the door, and she had all these dance moves planned out, and at the end the whole crew got up and applauded.” The scene calls to mind Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear to the strains of Bob Seger's “Old Time Rock 'n' Roll” in Risky Business (1985). West says that it was totally unintentional until a crew member brought it to his attention.

West states that one shot in the film, where the headlights of a car are seen traveling by a window, after an atmosphere of isolation from the outside world has been meticulously established, is a happy accident. “We could have dipped into our CGI paint box and brushed that image off of the film, but we left it in.” When this writer points out that the headlights imply that the car – or the car's occupants will play a larger part of the story, West says that this added to the overall feeling of isolation. “Terrible things are going on in the house, and cars are just driving by as if nothing is happening.”

While set in the Eighties, this writer argues that there are elements of 21st
Century horror film elements in The House of the Devil as well. I point out that the film's extended scenes of tension-wracked silence seems to evoke recent Japanese horror films. West disagrees. “Mainstream American horror films are aimed at the lowest common denominator, with test screen audiences. There is just one scary moment after another, they sort of become like porn, it's just 'get to the good stuff every few seconds.' I'm not particularly intersted in that. I think J-horror, when that had a good run, it was because those films were very serious, and very original scary movies. They weren't elbowing the audience in the ribs, they were genuinely terrifying.”

An original work with a fresh, daring approach, The House of the Devil is best appreciated by an audience going in without expectations. West does admit that the film's shock conclusion is a homage to “the greatest devil movie ever made .. .” For those who have yet to see the film, it includes a bit of business that occurs offscreen, and something that the heroine had assiduously avoided up to that point.

DEEP RED magazine founder Chas. Balun dies, 1948 - 2009

2010-01-04T18:35:00.000-08:00

It was grim resignation that I recently learned of the passing of Deep Red magazine founder, Chas. Balun. I had been out of contact with Chas. for several years, and what news I did hear was not good. A cancer survivor, Balun had suffered a resurgence in recent years.

I had worked closely with Charlie in the late Eighties and early Nineties on Deep Red-related projects, landing the title of Managing Editor of Deep Red Alert magazine. It was my access to the-then rarefied world of desktop publishing that granted my entry to Balun's fan boy universe. It was a rewarding collaboration and was a wild and wooly ride.

My association began with him in 1988, when Deep Red issue #2 hit my local comic book store. Balun waxed enthusiastically about Cecil Doyle's Subhuman fanzine, a Xerox publication where I found welcome outlet for my early writings. Seeking further exposure, I cautiously submitted a query on my best stationary if he was interested in some genre-related pieces from yours truly. In blood red felt pen, Charlie replied “Welcome aboard!” and we were off to the races.

I met the man in the flesh that year at the Los Angeles Fangoria Convention. A tall, physically imposing gentleman, Balun quickly dispelled any misgivings with his open and friendly manner. He had a thick, Southern Californian hippie accent that recalled comedian Tommy Chong: “Right on, bro!” At that time, Deep Red magazine was an on-again, off-again proposition due to an shaky agreement with Balun's then publisher and distributor, one of several shady figures who will remain nameless in this story. I would annually greet and meet Chas. at the various Fango-related conventions held in Los Angeles over the years.

Charlie always encouraged my writing. He felt that my stuff had a wit and joie de vivre that was lacking from his other contributors, who were all quite good but just a bit too scholarly when it came to the horror genre. “Sheesh! It's all rock 'n' roll,” he would declare. He especially liked my piece for the 1989 Deep Red Horror Handbook, “The Unwatchables,” a skewering of all the wretched offal that was cluttering up video rental stores at that that time. He and his lovely wife of many years, Pat Petric, got a big hoot from it, and he said it was the only chapter of the book he "read more than once.”

It was at the 1991 Fangoria Convention, where I coincidentally met fellow Screem contributor Shane “Remo” Dallman, that I shared to Charlie that I was then employed in the world of desktop publishing. He had been having issues with the various typesetters in the production of the magazine, and I offered him a golden opportunity with a “fan friendly” solution to his current crisis. A cautious phone call from him asking if I was interested in such a venture was made at my place of business, to which I wholeheartedly agreed, and we were off to the races once again.
The Deep Red night train and all its attendant publications was a wild and hectic ride, one that had a tremendous influence on the current state of genre fandom.

Balun left his meaty and bloody imprint on how we enjoy horror films today. First and foremost was his celebration of Italian genre cinema. While the work of Mario Bava had international recognition, the works of such diverse auteurs such as Dario Argento (be sure to check out Stephen King's curt dismissal of Suspiria in an old issue of Film Comment if you want to know what Argento's critical cache was at that point in time) and Lucio Fulci had yet to be fully appreciated. Balun saw to it that pristine VHS copies of these films, chopped to ribbons by stateside distributors, got into the hands of the people who mattered via various shady networks. This tactic got Charlie into hot water more than once. Many several guilty parties will go unmentioned.

Balun was also forthright in celebrating graphic violence on the screen, as politically incorrect as that notion is. Charlie would wax effusively on the joys of severed limbs and the geysers of guts that would spray across the screens in some of his favorite films. Balun saw these displays as cathartic in nature and the raison d'arte of these films. Rest assured, Charlie knew the difference between real and “reel” violence, and was a relatively gentle soul in person -- although I did see him unleash his wrath on one very memorable occasion.

It's at this point that I share something about Balun that is not widely known in fandom. While he enjoyed graphic violence in his horror films, Balun NEVER embraced graphically violent horror films simply on that basis alone. It was all a matter of tone and intent. Truth be told, he found quite a few titles – ones from a certain nation in particular – to be repulsive and dehumanizing. He did not suffer fools, the ones with multiple piercings inquiring about “snuff” and “gang rape” videos, gladly.

I would also be remiss in saying that Balun was a jovial Santa Claus figure beloved by all. If one judges a man by his friends, then the same could be said of his enemies. The people who actively disliked and trash-talked Balun fell into two camps: those who were jealous of him and those who couldn't take a joke. Over and over again, the people I personally encountered that fell into the anti-Chas. camp would reveal themselves to be highly unreliable figures of dubious, if any virtue.

It must be stressed that Deep Red was not the only key on the grand piano that was Chas. Balun. He was so many things – a hippie, a body-builder, a world-class athlete, an intellectual, a scribe, a raconteur: truly a complex individual. He shrugged off the controversies that surrounded his publication that he had battled cancer several times in the past and had won. What someone said or wrote about him was inconsequential in comparison.

As I mentioned earlier, I had been out of contact with Charlie for several years, so I was never to hear his take on how graphic on-screen violence would enjoy a renewed popularity at the box-office. I also was to never learn how he felt about the directors and films he once championed receiving deluxe Criterion-level treatment on DVD and Blu-Ray. Chas. was a driving force in making these things become reality. I suspect in his final days he took some pleasure in seeing these things come to pass, but he never lost sight on the things that really mattered –love, life health and serenity.

Balun fought the brave fight until the end. I end this reminisce with a sobriquet with which he would end many of his letters to me -- “Here's blood in your eye!”

MESSIAH OF EVIL (1973)

2009-12-28T18:42:00.000-08:00

MESSIAH OF EVIL (1973)

Directed by William Huyck

Arletty, a young woman (Marianna Hill) in an insane asylum relates her weird tale through voice-over and flashback. She relates a series of disturbing letters received from her artist father (Royal Dano) while ensconced at his seaside mansion near the “stucco, neon” environs of Point Dune, California. In a secondary voice-over, her father relates an experience that audiences watching Messiah of Evil for the first time will share: “These grotesque images keep crowding me ...”

Driving to Point Dune to investigate, Arletty stops at an ultra-modern gas station for fuel where she is shooed away by a fearful mechanic (Charles Dierkop) who is then bloodily murdered by an albino African-American man (Bennie Robinson) who drives a pickup bearing mutilated corpses. Arletty learns of a trio of jet-setting hippies, Thom (Michael Greer, Fortune In Men's Eyes), Laura (Anitra Ford, Invasion of the Bee Girls) and Toni (Woody Allen favorite Joy Bang) who are likewise seeking her missing artist father. Tracking the threesome to a nearby motel, she discovers them interrogating a bum (film noir icon Elisha Cook Jr.) who tells them of a plague that has gripped Point Dune's townspeople, and how it ties into a mysterious satanic figure set to return after a 100-year hiatus (hence the film's original title, The Second Coming). As is the case with all American horror films, the sophisticated city folk sadly underestimate Point Dune's local yokels – who turn into white-complected cannibals when the moon turns a blood red, and are all dispatched in a series of show-stopping murders.

The question remains: is Messiah of Evil an unsung genre masterpiece or yet another “pretentious horror cheapie?” Seeing as screenwriting couple William Huyck (who directed) and Gloria Katz (who produced) are simultaneously associated with one of America's most beloved films, American Graffiti (1974) and the universally reviled Howard the Duck (1986 – also enjoying a recent DVD release), the answer is probably a little bit of both. People discovering the film at drive-in triple bills, VHS tape or on countless public domain DVD releases are initially bowled over by its bizarre visuals and knockout setpieces, but later become acutely aware of its shortcomings on return visits. The parts Messiah of Evil gets right is absolute perfection, and several scenes rank up there with the very best that post modern horror film has to offer. But there's no escaping the fact that the film sometimes falls flat due to its budgetary limitations and has stretches of some egregiously bad acting.

Historically, Messiah was one of the very first films to capitalize on the success of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and as Huyck points out on the commentary track to this Code Red DVD, Romero's representatives were quick to file a lawsuit when the film floated briefly under the alternate title of Dead People. (Huyck also points out in the disc's audio commentary that certain people were loathe to associate themselves with the project when it went under its original title The Second Coming, as it had connotations of being a pornographic film!) This tidbit is ironic, as this certainly didn't turn the tide of countless other Romero imitations flowing from Europe, most without an original idea in their undead craniums. Messiah's ghouls share much more in common with the dignified, pasty-faced ones in Carnival of Souls (1962), with all acts of cannibalism kept discretely offscreen.

Messiah of Evil has more historical signifigance in foreshadowing trends in modern horror, with David Cronenberg's explorations of visceral horror exploding in modern, sterile settings still a few years away. Messiah's most notorious scene follows Anitra Ford, after she flees a roadside pickup from the aforementioned albino gentleman. Walking the deserted city streets, lit by flouresecent tubing, Ford walks past the the strangely uninviting storefronts before ducking into a supermarket. The muzak plays loudly, and shadowy figures stalk her through the aisles. (One recalls the use of a similar setting to evoke soul-crushing dread in the 1975 adaptation of The Stepford Wives.) Ford encounters the town ghouls chowing down on some fresh meat in the freezer section, tries to run away – and in a finale worthy of novelist J. G. Ballard, is captured and killed by the zombies when the supermarket's automatic sliding doors refuse to slide open.

Messiah's other standout scene, Joy Bang watching a noisy collage of cowboy movie clips in an empty movie theater as it slowly fills up with zombie spectators, clocks in as a close second. Bang watches the onscreen action with disinterest, munching on a box of popcorn, until she realizes far too late that she is to be the featured late night snack. One wonders how this scene went over in similarily deserted grindhouse theaters during Messiah's initial theatrical run, inspiring the few attentive, sober viewers to nervously look over their shoulders to inspect the people sitting behind them.

A major key to the film's success is the main setting, the artist's abandoned seaside mansion, its walls covered with massive murals. Detailed, hard-edged paintings of department store escalators vie for attention alongside life-sized depictions of elderly ghouls intended to foreshadow the true identities of the Point Dune residents. An outsized pop art portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald rounds out the exhibition. The work of perpetual Hollywood handyman Jack Fiske aided by local artists, a telephone interview with muralist Joan Mocine recalling her time on the set is included as an Easter Egg on the DVD.

Long relegated to poor quality public domain releases, the folks at Code Red DVD have finally done this strongly flawed but fascinating film justice. Along with a superior transfer, Code Red acknowledges that the story behind Messiah of Evil is perhaps more worthy of attention that the rather arbitrary collection of scenes comprising the film's narrative. The disc is stuffed to overflowing with extras, with an accompanying audio commentary by Huyck and Katz chock full of outrageous stories. Among the countless factoids is that many of the film's zombie extras were freshly unemployed aerospace workers who enthusiastically chowed down on raw meat in lieu of what craft services offered that day. A included featurette, “Remembering Messiah of Evil” likewise culls many enjoyable anecdotes from the film's principals. Especially delightful is a telephone interview with the brassy Joy Bang, who reveals her nomenclature is in fact her maiden name (!) and admits that she was rather out of it at the time of her participation in the project. Bang also has some choice words to share about leading lady Marianne Hill. One wishes that Code Red tracked down albino actor Bennie Robinson for a chat. Stephen Thrower, in his chapter on the film in Nightmare USA describes a telephone conversation with Robinson as most unnerving, but won't say why. (Thrower is alluded to on the disc in a less than flattering light that I will leave for the consumer to uncover hidden amongst all the extras.) The cherries on this mile-high sundae are two short student films by Huyck and Katz, The Bride Stripped Bare and Down These Mean Streets. A documentary and film-noir inspired short story respectively, these two shorts use genre convention to make valid social and artistic statements – something that they attempted, and had limited success with with Messiah of Evil.

While there have been some Internet mutterings on fanboy message boards on the prudence of some recent Code Red DVD releases – Night of the Dribbler over Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, anyone? -- their edition of Messiah of Evil can be unconditionally recommended as an essential purchase for all cult horror film fans.

Thank God It's Friday?

2009-09-16T20:30:00.000-07:00

FRIDAY THE 13th: THE NEW BLOOD (1988)
Directed by John Carl Buechler

FRIDAY THE 13th: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN (1989)
Directed by Rob Hedden

Love ‘em or leave ‘em, the Friday the 13th series kept horror on the big movie screens through the particularly dry Eighties, in appeasement of rowdy, appreciative audiences who cheered on the graphic murders of unsympathetic youths. Hockey-masked killing machine Jason Voorhees would arise from the dead time and again to provide grist for the mill, and one could count on some seasonal fright flick fare around Halloween time. While often cited as an example of fostering a callous disregard for human life among the young and impressionable, it’s hard to take any of the murders, especially towards the end of the series – seriously. Characters walk into brightly lit rooms where the killer is readily visible and pretend not to notice, people are murdered by being pushed across a room, et cetera. It’s alarming to note more evidence of a societal slide today with video games that encourage adolescents to kill virtual characters in a wide assortment of graphic ways, and real-life torture and murder scenes being available for a download off the net.

Paramount Studios honors its machete-wielding cash cow with two deluxe DVD editions on the waning entries in the series, Friday the 13th: The New Blood (1988) and Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989). Both films try to bring something new to the shopworn, minimal plots of the previous entries. At this late stage, it appears that the Jason franchise was taking a lesson or two from the competing Nightmare On Elm Street series by jettisoning rational narratives altogether.

Friday the 13th: The New Blood ups the ante with a not-so defenseless teenager this time in the form of Tina (Lars Park Lincoln), a telekinetic teen with an even greater grasp of her abilities than Stephen King’s Carrie White. Taken to Camp Crystal Lake by her domineering mother and overbearing therapist for a week of intensive analysis, Carrie joins a nearby cadre of party hounds (those damn kids never do learn, do they?), and an unintentional burst of orgone energy from our heroine raises Jason from his watery grave (where we lost saw him in Friday the 13th Part IV) and the killings begin anew.

The New Blood has many impressive special effects set pieces, befitting a film directed by movie monster maker supreme John Carl Buechler. However, the MPAA was really cracking down on graphic violence at the time of this film’s release, and the majority of the murders are relatively sauce less this go round. As Buechler explains in the disc’s accompanying documentary Jason’s Destroyer: The Making of Friday the 13th: The New Blood, censors ripped into the film with far more frenzy than Jason did to his victims! Part of this is rectified with the addition of 21 “slashed scenes,” varying from snipped bits of dialogue to scenes of far greater graphic carnage. Other extras on this disc include a commentary track including Buechler, actors Lars Park Lincoln and Kane Hodder, and the fun short “Makeup by Maddy: Need A Little Touch Up Work My Ass” where two actresses from the film meet cute for a fun afternoon of shopping. An additional documentary, Mind Over Matter: The Truth About Telekinesis, featuring paranormal researchers, points out the distressing truth that those blessed with telekinesis can never harness it when a dangerous situation actually arises.

“A maniac is chasing us!” “Welcome to New York,” snaps a brassy Big Apple waitress in Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. This entry remains controversial even among fans of the series. It takes Jason out of a remote rural setting and pits him in a bustling urban landscape, where his menace is diluted considerably. As it has been pointed out elsewhere there are already lots of people like Jason in Manhattan already, and the heavily armed populace there would more than likely take him out with a store-bought Magnum should he give them any out-of-towner ‘tude. The title alone is more than a bit of a cheat, as Jason chases around his captive prey on a cruise ship and spends less than half an hour in the city.

Jason Takes Manhattan has stunning location photography but leaves all coherent narrative in the garbage can. Characters lie still in order to get killed, survivors of a boat wreck jump out of a lifeboat with their clothes cleanly pressed, and Jason swims undetected across the Atlantic Ocean to stalk his victims in the city. The filmmakers at this point were keen that crowds didn’t line up for these films for their believability, and include a scene of Jason knocking the head off a victim to have it go flying clean off in the manner of a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Toy Robot!

Special features include on this disc include a commentary track by actors Scott Reeves, Jensen Dagget and Kane Hodder, the documentary New York Has A New Problem, The Making of Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan, slashed scenes and a blooper reel. Audiences recently clamored for Jason once again in 2009 with a Friday the 13th remake in 2009 that was number one at the box office opening week. As long as the public demands the slaughter of innocents on its movie screens, it seems that a certain hulking hockey-masked slayer will only be too happy to comply.

MONSTERS, MARRIAGE AND MURDER IN MANCHVEGAS (2009)

2009-09-09T20:53:00.000-07:00

Directed by Charles Roxburgh

Jenny (Marie Dellicker), All-Star Pete (Thomas Scalzo) and Marshall (Matt Farley) are the sole members of M.O.S. – the Manchvegas Outlaw Society. The three are cheerfully free of all ambition, and support themselves by doing lots of odd jobs in their small town of Manchvegas (in reality, Manchester, New Hampshire). They deliver papers, sell lemonade and record insipid pop music they peddle to the locals. Jenny begins to suspect that there may be more to life, and is frustrated that her relationship with Marshall hasn’t strayed from the platonic. She begins to date a series of older men, and Marshall and All-Star Pete begin a series of childish pranks to put a damper on Jenny’s romantic aspirations. In the meantime, Melinda Corbin (Sharon Scalzo) starts an affair with local grocer Vince (Kyle Kochan) in spite of her ever disapproving father (Kevin McGee). Vince and Melinda then become engaged, when Melinda mysteriously disappears while skinny dipping in the local stream. Shortly afterwards, other young women set to jump the broom turn up murdered. Could the local legend of a tribe of woolly “near men,” the Gospercaps, be somehow responsible? Determined to get to the bottom of all of this, Jenny and Marshall masquerade as a soon-to-be-betrothed couple, leading to a thrill-packed conclusion.

From the makers of Freaky Farley (2008), Monsters, Marriage and Murder in Manchvegas is a movie that is nearly impossible to dislike. Perpetually sunny and good natured, one is far too willing to look past its technical roughness to see a good hearted attempt to entertain its audience. The movie revels in its small town innocence. There is only one cuss word, the bloodless murders take place offstage and the Gospercaps, in their kneejerk monster getups would fail to frighten the most excitable infant. All scenes, with few exceptions are set outdoors in bucolic settings.

The project is altogether so harmless that an unintentional sinister aura begins to pervade it. The character of Marshall (producer Farley, who also played the lead in Freaky Farley) appears to be a textbook example of arrested development. His desire to keep his gang of three chaste and pure verges on the unwholesome, and when he reluctantly accepts Jenny as a girlfriend, one wonders if the relationship ever gets up to the plate, let alone first, second or third base.

In spite of this, the film adheres to its Walt Disney coda of clearly defined bad guys and pure-hearted heroes, and a good time is guaranteed for all. Shot on Fuji Film (a rarity in this digital age), the DVD includes several documentaries on the making of the film. Director Charles Roxburgh cites the American horror films of the mid-Seventies to early Eighties as his biggest influence, but Manchvegas is as far away from those downbeat features as you can get. There are trailers for other films from the same production team, the aforementioned Freaky Farley among them. Manchvegas works well as an after dinner mint after an evening of overly serious film fare.

Battle of the Black Devil Dolls

2009-07-27T17:13:00.000-07:00

BLACK DEVIL DOLL FROM HELL (1984)
Directed by Chester Novell Turner

BLACK DEVIL DOLL (2007)
Directed by Jonathan Lewis

Circumspect church woman Helen Black (Shirley L. Jones) tends to her spotless home with vinyl-slipcase- encrusted furniture in an unnamed Illinois suburb. Stopping in a curiosity shop one day, she buys a dreadlocked ventriloquist dummy in spite of the shopkeeper’s warning – cue Casiotone key held down with one finger, eeeeeeeeee – that the doll always returns by its own volition after a couple of days. Once home, the dummy comes to life and spies on Shirley in the shower. The doll overpowers her, then bounds and rapes her bellowing Ebonics-laced obscenities. “Taste the wrath of my tongue, BITCH!”In typical faulty movie logic, the frigid young woman later decides she likes rough sex and begins to cruise the local singles bars for men.

Once you’ve had wood, nothing’s good, and Helen sends her flesh and blood suitor away and has a fatal confrontation with the doll. True to form, the doll returns to the curiosity shop to await a new bitch.

The original Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984), from gutter auteur “Chester N. Turner” was a true cult phenomenon. Found in only the most desolate of mom-and-pop video stores in the Eighties and Nineties, few knew what they were getting into when they popped the VHS tape in their home entertainment systems. Apparently filmed with only the most primitive of video cameras and edited with two VCRs, Devil Doll was a joyously repugnant misuse of magnetic tape. Ugly, foul and mean-spirited, the film fulfilled a requirement that even the roughest horror films often fail to deliver – there were some people out there who really didn’t want you to see this, as it spoke of harsh truths and ugly sentiments lurking in the male consciousness. There’s a scene in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) where the white trash killers kill a family and videotape it for later amusement. Devil Doll was the real thing, baby. Better not get hit by a truck tomorrow and let your family find this tape in your linen closet.

Chester N. Turner would go on to make another shot-on-video horror film, Tales from the Quadead Zone (1986), a horror omnibus once again featuring Shirley L. Jones in the wraparound story. Comforted by the ghost of her dead son, represented by an off-screen hair dryer blowing her hair as a ghostly “yes yes yes yes” trills on the soundtrack, Jones reads some stories from the Quadead zone. Turner had matured as a filmmaker by this time and was able to inject some genuine pathos into his storyline to back up his poverty-stricken visuals. Quadead failed to have the same impact as Devil Doll, and Turner faded into obscurity shortly afterwards. The iMDB claims that Turner died in a car wreck in 1996.

When it was time for horror T-shirt impresario Shawn Lewis of Rotten Cotton infamy to helm his own exploitative horror film, he would call upon Black Devil Doll for inspiration. It was time to bring the Black Devil Doll into the 21st Century, and Lewis and company would successfully breathe life to the wooden one in the post Tarrantino age.

Black Devil Doll focuses on the more worldly-wise Heather (Heather Murphy), bored to tears in her own Northern Californian tract house littered with pop culture detritus. Fooling around with an Ouija board one evening, her plastic ventriloquist doll becomes possessed with the spirit of a militant Black extremist, freshly executed on death row for the murder of young Caucasian girls. The two begin a love affair with trips to the park and romantic picnic until the doll declares his need for sexual variety and sends Heather tearfully away (“Go to McDonald’s, BITCH! I don’t care!”). A quartet of surgically enhanced party girls arrives, and the doll returns to his sensual and homicidal ways in an orgy of rape and murder.

Hysterically funny, Black Devil Doll uses excess as its key to success. Laughs pile up with scenes droning on for far too long, such as a lesbian car wash scene that goes on and on and on until it ceases to be erotic and becomes an ironic commentary on the bankruptcy of the male sexual imagination. Yet another female character, Natasha Talonz, spends over 40 minutes in a shower washing her monstrous breasts.

The film also takes fresh swipes at our processed food culture, as in the scenes of the lonely Heather picking away at her freedom fries in a dreadful 1950s diner. While blatantly racist and sexist, one could well imagine something like Black Devil Doll springing from minority or lesbian feminist filmmakers as a satirical attack against the cultural hegemony of white heterosexual men.

Black Devil Doll is definitely not recommended for humor impaired viewers. As a searing document against certain unspoken cultural truths about America, Black Devil Doll comes nowhere near the scorched earth territory of the original Black Devil Doll from Hell – but then again, nothing else does, either! Laugh it up.

JACK SMITH AND THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS

2009-07-24T17:24:00.000-07:00

Directed By Mary Jordan

How does one begin to ponder the unanswered question that was underground artist extraordinaire Jack Smith? Fleeing the dreary Midwest of his childhood for New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950’s, Smith would influence and inspire a generation of filmmakers and artists while steadfastly maintaining an oath of poverty and self-imposed obscurity. Tall and gangly, Smith was an openly gay artist who drew upon the gaudy Technicolor fantasies of Maria Montez for his own personal mythology. Furthermore, Smith embraced these visions of exotic lands replicated on Burbank soundstages at face value, without camp, without irony. To Smith, these films were a portal to another world free of ugliness and injustice. Pulling bits of scenery and costumes from dustbins and recruiting actors off the street, Smith would explore his hothouse vision with fevered abandon.

Flaming Creatures (1963), Smith’s only completed film would create a sensation, with audiences lining up around the block at the fiercely independent theaters who risked police raids by screening it. Using over-exposed black and white film, Creatures follows the rooftop orgy of a group of men, woman and transvestites as they roll in and out of extravagant costumes. The soundtrack consists of classical music from scratchy records, with Smith whispering “Psst! Did you hear? Ali Baba is coming!” at one point. Seen today, Creatures seems tame and antiquated and is best appreciated in a historical context.

Smith would never experience the critical, let alone the financial success of Creatures in his lifetime. Staging plays throughout the Seventies in his loft apartment, hipsters would gather at midnight only to be shooed away by an indignant Smith, incensed that they dare come see his work on their schedule. As one participant in the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis recollects, the only night Smith staged his seven-hour-plus production in its entirety was on the night no one showed up.

Filmmaker Mary Jordan declares that Smith, who died penniless after contracting AIDS in 1989, was ruthlessly pillaged and then discarded by the art intelligentsia. Using her camera in the manner of a high-powered rifle, Jordan goes on a safari hunt to shoot the purported “villains” in Smith’s life, frequently with their tacit permission. Underground film maven Jonas Mekas is front row and center in Jordan’s sights. Mekas allegedly took Flaming Creatures away from Smith, roadshowing it in the manner of exploitation hucksters of yore, later turning it into the cause célèbre that it would become for defenders of free expression. Mekas happily admits to being partially responsible for this claim.

Next on the hit list are Andy Warhol and Federico Fellini, both no longer around to defend themselves. Warhol was probably inspired by Smith to pick up a movie camera to begin making his own films, but their approaches were as different as you could possibly get. Smith would flood his viewfinder with filigree and exotica, using fluid camera movements, whereas Warhol would nail his camera to the ground and focus his camera on ugly and banal subjects. Jordan then argues that Fellini copied some of the visuals he used in Juliet of the Spirits and Satyricon from Smith. Fellini, in the company of such extravagant film stylists in his native Italy, may have heard of Smith, but had far better sources of inspiration nearby. Smith may have readily influenced schlockmeister Andy Milligan, who was active in New York City at around the same time. Milligan’s no-budget costume dramas and handheld camera owe a certain debt to Smith, but curiously is left out of this retrospective.

Smith was staunchly anti-capitalist, an example of art for art’s sake taken to an illogical extreme. It’s refreshing that Smith did not toil as a paste-up artist until that one “big break.” At the same time, this writer is familiar with other artists who declare that those around them have “sold out” while hiding closeted bitterness and jealousy over their contemporaries’ success. It appears that Smith had a lot in common with Screem magazine favorite Underdog Lady Suzanne Muldowney (see issue #14) and definitely falls into a category of artists whose work I admire that I wouldn’t want to meet.
Jordan is to be commended on assembling so many snippets of film, artwork, and interviews on an artist who appeared to prefer that his work be temporary if at all. There are extensive sound bites from Smith, who had a distinctive voice calling to mind Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh’s Booji Boy. One other pundit describes Smith’s voice as one “suppressing a burp.” A list of high-profile celebrities is on hand to describe Smith’s life and times, such as John Waters, Holly Woodlawn and George Kuchar. The disc also features interview segments not included in the feature film. In this section, performance artist Collette describes a frightening altercation with Smith that suggests that the artist may have actually benefitted from a trip to the Stony Lonesome.

Lovingly and artfully assembled with care, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis joyously celebrates a man who truly may have been the earthly manifestation of Oscar Wilde’s Sphinx Without a Secret.

The Unholy Four: Films That Freaked Me Out

2009-01-13T08:15:00.000-08:00

On the topic of movies that emotionally scarred me or freaked me out – where to begin? Ever since I was traumatized by the trailer for Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965) incongruously slipped into a kiddie matinee of the animated film Gay Purr-ee (1962) that I attended with my mother and sister while a fresh-eyed youngster, I have fruitlessly sought out other such experiences. I can’t narrow it down to a single film, as I have countless favorites; all of them leaving me scarred and freaked out in a positive way. When pressured to come out with a specific film, I must cite four titles, two of which are acknowledged classics, one a routine programmer, with the fourth and final one considered a lavish and expensive misfire.

The first, Them! (1954), screened on TV while I was a very impressionable tyke haunted me for years afterwards. Everyone recognizes this film as being the first and best of the giant bug movies of the Fifties. To an eight-year-old boy just beginning to recognize the mechanisms of the world around him, Them! is an especially horrific experience. Beginning with a traumatized little girl roaming the Nevada desert clad in a bathrobe and clutching a doll, Them! tapped into my very real fears as a child. Dependant on adults that could be snatched up and eaten by giant ants, I was keenly aware that my suburban security was a tenuous one. Unlike other creature features of its era, Them! builds up slowly and gradually before its unconvincing mechanical beasties arrive. Until our first full-on glimpse of the ants during a desert windstorm, we hear a high-pitched whine with the characters being killed off screen. In one memorable early sequence, two policemen discover a trashed general store; ants swirling around some spilled sugar serve as a foreshadowing. As one policeman goes off to headquarters, the other hears a distinctive wail in the high desert winds. Walking outside camera range, the policeman lets out a terrified scream. How effective is mere suggestion …

What made Them! so unsettling for myself was how realistic and in tune the film was to the mundane and everyday world that surrounded me at that time. Unlike other horror films that were usually set in some undefined middle European locale or shadowy castle, Them! was set in a stark universe of military barracks, clinics and sewer systems. More disconcerting still was the anxiety expressed by all the grownups in the film, unable to comprehend the mysterious menace swirling all around them. Older people were supposed to know everything, and keep little kids like me safe from harm. Viewing the film today, my favorite scene is the one in which a lady psychiatrist trots out a long stream of clinical terms intended to diagnose the traumatized girl’s condition. A whiff of insectoid joy juice under her nostrils sends the girl cowering in a corner shrieking “Them! Them! Them!” This scene would have a personal resonance for me later on, when I too would be diagnosed as a troubled child and be subjected to other “hit and miss” analysis by concerned adults.

The Saturday afternoon creature feature wasn’t done with me just yet. The following week, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was broadcast. Also set in the ordinary and commonplace, Don Siegel’s classic of paranoia left me quaking in my knee pants. In a small California town, very much like the small California town I was growing up in, pod people from beyond the stars arrive to take the identities of the family next door. Other than the few shots set in a greenhouse – where alien pods regurgitate unformed human replicas in geysers of soap bubbles, there were no conventional monsters. The creatures in Body Snatchers are your friends and family, smiling and welcoming, only dropping their guises when other human beings’ backs are turned. The snotty, superior condescension of the pod people are in fact reminiscent of an impatient adult lecturing a child.

Body Snatchers has many themes and ideas that are far too terrifying for the unprepared youngster to grasp. How do we know the teachers at school really have our best interests at heart? The friendly policeman that we’re supposed to go to if we’re lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood, how do we know that he’s not some malevolent monster from outer space? William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars (1953) had many of the same ideas, but relied on a dime store surrealism to offset its scares. The one-two punch of Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers on my fragile mind was almost too much to bear. Don’t trust the squeaking noise you hear late at night down the hall from your bedroom …. And furthermore, don’t trust the people who say they’re your parents asleep in the next room!

Speaking of family, yet another film that I saw with my mother and sister in 1972, at a regal downtown theater usually reserved for Walt Disney children’s matinees set my brain awhirl with all manner of cinematic possibilities. Tales from the Crypt (1972), directed by Freddie Francis is not even five minutes old when a pre-Dynasty Joan Collins bashes in her loving husband’s brains out with a poker all over the evening newspaper. More grisly shocks were in store. Hearts torn out, hands lopped off, wicked wardens falling into walls of razor blades – it wasn’t fit for a young boy that had heretofore been nursed on Comics Code-approved pap. I spent most of the film hiding my face in my hands and I loved every last minute of it.

I knew that Tales from the Crypt was based on EC comics that were snatched up and banned long before I came on the scene. I also knew that the comics were the work of William Gaines, the avuncular hippie-like publisher of Mad magazine, a humor periodical enjoyed by myself and my parents alike. I was totally unprepared for the succession of grisly shocks at this matinee. I was simultaneously appalled and delighted – this omnibus of horrors appealed to my childlike sense of right and wrong, while shocking me with all manner of sights and sounds.

Tales from the Crypt was Amicus Productions’ most popular film to date. Based on the American EC horror comics such as Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt was one in a long succession of portmanteau films the studio first began with Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. William Gaines allegedly had mixed feelings about the result. Producer Milton Subotsky allegedly hated the film’s grimness, yearning to return to the escapist musicals he had started his career with, such as Rock! Rock! Rock! As a director, Freddie Francis was capable of masterpieces (The Skull, 1965) to some of the worst dreck imaginable (Trog! The Vampire Happening, Son of Dracula). He would enjoy later success as a world-class cinematographer and would keep steadily working right up until his death in 1999.

Viewing it today, where it is paired with its far inferior sequel Vault of Horror (1974) on a Midnite Movies Double Feature DVD, Tales from the Crypt remains a superior horror programmer, still vastly superior to the uneven HBO TV series that bears its name. Its importance to me was in that it forced me to look at the people behind the camera, being keenly aware that this blood-drenched flick was originally the work of a man who flooded newsstands with a beatific, grinning Alfred E. Neumann offering up laughter and good cheer. I began to actively seek out other films directed by Francis, and began to appreciate the transition that the written word takes before it is brought to the screen. Where Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers had twisted my head around with fright, it was Tales from the Crypt that had twisted my head around to the notion of art in cinema.

The fourth and final film in this roundup is one that is included in many horror genre surveys, although it is generally not considered to be a “horror film.” The Day of the Locust (1975), director John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Nathaniel West’s novel of Hollywood life in the Thirties, is not well remembered today, but the film had a far greater impact on my budding mind that The Exorcist (1973) did a few years earlier.

Centered on a collection of film factory fringe types a few steps away from the soup lines, Locust features an impressive cast. William Atherton plays Todd Hackett, an up-and-coming art director with eyes on aspiring actress Faye Greener (the incredible Karen Black) who lives across the way in a crumbling Hollywood duplex with her ex-vaudevillian father (Burgess Meredith). The characters try to claw their way up the tinseltown ladder with no success, and Faye must turn to prostitution in order to pay for her father’s funeral. Faye then sets her eyes nebbish accountant Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland) as a potential meal ticket, but things fall apart at a disastrous drunken orgy. All the characters converge at a Hollywood movie premiere, where Homer brutally stomps a child to death in a fit of anger and despair. The crowd rises up in mob vengeance to kill Simpson, and transform into faceless monstrosities –the “locusts” of the title -- in a hallucinatory riot.

The Day of the Locust, in its wild and expressionistic final half hour was by far the most horrifying thing I had seen on film up to that point. Seeing it in my confused adolescence, I was drawn to the sexual undercurrents running throughout the film and was left breathless by the orgasmic intensity of its climax. Far more importantly, Locust would smack me across the head with its brutal truths. A native of Bakersfield, I grew up in the shadows of the Great Depression, acutely aware of all the people around me who had come to California in search of a dream. Most found disappointment and despair, and carried on a vicarious life through the popular media. The displaced Okies and Arkies from the Dust Bowl worshipped their movie stars and ball players and politicians from afar – but would rise up and smash their idols if inclined to do so.

Actor Karen Black appears to have a similar “love/hate” relationship with the film. When I asked her to autograph a poster The Day of the Locust at a movie convention, she threw up her fingers in a sign of the cross. Later, she would inscribe one of her glossy 8 x 10’s of her as Greener in the shadow of the Hollywood sign with one of her choice bits of dialogue. “Hollywood parties – PUKE! Best to you Greg! Karen Black.”

When it came time for me to make my own horror film about Bakersfield, I made sure to include plenty of clips from The Day of the Locust. With able assist from editor extraordinaire Damon Packard, footage from the riot scene was interwoven with my story about a young male hustler who falls under the influence of an evil group of powerful homosexuals. Entitled Lords Part One, the six-minute short is a meditation on a local legend that is just as true as any other story to come out of Hollywood.

Of the four films mentioned above, I see no real common thread. Them! Beware of giant ants. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Beware of other people. Tales from the Crypt. Be aware of the people behind the camera. The Day of the Locust. Be aware of the power of cinema. Perhaps the best we can all hope for is to simply remain aware ….

Into the Zone: Richard Elfman recalls the shooting of his cult classic Forbidden Zone

2008-08-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

Audiences who stumble into the indescribable musical fantasy Forbidden Zone (1980) -- whether from a late night cable TV showing, a bootlegged VHS tape, or repertory theater screening -- are instantly whisked away to a paper-and-glue netherworld called the Sixth Dimension. In the film's overheated 73 minutes, a veritable parade of ethnic stereotypes, topless princesses, dancing frogs and chorus girls fly by, leaving the viewer befuddled, shocked and enchanted.

The film Forbidden Zone grew as an extension of the cabaret act The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, which later would become the new wave rock group Oingo Boingo, fronted by current film composer wunderkind Danny Elfman. It was through the vision and hard work of Danny’s older brother, Richard Elfman that Forbidden Zone came into existence. Though bizarre and delightful, Forbidden Zone is merely like most other musicals, insists Richard Elfman: an excuse for a dozen hot song-and-dance numbers.

And like the majority of musicals, Forbidden Zone’s plot is a vaporous one, best left to the inebriated film fan to decipher. To whit: Slumlord Huckleberry P. Jones (Gene Cunningham, acting in minstrel blackface under the name Ugh-Fudge Bwana) is rutting around in one of his bungalows in Venice, California looking for heroin to unload. He stumbles through a basement portal into the Sixth Dimension, presided over by midget King Fausto (Hervé Villechaize) and insane Queen Doris (Susan Tyrrell). Jones manages to escape -- and according to one of many silent movie intertitles -- finds and sells the heroin and then rents the property to the dysfunctional Hercules family.

Composed of Swedish Pa (Cunningham again), Ma (Virginia Rose), Flash (Phil Gordon II), Jewish wrestler Gramps (Hyman Diamond) and daughter Susan B. “Frenchy” Hercules (Elfman’s then-wife Marie Pascale-Elfman), the basement has already swallowed up neighborhood kid Rene Henderson (Matthew Bright, acting under the name Toshiro Boloney), the transvestite “sister” of abused child Squeezit (Bright again).

While colorful, the Hercules family was based on real-life characters Elfman says he knew at the time. “Among the things that I wished to portray in Forbidden Zone, besides simply a filmed version of an entertaining stage musical, was an Absurdist satire on contemporary amorality and society’s utter lack of ethical responsibility. My next door neighbors at the time were a poor white trash family -- the drunken father would scream at the mother, who yelled and slapped the teenage piggy slut-daughter, who beat her younger brother, who threw shit at the dog,” Elfman says.

Ma and Pa sternly warn Frenchy against venturing into the basement while stoking her curiosity. “How cure-yee-us!” Frenchy exclaims in her exaggerated Gaelic accent. Attending school with Gramps, Frenchy jumps through the window when a disagreement over a gambling debt between black students (played by adults in Blaxploitation pimp attire) erupts into gunfire.
Returning home, Frenchy disobeys her parent’s edict and enters the basement, where -- in just one of a series of remarkable animated scenes courtesy of John Muto -- she is swallowed whole and sent through gigantic intestines and a Rube Goldberg device before being shat out of a cartoon anus to land on fecal pillows.

“Hot damn! The Sixth Dimension! Is that a rumba I hear?” she exclaims.

Lured to a boxing ring surrounded by gigantic heads, Frenchy discovers two Dadaist boxers (performance art group the Kipper Kids), dancing frog manservant BustRod (Jan Stuart Schwartz) and a rather rotund young man in Mickey Mouse ears singing the 40's Latin classic, “Bim Bam Boom.” In a hilarious scene designed to send all viewers on lysergic chemicals screaming from the room, lips mouthing the nonsensical lyrics in Spanish are superimposed over the kid’s face.

A question foremost in the minds of many of the film’s fans was where Elfman discovered this actor. Elfman has long forgotten the young man’s name. “He was a neighborhood kid in Venice, California. Very, very shy. He froze up in front of the camera, so I had to superimpose Squeezit (Matthew Bright) Henderson’s lips over his.” The scene is still used by Elfman as a warning to actors who fail to memorize their lines.

The dance is rudely interrupted by the Kingdom’s topless princess (Gisele Lindley), who brings Frenchy before her parents King Fausto (Villechaize) and Queen Doris (Tyrrell). Fausto is instantly smitten with the gamine, much to the Queen’s dismay. “She is French, and therefore of the Master Race!” Fausto later rationalizes. The queen consigns Frenchy to the dungeon, and between numerous romantic peccadilloes, a power struggle for the Sixth Dimension ensues.
Frenchy’s friends and family all enter the Sixth Dimension in an attempt to rescue her; the former queen (Warhol Superstar Viva) is found rotting in a cell ; there’s a smoking hot Cab Calloway number starring Danny Elfman as Satan; and a coup d’état. It’s all over before the audience has a chance to catch its breath, and no one can resist jumping back on the roller coaster ride for yet another viewing.

Where did all this wonderful nonsense begin? According to Elfman, it all began in Southern California, with a detour courtesy of Paris, France.

Forbidden Zone is a crazy quilt of ideas and visuals. One can cite the Fleischer Bros., underground comics, vaudeville, Yiddish theatre, silent films, “late 19th Century French Absurdist Theater; maybe French theater in general. And the Ascended Masters, of course!” says Elfman. This writer, a native of the Golden State, points out to Elfman that a lot of Southern Californian malaise seems to have been a major inspiration as well. I ask if his upbringing was a traumatic one.

“Mine wasn’t too traumatic,” he replies. “Except for getting beaten and bloodied by anti-Semitic poor-white-trash kids and taunted and ridiculed for being a Jew through much of my early youth. And maybe the time, a few years later, when Dorsey High won a football game at Manuel Arts High here in South Central L.A. when an angry black mob pulled me and few white friends out of the broken car windows and stomped us. Luckily, the police arrived ... but other than that and several dozen other incidents -- nothing too traumatic. Danny, a few years my junior, seemed to get off easier in terms of harassment.”

The creative Richard and Danny fled California for the higher artistic climes to be found in Paris, France in the Seventies. There, the brothers joined the theatre group The Grand Magic Circus under the hand of James Savary, who would later become the director of the French National Theatre. It was also the Elfmans’ good fortune to work with Peter Brooke of the Royal Shakespeare Company during this especially fecund period. After studying a wide array of music, theatre and stagecraft, Danny and Richard returned to the United States to form the avant-garde musical combo The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

Unlike other musical acts of the day, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo eschewed rock and roll to concentrate on such Harlem Renaissance hipster artists as Cab Calloway and Josephine Baker. Retro long before the coining of the term, the band would dress in wild costumes and engage in bizarre bits of cabaret.

It was during the late Seventies that Richard decided to transpose the Mystic Knights’ stage show to film, and the result was the hour-long, 16 mm, lost-to-the ages The Hercules Family, which was never completed. Friends encouraged Richard to make the leap to 35 mm to capitalize on the Midnight Movie crowd audience, which was then lining up at multiplexes for such fare as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Pink Flamingos (1972).

Production money was raised by “buying and refurbishing old houses, credit cards and help from Ugh-Fudge Bwana and producer Carl Borack,” says Elfman. Shooting Forbidden Zone proceeded off and on over a two-year period. Elfman says that the cast was recruited from friends and acquaintances. “Matthew Bright (Toshiro Boloney) was a classmate of my brother Danny. Matthew’s roommate at the time was Hervé. Hervé’s ex-girlfriend was Susan (Tyrrell). Matthew also was friends with Joe Spinell. Pa was in the Mystic Knights with me. The Princess did a bit in our stage show.” Many other faces were literally plucked from the street, as in one scene where a Greek chorus of drunks is seen chuckling at the action. “The 'inebriated gentlemen' you refer to were sitting on the casting sidewalk that day on 4th and Alameda, awaiting some bottles of acting booze,” says Elfman.

Villechaize and Tyrrell, jealous lovers on film, were jealous ex-lovers in real life. “The two loved and admired each other profoundly. Yes, they had some tempestuous chemistry as a couple, but the love was always there.” Elfman also shares that Viva, who portrays the garrulous ex-queen, had a contentious relationship with Tyrrell, and that the catfight they engage in at the climax of the film was real.

Disaster struck when a lighting fixture fell and struck Matthew Bright on the head during filming. Elfman says he will never forget the sight of Bright lying on a hospital emergency room gurney while dressed in full Rene drag and makeup. Ever the trouper, Bright returned the next day for shooting, albeit with a sprained neck.

Everyone pitched in and did double duty on the project. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, Marie Pascale-Elfman would relinquish her place in front of the camera in order to spend long nights painting the expressionistic sets. Hervé Villechaize, himself an accomplished artist, would lend his artistic expertise to the painted flats on the weekend.

Many actors filled secondary roles. Among the most notable is Susan Tyrrell’s turn as Rene and Squeezit’s barfly mom Mrs. Henderson. In a dark wig and long nose makeup, Tyrrell berates and torments Squeezit (“Oh, Chicken Boy!”) and declares that her waterfront date for the evening is his long-lost father (Joe Spinell of Maniac [1981] infamy).

Shot years before advances in digital technology, many of the sped up sequences in Forbidden Zone were accomplished by painstakingly removing individual film frames and then reassembling them one at a time. While many props and costumes were on loan from the Mystic Knight’s stage act, one bit of wardrobe -- Mickey Mouse caps with distinctive round ears that one can buy at Walt Disney theme parks -- is worn without apology by many characters throughout the film. Elfman remembers that one insurance company refused Forbidden Zone coverage due to the caps, but the items, shorn of their distinctive corporate logos, flew under the radar of the usually litigation-happy multimedia conglomeration.

Once completed, Forbidden Zone had a hard time drawing an appreciative theatrical audience. Released when Midnight Movies had faded in popularity, the film “was condemned by the 'politically correct' when it came out, banned from PC campuses. Arson threats drove it from theaters.” Many accused Richard Elfman of anti-Semitism for his inclusion of an elderly Yiddish money changer character, unaware that the actor was played by Elfman’s real-life grandfather.
This writer became familiar with Forbidden Zone through the odd late-night cable TV screening. “The original cable version was a piece of shit low-res dupe of a rough cut that I had my lawyer pull off the air,” says Elfman. The film was released briefly on VHS on the Video Gems label, where it quickly went out of print (but now fetches high prices on Internet auction sites). “Most people saw shitty bootlegs that I wasn’t aware of. It was only a few years ago that Fantoma Films put out a decent version, and now Legend Films has done this new amazing color job on the film.”

Elfman says it was a longtime dream to have Forbidden Zone in color, hand-colored by Chinese craftsmen in the manner of silent films. The Legend Films DVD release has bright, stylized hues recalling hand-painted postcards of yesteryear. This writer asks if this expressionistic color scheme was intentional. “No, we choose a more ‘realistic’ looking route,” replies Elfman. “The film is cartoony enough already in terms of art direction.”

In the years following the original release of Forbidden Zone, many cast and crew members have gone on to many other projects. Danny Elfman would later score countless motion pictures, in particular the films of director Tim Burton. Matthew Bright would later direct Freeway (1996) and Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999), and currently is working on other film projects. Richard Elfman would go on to direct Shrunken Heads (1994) and Modern Vampires (1998), as well as serve as editor-in-chief of the glossy entertainment periodical Buzzine. Kipper Kid Martin von Haselberg would later marry comedienne Bette Midler, leading the Divine Miss M to quip to her tittering fans during her stage show, “I married a German. Every night, I dress up as Poland, and he invades me!”

Several Forbidden Zone cast members have since passed away. Actor Joe Spinell was found dead in his Queens apartment in 1989. Hervé Villechaize, despondent by the dwindling acting jobs offered him after his long run as Tattoo (“Da plane! Da plane!”) on TV’s Fantasy Island, would take his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1993. Susan Tyrrell would have a brush with death in 2000 when she became stricken with the rare blood disease essential thrombocythemia, necessitating the amputation of both legs below the knee in order to save her life. Confined to a wheelchair, Tyrrell still takes the occasional acting role, but now concentrates on her artwork. At a packed-to-the-rafters screening of the new colorized version of Forbidden Zone at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, Tyrrell was greeted with thunderous applause as she took to the stage for a post-screening question and answer panel.

Midnight film, VHS and Beta, DVD, and finally a spanking brand new colorized version on DVD: I ask Elfman what wild permutation Forbidden Zone will take next. “3-D. Then Holograms in your living room. And finally, hallucinations inside your head.” One last question for Elfman: With every cult film favorite, there are always obsessed fans. What was the most remarkable fan adulation that he has seen as a result of Forbidden Zone?

“Maybe the time those three 19-year-old Playboy triplets, all dressed as the topless Princess, tried to sneak into my bed one night when I was particularly drunk and single. They did lewd things and tried to provoke me -- but of course I told them that such behavior was unchaste, and I ran straight away to the Rabbi for guidance. I told the Rebbe what had occurred. He said I was full of shit and didn’t believe I had resisted--only Abraham or Moses were capable of something like that. I offered my fingers for him to sniff, to prove my innocence. The rabbe left the room... and returned dressed like Susan Tyrrell in ‘The Queen’s Revenge.’ He lashed me with whips and forced me to recite 20 Hail Marvens.”

(Fans can observe other projects by the mad genius by logging on to http://www.richardelfman.com/)

Pittsburgh Triumphant

2008-08-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

By Greg Goodsell

"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death." – Oscar Wilde

Jim Towns, co-director of Prometheus Triumphant: a Fugue in the Key of Flesh tells the story of his visit to the notorious Mummer Museum in Philadelphia. Among the vast collection of medical curiosities was a human skull with an iron rod pushed clean through. "It was during the time when train engines were wont to explode at any given time," Towns explains. The said victim was a man, who managed to survive the ordeal and would go on to lead a normal life and die of natural causes, albeit with an iron rod pushed through his skull.

The anecdote dovetails nicely with Towns' film as both address the resiliency of the human spirit to triumph over grotesque odds. Prometheus is a black-and-white silent Gothic horror film for the 21st Century, calling to mind E. Elias Merhige's Begotten (1996), the films of Carl Dreyer and most especially Guy Maddin, who Towns says he was only recently made aware of through The Saddest Music in the World (2006). Prometheus could be a direct descendant of Maddin's earlier features, such as Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Careful, "except without any winking to the audience."

"Prometheus has a very classical love story at its heart. Two mismatched lovers. It's set in a nebulous time period and place, a lot like the Universal films such as The Wolf Man and The Son of Frankenstein. You know it's sometime between the 1880s and the 1930s, but you can't quite discern it. There's an anachronistic quality to it.

I point out that a lot of these classic horrors appear to be set in some Victorian era when a telephone will suddenly pop up. "In The Wolf Man, there are gypsies and then there's Lon Chaney Jr. driving a car. I kind of love that. And there's also that part where Chaney takes a cart with Maia Ouspenskaya from Wales to Switzerland. I love that nebulous world, because it's almost a fantasy world. You just can't quite place it."

Towns and company tried to recapture this non-era specific atmosphere with the resources that their limited budget would allow.

"It takes place during one of the last Great Plagues, that's sweeping this Germanic town in the mountains. The doctors at the local university are confounded and have no way of helping. The hero is Janick (Josh Ebel), who is a kind of upstart young medical student or doctor, who has very radical ideas about life and death. When he promotes these techniques as a way to combat the plague, instead of being rewarded and congratulated as a hero, his theories are rejected as being too radical and he's decried as a heretic. He has a kind of secret love in the doctor's daughter Esmeralda, who then succumbs to the plague, and without Janick around to help her, she dies from it. I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that Janick comes back in a more mysterious disguised form, exhumes her, and begins a very slow and laborious process of not only reanimating her, but also restoring her to the woman he loves.

Does it all come back to bite him in the ass? "No! No! There was a point where we made a conscious decision, since we had a 'Frankenstein' story, and 'Modern Prometheus' was the original title for 'Frankenstein,' the Frankenstein story is always a morality tale about the presumption of man to assume the power of God, and it always ends tragically. We thought there's no reason for this to end tragically …"

Prometheus succeeds in creating an undefined European largely through a careful collection of settings, all for the taking in that most American of cities, Pittsburgh. Abandoned foundries, mental hospitals and decaying structures, each with their own brand of poetry and desolation was there for the filmmakers' taking. "It was incredible, some of the locations we got," Towns says.

Prometheus has tons of atmosphere, a lush musical score by Lucien Desar and more than just a generous helping of sex. There is ample nudity and a (fairly discrete) scene of necrophilia. Making the round of the film festival circus, the DVD can be had at www.madmonkeyproductions.com.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1981)

2008-04-30T18:24:00.000-07:00

Movies about Bigfoot usually stink. Most of them fall on the side of a classroom mental hygiene film, with non-actors flailing about in mock terror over some poor unfortunate soul in a modified gorilla costume. The Curse of Bigfoot (1976), in particular squanders its running time on a group of stupid crackers on an archaeological dig before the tatty Sasquatch shows up. There are a few notable exceptions, however … Shriek of the Mutilated (1975) found the notorious Roberta and Michael Findley turning their twisted attention to the abominable snowman myth with a subplot involving an international cannibal cult, as well as some low-grade murder scenes (toasters dropped into bathtubs, etc.).

Head and shoulders above all other Bigfoot features is Night of the Demon (1981), which has a great deal of notoriety over a single scene. In flashback, a scrawny biker in a black leather jacket pulls off to the side of a lonely mountain road for a smoke break and a piss. A furry arm reaches out of the bushes, grabs the biker’s bulging bishop and tears it clean off. The moaning victim stumbles back to his motorcycle, the tattered remains of his manhood dangling out of his jeans, as his molasses-thick blood trickles over his engine.

As shocking and as unprecedented as this one scene is, there are still more sights and sounds in Night of the Demon to keep the most demanding sensation-seeking viewer awake and happy. Just as ballsy (and far more ridiculous) is yet another flashback involving two Girl Scouts. The two teenyboppers, with the Girl Scout corporate logos prominently displayed on their T-shirts are seen walking through the woods armed with hunting knives when Bigfoot grabs the two of them, and slaps them together, forcing the other girl to stab the other to death in a hail of phony stage blood. The least attentive viewer will ask, "Why don’t those kids just drop their hunting knives?" It makes for an arresting visual regardless.

Most horror films are little more than a parade of unusual scenes that have little to do with a cohesive narrative anyway, and Night of the Demon has far more than its quota. The Bigfoot in this film is not the put-upon androgynous wooly man of the woods, but a sexually aroused, sexually aware and sexually active man of action.

Take an early scene (still another flashback) where the Bigfoot spies on a fornicating couple in a van. The woman is a big-haired bimbo with perky breasts, her male partner a lustful troglodyte. The voyeuristic monster throws back the van’s doors, drags the man outside and then flings his bloody carcass on the windshield. The woman, in one of many countless bad performances screams feebly before apparently dying from fright, the camera zooming in on her eyeball in the manner of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Another copulating couple in a sleeping bag has their tryst interrupted when the horny Bigfoot rakes his claws against the man’s back.

This is just a handful of one of many scenes that make Night of the Demon such a keeper. The plot? Uh, Professor Nugent, a suave college professor whose friends and colleagues say is "just a sucker on the subject of Bigfoot (actual quote)" leads five of his friends on a mountain expedition to find the shambling man monster. To prove his point, he shows his class a home movie of a mother and child waving at the camera, where the unseen photographer is trounced upon and a hairy arm brushes across the screen as the camera runs out of film, long before The Blair Witch Project (1999).

The investigators uncover a story about an isolated hillbilly woman named "Crazy Wanda" who is rumored to have had connubial relations with the monster that led to the birth of a monster child, or in the words of a spinsterish old biddy, "Deformed. You know, mongoloid," Along the way, the intrepid party happens upon a sex ritual in the woods performed by the local yokels in front of a "huge anthropoid effigy."

The expedition meets with much misfortune along the way, with one of their party eventually being carted off into woods by the monster for God knows what. But the audience won’t care, as they’re an unsympathetic lot. When asked by one mountain man to be left alone, the undeterred academics pitch tents on his lawn and camp out until he agrees to talk. When they finally meet up with Crazy Wanda in her mountain shack, they barge in and unlock the door to her private shrine without asking. Talk about rude! And as members of an accredited university, they don’t appear to be highly intelligent as well. In their initial search for Wanda, one of them merely yells "Waaaaaaaaaaaan-da!" into the cavernous forest.

There’s a ton of unintentional laughs to be had along the way, but things get dire when the professors finally encounter Wanda. It seems that Wanda was the product of an abusive, religious zealot father who forbade her any contact with boys. The acting, directing and photography, barely competent before now finds a newfound clarity and the film suddenly becomes almost too good. You know the rare instances in a horror film where it stops being an entertainment and begins to touch on some raw nerves that the audience doesn’t want to acknowledge? We’ve all come to laugh at a stupid monster movie, and we’re suddenly being presented with child abuse, religious oppression, rape and more than just a little soupcon of incest …. Like that. This episode could have easily flowed from the pen of H. P. Lovecraft.

Night of the Demon does have a palpable "Heart of Darkness," surrounded by lots of cheap laughs, bad acting and terrible scripting. But no one can deny that these scenes involving Wanda’s past have an unmistakable power and weight to them. It all ends in pandemonium, with the monster bursting into the cabin as the principal characters all wait to be killed in all manner of novel ways. Only Professor Nugent makes it back to civilization, his face "horribly mutilated," all of his stories discounted as the ravings of an unhinged academic. We’ve been entertained, we’ve laughed it up along the way, but Crazy Wanda -- and other people like her, who live right next door, remain out there.

Night of the Demon is a foremost example of why people such as myself return again and again to the realm of no-budget schlock horror. Expecting little, we sometimes get something much, much more than what we bargained for.

BoardingHouse… Where the Rent Won’t Kill You, but Something Else Will!

2008-04-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

The home video revolution in the early 1980s brought a plethora of shot-on-video horror titles to rental store shelves. Aspiring filmmakers from across their land picked up heavy, prehistoric video cameras, gathered friends and family as actors, shot their epics over the course of a few unoccupied weekends and edited their efforts with two VCRs. Many of these titles are remembered fondly for their quirky enthusiasm in lieu of technical proficiency. Some foremost examples include Video Violence (1987) and Video Violence Part 2 (1987) that turned a satirical, critical eye towards the splatter film phenomenon. Chester Novell Turner’s Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984) and Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987) continue to shock and amaze viewers with their primitive genius. Invitation to Hell (1982) from Britain has yet to topple any other comparable project for its unintentional, artless surrealism. Even by-the-numbers home-brewed efforts that follow strict slasher templates such as Sledgehammer (1983) serve as relatively non-demanding time killers.

Standing head and shoulders among this batch was John Wintergate’s BoardingHouse (1982). This title is remembered mostly due to its parade of pretty, frequently naked girls, anyone-can-do-it special effects, and knee-jerk story about evil spirits at a Southern California ranch house. More importantly, BoardingHouse had something on its other shot-on-video brethren that they didn’t: a wide, theatrical distribution. “It opened across Jaws 3-D (1983) in the theaters. It was distributed all over the United States, some places in Europe, too. It was floating around, and we had our rights to it, but [our distributor] Howard Willette died shortly afterwards,” Wintergate explains. “And it’s been black marketed everywhere in the world. It’s out in Germany, translated into German, into Italian, Spanish. We haven’t seen a penny.”

Wintergate, speaking to this writer on a sparking telephone connection out of British Columbia, Canada has quite a tale to spin about the film. Like most stories about independent films, BoardingHouse’s tale is a mixture of ambition, personal vision, and the almighty dollar lurching into the international film marketplace.

The story… In “HorrorVision”

BoardingHouse begins with a warning that the film is shot in “HorrorVision,” with scenes of horror and extreme violence being preceded by a shot of a black-gloved hand flexing and a synthesizer sound effect. Over a threadbare synthesizer score, the film’s credits unfold with ultra-primitive computer graphics. Wintergate directed, scripted, and produced the film under his nom-de-plum Hank Adly. Those chintzy bitmapped graphics are not done with you yet, either. In a prologue, we learn of the title house in question. Accompanied by irritating “dit-dit-dit-dit-dit” sound effects (Bill Landis in an early issue of his Sleazoid Express fanzine likened the effect this had on the theatrical audience of a collective thumbscrew), we learn of the Hoffman family, who was mysteriously murdered while conducting research into psychic phenomena. The fate of the Hoffman children remains unclear.

The introduction then goes into the fates of the subsequent tenants at the Hoffman house. A man floating on a raft in the backyard pool falls off and drowns in what appears to be two or three feet of water. Wintergate explains that this actor was the house’s actual owner and personal friend of his. “We had to promise him a part in the movie, we did, and he died,” remembers Wintergate.” “He played the ‘dying man,’ the one who went in the pool and drowned.” Other tenants are shown to have suffered far worse fates, such as an unlucky woman who puts her hand in the garbage disposal as a mysterious force flicks on the switch and her hand is ground into a bloody mess. Wintergate expresses a certain amount of pride about these opening scenes.

“If you notice, some of the scenes for example, the garbage disposal scene?,” asks Wintergate. “That was the first time it was ever done, and since then it’s been done many times in many different pictures. The computer writing in it? Totally annoying and funny! Subsequently what we did was we added a voiceover for the people to make it not quite so annoying. They really got frustrated and they left because of it! We thought maybe we should just use a voiceover.”

The narrative then jumps to modern day Los Angeles, with Wintergate decked out in the ugliest clothes this side of an International Male catalog as he closes the deal on the accursed house. Our hero plans to rent out the rooms to only the prettiest girls in Tinseltown for $100 a month. It’s not long before hordes of the loveliest ladies in the film and music industry start beating a path to Wintergate’s door. Among them is brunette beauty and rock musician Kalassu (pronounced “Callah Sue”), portrayed by Wintergate’s real-life wife.

It’s a bachelor’s paradise for a while, with a rambling home full of gorgeous women and little more than romps around the pool and bedroom to occupy the time. But slowly but surely, an evil supernatural force is felt around the property. This gives Wintergate and company ample opportunity to indulge in all sorts of cut-rate special effects. Bars of soap and pieces of paper are jerked around by wires. A shrieking male victim disembowels himself by pulling out a few sausage links from his shirt. In a piece-de-resistance of cheap gore effects, a kinky leather blonde lady is commanded by unseen psychic forces to tear out her eyeballs. Contrary to popular viewer opinion, Wintergate says the eyeballs in question aren’t the rubber ones you get out of vending machines, but pig’s eyeballs.

In an unusual plot development, it’s revealed that the film’s hero successfully practices telekinesis as a counterpoint to the evil psychic forces in the film. This reflects Wintergate’s long-standing belief in metaphysics. “We wanted to put in metaphysics, because in our basic cinematography style creations that we had done, a lot of metaphysical stuff was used negatively,” says Wintergate. “We wanted to give a juxtaposition with negative and positive, showing that it can be utilized in ways that can be helpful rather than just destructive. That’s why we needed a negative and a positive force in the movie. Using the metaphysics kind of gave another twist to it, with other weirdo, wild wacky things, instead of just straight horror.”

It’s not revealing too much that one of the house’s tenants is behind the evil psychic disruptions. A blonde beauty (Alexandra Day) whose faux British accent fades in and out is high on the list of suspects. There is a showdown at a wild party, a neat resolution, and room left for a sequel.

Building a Foundation

At the time of BoardingHouse’s filming, Wintergate had worked extensively in the motion picture industry. He is reticent to speak specifically about his previous film work. “Well, I’ve worked for other people before, doing some directing, some writing and acting in different things,” he says. Such as? “Let’s not get into that, it’s old and not really important.”

Had Wintergate seen many other horror movies? “No, we really weren’t into horror films,” he tells me. “We had seen a few of them. Roger Corman had did some, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was out and so we thought, ‘hmmmm. All these horror movies.’ Why not do something … different? Why don’t we do a genre of making fun of horror movies? In other words, make a comedy out of it? A parody, comic interaction, and do it really over the top. A campy kind of thing, instead of making it serious and horrific and bloody. We wanted it to be funny. We wanted it to be a spoof, which at that point no one had done that I was aware of at the time. Kalassu and I got together and wrote the script, got some friends together, and said, ‘let’s do this.’”

Wintergate cast a lot of his friends and acquaintances in the music and film business. “A lot of them were our friends because we had been in the business, and knew different people, and some actresses wanted to have some film on them and such, so we got our friends together and started casting,” Wintergate says. “We did put out a casting call out for a couple different things but basically we just used friends from the industry.”

Foreseeing the trend to shooting motion pictures on video, Wintergate used the newly emerging technology as a cost-cutting measure. “We thought of doing it on film, but it was a new adventure, and we knew we would have to do a lot of takes, a lot of outtakes,” explains Wintergate. “With film, the cost would be really exorbitant. We would have to shoot 15 to one or something like that. Normally, we shoot three to four to one, because we were trying something new and something different, we had to get the right feel for each on video and see what happened. We could blow it up to 16mm if necessary, and that’s what we did.”

BoardingHouse was shot quickly and inexpensively. “The film was shot in two segments,” Wintergate says. “One shoot lasted two-and-a-half weeks, the other about a week.” While there is a fleeting reference to the house’s address on Hollywood’s Mullholland Drive, the film was shot entirely in the San Fernando Valley. Wintergate pegs the budget around $35,000. “We did a lot of the food catering,” Wintergate points out. “We did spend a lot of money on the costumes, just to make it different. It wasn’t a lot of money for everything. The blowup alone cost 35 grand. Then of course all of the prints cost a grand apiece.”

The one aspect of the film that isn’t scrimped upon is the many garish, rock star costumes. Characters don’t wear the same outfit twice in the film. “That was the whole idea, to make it different,” says Wintergate. “That was accomplished, but the comedy was kind of left behind a little bit. When you watch the movie, really, you don’t know whether to cry or to laugh or to be scared. It’s a little confusing, but I guess that’s what made it so interesting.”

Once completed, the Wintergates looked for a distributor and found it in the person of Howard Willette. “The funny thing is, is that once we did it, and it was done very comical, a lot of the comic scenes were taken out by our distributor,” remembers Wintergate. “He looked at it and he said, ‘No, no, no, no we can’t make fun of a horror movie! It has to be a real horror movie!’ And I said, ‘No, that’s impossible! We shot it to be campy, to be funny. You’re going to confuse the audience!’ He said, ‘No, no. We can’t sell a funny movie. We have to make it a real horror movie.’ I said, ‘Well, I can’t do it! If you want to reedit it, go ahead!’”

Wintergate estimates that at least 20 minutes of footage were cut out by Willette, which leads to certain “continuity issues” with the finished film. The most glaring example is a male character that comes snooping around the house and asks to use the phone. He’s next seen in bathing trunks by the pool surrounded by the girls without any transition shots.

Another example of story elements lost in editing is a mysterious hooded figure with glowing red eyes that appears in a few scenes without any explanation. Wintergate says this will be explained away in the film’s proposed sequel. “Basically what the idea was if you saw the movie, the apparition that comes, the black hooded figure is actually an evil that comes from another dimension and takes over a particular body,” says Wintergate. “BoardingHouse II, which we just finished writing, will be a sequel if the money comes along. We will bring that particular evil apparition to life. Basically, the evil comes from another dimension, disappears [once the villain] disappears, but that can’t be broadcast. That was the idea behind it. She kind of slipped into a different dimension. Anyway, the whole thing will be cleared up a little bit more in BoardingHouse II.”

A notable highpoint of BoardingHouse is Kalassu’s nightmare sequence, where she’s pulled into her bed by groping hands (rendered on the film’s poster and video box art), menaced by a pig-headed phantom, and wanders into an eerie graveyard that sports a headstone with the name “Ilsa Wolfe” on it. Is this a reference to the Ilsa films starring Dyanne Thorne, such as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1974)? “There was no conscious reference to anybody,” claims Wintergate. “It was basically just the tombstone that was around. We created it, but I don’t know why it came out that way.”

Theatrical Distribution

Wintergate only has praise for distributor Howard Willette, who he says “really got it out there!” BoardingHouse played the dwindling grindhouse and drive-in circuit, as well as the sterile suburban multiplexes. “I don’t know what [Willette’s] books really read. People have double books most of the time, and I think we made 150 prints that were sent out all over,” says Wintergate. “We put it up into 35mm which at that particular time was still a novelty. Nobody had ever really done a movie in video and then blown it up. It looked reasonably okay on the big screen. There was pretty good visual quality. The one that we saw was not bad. It wasn’t crystal clear, like the big budget movies.”

How did theatergoers react to the Wintergate’s unique creation? “It was very diverse,” Wintergate remembers. “Some people thought it was just absolutely a hoot. I guess there were people who love to party, and just watch and make fun of movies. Other people went ‘This is just the worst thing I’ve seen in my life!’ From A to Z, the gamut was pretty big, which is an indication that it made an impact, regardless of which way.”

Money continued to roll into the Wintergates’ coffers until their original distributor Willette passed away. This writer first encountered BoardingHouse on the Paragon Video label, and clearly remembers both a version transferred from film and a straight video version of the movie on rental shelves. Michael Weldon of Psychotronic Video declared that the tape version took a permanent place in all check-cashing stores throughout the nation. It was even floating around under the alternate video title HouseGeist. By this point, John and Kalassu weren’t making a cent off of the feature.

“Somebody made out big, and it wasn’t any of us,” Wintergate laughs. “It wasn’t the distributor, either. It’s all water under the bridge, I guess. Karma paid!”

Life After BoardingHouse

Wintergate, his wife, and his two children forsook Hollywood a long time ago, but before they threw in the towel, there was one more feature to be made.

“We made a film called Sally and Jess, the direct opposite,” says Wintergate. “It’s a Walt Disney type of movie, shot on film, 16mm and 35mm. It had a lot of woodsy scenes, and I didn’t want to take 35mm into the woods because you have to clean the lenses forever and the housing. The 16mm was easier to deal with in the woods. After our distributor died, we finalized it and we tried to find other distributors. We found two, and both of them tried to rip me off, but I got wind of it. I still have it. It’s perfectly virgin. I couldn’t find a distributor who was clean and honest. I tried the big distributors and they didn’t want to hear from us, and I tried the small ones. A lot of them were fly-by-night outfits and I didn’t feel it was right just to lose another one. It’s still there and one day if some distributor comes along, it would be a very nice TV movie, but now nobody will accept it if you know good people.”

Today, shot-on-video movies on theater screens are common. Due to increasingly sophisticated digital technology, video can now replicate the diffuse nature of film stock. Films such as 28 Days Later (2002) and Wolf Creek (2005), among several others, were shot on video with all sorts of technical trickery used to conceal their humble origins.

Wintergate and his family have since traveled all over the world, playing in their rock band Lightstorm. Wintergate’s clan now resides at an idyllic mountain retreat. “We have a home in Idaho, way on top of a mountain,” Wintergate reveals. “We took the kids out of the big city because as they were growing up, you can’t keep them in the backyard or the front yard anymore. Kalassu said, ‘They need some more nature,’ so we moved them up into the mountains. It’s a beautiful house. It’s a place where there’s silence, clean water, clean air, and lots of nature for the kids to have interaction with.”

And yet there’s an indication that we haven’t heard the last about that spirit-plagued home and that the story may very well continue. “We wrote BoardingHouse II because it’s a cult classic, and there are lots and lots of people interested,” says Wintergate. “So we wrote a second script and it’s ready to go. Our daughter and our son will continue the BoardingHouse sequel. Kalassu will be in it, and I will be in it for a few cameos.”

In any case, Wintergate is gratified that his feature is vividly remembered some 25 years afterwards. He remains heartened that anyone who sees BoardingHouse never forgets it and points out that “in the entertainment business, that’s a big plus!”

Masters of the Grind roundtable

2008-04-15T18:22:00.001-07:00

By Greg Goodsell

Masters of the Grind is the title of an exciting new documentary by filmmaker Jason Rutherford, which charts the rise and fall of the legendary seat-of-your-pants directors of the drive-in era. Rutherford corralled such B-movie notables as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS director Don Edmonds, director Gus Trikonis (The Evil, Nashville Girl) and Ed Adlum (Invasion of the Blood Farmers, Shriek of the Mutilated) for a special roundtable discussion. Rutherford lined up Adlum, Trikonis and Edmonds, posed questions by yours truly, and filmed the proceedings. Due to encroaching deadlines, this roundtable is an abbreviated but highly pungent taste of a conversation that went in all directions, addressing filmmaking along with the hard-won lessons that only a life fully lived can give. Rutherford hopes to make this a bonus feature on Masters of the Grind DVD release.

D. W. Griffith is credited as saying “Give me a girl and a gun, and I’ll give you a movie!” In your opinion, what two elements are essential for a film?

ED ADLUM: The classic! Trouble happens, trouble is resolved! The volcano goes off at the end of the picture, Dorothy Lamour kisses Jon Hall. The music swells, and you buy more popcorn.

GUS TRIKONIS: like I said to you once before, I learned a lesson from a friend of mine, a producer who is now dead, who said “get girls in trouble, and then figure out a way to get them out of trouble.”

DON EDMONDS: With this kind of picture, the scripts are always not that great, so what you try to do, and what I do is throw as much mayhem at the screen as I can and fake out a bunch of dialogue, because not only are the scripts not that great, usually, the actors aren’t that great either. So you’re combining a lot of stuff there. I’ve worked on pictures where I’ve had extras doing parts and dialogue. I think one of the elements that I do with this kind of picture is you’ve got to keep it alive, keep it moving.

ED ADLUM: I have a unique formula, I kind of did with the Blood Farmers movie, and I figured it takes about six minutes for a guy to get a girl in a clinch in a drive-in theater. So, for every six minutes I throw an atrocity on the screen. They unclench, they look at the screen, and they say “Did you believe what they just did up there with that hypodermic needle and did you see the guy with the ax? And then they go back to the tedium, and then they go back to the clinch.

GUS TRIKONIS: Roger Corman’s concept was every six minutes, “You’ve got to give me some action.” I don’t know who stole it from whom, that was his thing. Every six minutes, you’ve got to give me some action. Forget about the dialogue, you can cut the dialogue out, just get to the action.

ED ADLUM: We’re forgetting the big one, the title of the picture. That’s half the fun!

DON EDMONDS: I made this picture for Corman; we called it Tender Loving Care. He was making a series of pictures at that time, he was making motorcycle pictures, and then he started making nurse pictures, like Night Call Nurse. I made a nurse picture, I sold it to Roger, and it was 85 minutes, tight as hell, cut, cut, cut – he took ten minutes out of it!

GUS TRIKONIS: I’ve heard stories about Corman, he would go to another film – he would take film out of another film, and stick it in. It didn’t make any sense, it didn’t matter.

ED ADLUM: I heard that when he was old, Boris Karloff was in three pictures at the same time!He was so old he didn’t know it!

DON EDMONDS: They were working on the Edward D. Wood Jr. theory! Did you ever meet him? We were making this picture out in Glendale back in the day, the guy who made Killer Tomatoes. In came Ed Wood one time. He had the angora sweater and the whole thing. I thought he was a chick when he walked in, but he was a guy who just wanted to make movies.

Director Lawrence D. Foldes once turned down an aspiring actress named Vanna White who was willing to do nudity for his film Young Warriors (1983). He would later kick himself for all the residuals the film would have later brought in. In your filmmaking career, what was your worst business decision?

DON EDMONDS: I never made any – that’s a lie! He bought it!

GUS TRIKONIS: There were some films that I turned down, that years later I went, “Why didn’t I make that?” Why did I think that I could not take this film? The film is a challenge, no matter what is given to you, there’s always something there that you can pick up on and do something with. You start to get lazy when you go, “I have to pass on.”

ED ADLUM: The worst business decision I ever made was getting into the picture business. I didn’t know anything about it, and like a jerk, I trusted the people. I got ripped left and right! I don’t want to mention any names, because some of them may still be alive, and their grandchildren may be watching (or reading) this, but there a re creeps and bums in every arm of the entertainment field, and certainly the film business has its share. Especially, I think if you’re on our level, but I hear that even the big studios can get creative with the books. The only thing that I have left in my heart that would be positive about the picture business is having actually done them and gotten them on the screen without any formal training, just wanting to do it. It just goes to show you that if you have passion, you can do anything. I once heard passion defined – there were 27 people at Manhattan College that graduated with a degree in engineering. Twenty-six of them went to work for the city in New Jersey, and cleaned the sewers and built telephone poles, and the other one built the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and the reason he did was because he wanted to. That’s the same reason that I made the pictures. The reason that I stopped making pictures was because I got my head kicked in financially by these people, distributors, et cetera.

Exploitation films are a dirty business. Have you ever been approached by a producer to do a scene or film that you would never do?

DON EDMONDS: Snuff films would be a good thought. A lot of times for me at least was not that I refused to do it was because it was in the script, but because economically you just couldn’t pull it off. I think instead of being what I wouldn’t do, it would be what I couldn’t do. I’ve got 700 horsemen coming over from Troy, and I’ve got four dollars! No, let’s make the scene two guys against the wall over there and we’ll film a story.

You talk about films where you’re scraping the bottom, to get to the money, just to finish it. You’re doing it with a lot of economic strain to get the work done. I think with a lot of guy’s stuff, myself for sure, when I started doing this, I had been in the picture business as an actor and as a writer for a long time. I didn’t know how to be a director. I just went out and did it. You do it because you want to do it. Just suck it up and do it. Today, with high def these kids can go out every minute, you’re not wasting film.

GUS TRIKONIS: One thing that I would never do is make a porno. I’ve been asked to do that many a time. Because of the environment in which you work, you’ll be asked to do that kind of film. I don’t care how much money you’ll give me, I won’t do that kind of film. The other thing was, once I was asked to get an actress to show her breasts on film. She did not want to do that. I’m not going to get into any names, but finally I just said to the producers, “she’s just not going to do it, and I’m not going to push her any further than this.” So they decided to find a body double, shoot from here down, so that they could play with the visual. That’s the way it is, producers won’t give up. You can go this is where I draw my line, you want to take it further than this, and then you find some other way to do it because this is as far as I’m going.

ED ADLUM: I would never make a porno. I’m going to stay away from names, but I had a partner when I made Shriek of the Mutilated who used to make pornos, and we used to have a recurring argument. He would say “horror movies are terrible, because they bother little children.” And I would say “sex pictures are terrible, because there’s nothing redeeming about them.” Back and forth we’d go. Who know who’s right or wrong? I would never make a porno …

I remember when he once told me, “You know what the worst part of making a sex picture is?” And I said, “What?” And he said “the smell.” And I said, “What are you talking about?” And he said, “You got the windows closed, you’ve got the heavy lights on, do you think normal people take their clothes off to do those things in front of the camera? Do you think people like that take a bath?”

Exploitation films in general give audiences what they want to see: sex, violence and horror. However, such grindhouse mavens such as Roger Corman were notorious for slipping in subversive or political comments into their motion pictures. Do you think that the audience for this type of film needs to see?

ED ADLUM: I’ve got to answer this question, which is: No! No! You go the movies to eat popcorn and watch the screen and put your arm around your chick. But Mike Findlay, I don’t know if you know the name (Of course we do!) he made a bunch of pictures, he was a friend of mine, and he made a film in Argentina called Slaughter, they ended up calling it Snuff after Michael Shackleton got his hands on it, and it was a terrible film. There’s a scene in Slaughter where Mike, who plays in the picture, as many producers do, who have no money to hire actors, he’s gives a big lecture about what the Nazis did to people in World War II., which had about as much place in that picture as a rhinoceros in your bathtub! It didn’t fit at all, but Mike wanted to make his little statement.

GUS TRIKONIS: I would like to add little clips among the work that I’ve done that I’ve made some kind of point. Politically, morally, whatever. But it’s rare that you get a chance to do that kind of stuff, in this kind of film that we’re talking about. I did a film that was about Jack Dempsey. I wanted very much to show that first fight that he won was really fixed, and fixed that in that he loaded his gloves. I had someone from UCLA send me a documentary to me that was specific on that fight. The footage from that fight, stills and so on showed very much what had had happened in that fight. So I said to the producer, who bought Jack Dempsey’s book, “I want to play with this, kind of subliminally lay it into this fight.” He said, “No, no, no!” Well, I didn’t listen to him. I went ahead and I did little moments here and there, that someone who knows anything about that fight would see the clues that were left in the film that I made. Either they see it or they don’t see it, I don’t know.

DON EDMONDS: I’m the King of Guilt when it comes to that kind of stuff. I made a picture that you very well know that is as loaded politically as you can get. In fact, the film raises the hackles – it got banned in many countries. I’m guilty, I did it. I made this picture called Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and it is a tremendously famous film. College kids get it and look at it. I had a woman from Claremont College call me, and she was the dean of some division – she wrote a forty page thesis on the film! It was a nine days tits-and-ass picture that I made, for less than fifty grand and it’s still famous! A DVD company picked it up and sold 50,000 units. It’s on hundreds and hundreds of web sites. So I’m guilty. The interesting thing is I’ve always been bound by the philosophy that Sam Goldwyn once wrote, “If I want a message, I’ll go to Western Union!” There’s a certain truth to that. He was a storyteller. Now, I love messages! But he wasn’t being crass; he was being truthful to the fact that he made entertainment. And that’s what he wanted to make. He didn’t want to put his own thoughts – although I think he did, but his main thrust was to get the audience entertained. That’s what I still try to do. Here’s the thing: in this kind of film, if you are so devoted to putting a message in it, then maybe you shouldn’t take that job. (The audience) wants six minutes and some action. I try to stay true to that, because in these types of pictures that wouldn’t be the way to do it.

Do you think that the audience you made these types of films for still exist today?

DON EDMONDS: Obviously, they do. The mediums that they get shown in aren’t the same. They get shown on the Internet, they get shown on television, we do get the opportunity to show these things, and man, they go out the door! They really do! They fly out the door, so obviously, there’s still a market for them, and kids now are making these pictures. It’s not my call. You make it, and someone else will see it.

ED ADLUM: I’m so far out of the loop I couldn’t answer that question with any degree of accuracy. I really don’t know -- I’ll have to pass on that one. I don’t know if there are still people out there who like the type of stuff that I used to do, and guys like me, I don’t. I know oftentimes I’ll talk and reminisce so fondly about zombie pictures, the Sam Katzman era, black-and-white junk which I find fascinating, and people just look at me blankly. I don’t even know if they know what I’m talking about. If they get anywhere closer, they’ll use the phrase, “B picture.” There’s a whole world inside that crazy picture!

GUS TRIKONIS: My wife won’t even watch a black-and-white movie. She just says, “I’m bored! I’m bored with the black-and-white movie!” Stuff like Schindler’s List (1994), that’s special. But normally, black-and-white, that’s over.

ED ADLUM: Honestly, I was flipping around the TV and you see a black-and-white film you freeze on it, right? If it’s black-and-white, I stop. I’m going to look; I’m going to see what it is. It just says “movies” to me.

DON EDMONDS: It’s pretty hard to say that I won’t watch one movie because if it has Fred Astaire, I’m not going to turn that down. How can you turn down a (film photographed by) James Wong Howe? First of all, color is much too easy to shoot than black-and-white. With black-and-white, you’ve got to focus on every side of it. So yeah, maybe I’m the right age, I don’t care. The point is that I love watching black-and-white pictures. The only one who’s doing it nowadays is George Clooney.

GUS TRIKONIS: (As for audiences for this kind of film), it’s so diverse now. When we were making films in the late sixties, seventies, you had the drive-ins, the neighborhood theaters, you always had the B-movie if you were lucky, and there was an outlet for it. Now, with Internet – I don’t know! I don’t know how these things work. I don’t know who gets what where, if it’s on DVD, unless you have a name, it doesn’t mean anything. I have no sense of what’s available today. (The New Beverly Cinema in Hollywood that regularly screens grindhouse double features), that’s a unique place. We’re talking one little theater in the middle of this country. They’ve been trying to do that in the middle of the country somewhere. Maybe not, I don’t know. Even back in New York, I don’t know rather or not you would have the audience that you have in (Hollywood). I don’t know where we are today.

What were some of the reactions from the audiences watching your films that were most memorable?

ED ADLUM: Laughing. Absolutely no question about it. To me, an atrocity really scored when people bust out laughing, rather than screamed in horror. I don’t know why that is, but I found great humor in stuffing a hot poker in someone’s face, because obviously this never happens in real life. Unless we’re in some fourth world country where you got some pig running the place. But truly, great horror is done by Hitchcock, who knows that if you really want to disturb an audience, do something that could actually happen in the real world, such as in a dentist’s chair or in a shower. But the kind of pictures that I made, I’m not talking for everybody else, its outrageous things that could never happen in a million years! Absolutely! Hypodermic needles in eyeballs, cannonballs being fired through somebody’s face, you know, stuff like that. It only happens in the movies, and I think it’s funny.

DON EDMONDS: The idea of really great horror done by Hitchcock and some of the great masters of the art, a lot of what you thought made you as an audience sitting out there with popcorn boxes – you didn’t see it. It was built up to, and when you look at the picture, it’s not there. There’s no blood, there’s no mayhem, but the way they structured the screenplay, and the way they moved the camera, that’s master work. So consequently you can get more horror out of gaslight, out of suspicion, by dropping a key on the floor, seeing if the guy came out – you’re tense! “Did he do it? Did he do it?” Did Ingmar Bergman get away with it? That’s master work. I have no time to do mater work, I had time to do it and get out of there. I never had permits. The work that I was asked to do and paid to do was to throw some blood at the screen and kill as many people within the timeframe, which was like 80 minutes, and if I didn’t want to do that – go sit down! Figure it out some other way. That’s just the way it is. I made no great statement about the horror films that I made. I will tell you one thing … I wouldn’t take it back. I wouldn’t take it back. It was a great, fun time. I’ve had pictures that were so cheap, that I did them, ran out of money, had to go ask my leading lady, and she gave me all the money I paid her back, and I made film with it (Bare Knuckles, 1977). Her name was Sherry Jackson, I came to her in the rain, and I was asking “I’m dying, I have no money,” and she said, “You want my money back?” and I said, “I have to have it!” I never got it back to her … we made the films because we were trying to be filmmakers, trying to learn our trade, both from the production side and from the acting side. We did, and we had many, many laughs. It didn’t matter if it was a cheese sandwich and a soda pop, we had fun.

GUS TRIKONIS: You know, of all the films that I’ve made, 12 or 13 films, I don’t remember going – except for one, and I don’t remember going to see the film with an audience. Usually what would happen is, I would finish it, and I would be lucky to get a cut made before the producer took it from me. Sometimes, if the producer was a close friend, we would go to the answer print. Once you got it into the theater, I never went to see. So I don’t know what the reaction was. I was sitting in a theater watching Swinging Barmaids, and I’m having a good time because everyone is laughing and hooting at the screen. I’m going, “this is not what the film was made for!” But I am having a good time because they see it in a way that’s way out of its time! So, for some reason, it works, it works because it’s what it is! That’s all. I had a good time watching them have a good time with the film that I made 25 or 30 years before, where I was so serious, I was just trying to get it done in 12 days and blah blah blah and so forth and so on. So that’s where it is.

ED ADLUM: The theater was the Selwyn on 42nd Street in New York, in Times Square. The movie was The Invasion of the Blood Farmers. I’m sitting in there with my wife and in front of me is a guy with a date. The picture is about halfway through and he turns to his date and he says “Dis is shit!” I have to tell you, I love that! I don’t know what, but it was the neatest thing that ever happened to me in my life!

What film or scene will you be best remembered for?

DON EDMONDS: One of the scenes that I did in Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, I opened the film with – it was on the page! It was written, and I was going to take the money, or not do it – Ilsa comes in, and there’s this guy on a steel bench, like an operating room. She walks around and she’s got this tool and she cuts his balls off! And I have the thing with the water running down the thing and the blood and all that stuff. And the one thing from that film that everyone seems to remember, I hung a girl, she was the centerpiece of a big banquet. I put her on an ice block, and her feet melted the ice block, and at the end she’s hung around all these Nazis. Everyone seems to remember that scene. AS far as a whole career move, it’s not one of my finest. But if you asked what was remembered, that’s what was remembered.

ED ADLUM: the one that I like, and it’s not because of the visual, but because of what was going on around it, Mike Findlay was the photographer, the player was my wife Tippi, and we have her hanging by chains against the garage wall, and we’re draining her blood through a hose stuck in her arm, right? And we have the blood pumping, and I’m there in a black hood, and I’m jerking her around and pumping blood, and she’s writhing and screaming and Michael is filming and it’s all going on. She says to me, “Eddie! I’m going to faint!” Because she’s all tied up and stuff, right? Michael says the classic line, “Not yet Tippi, I’ve got ten more feet in the camera!” Absolutely true. She fainted, she threw up, and Michael luckily had pushed the button. She came back and he said, “You want to do it?” They did it again and that was it. It was a great shot.

GUS TRIKONIS: I won’t be remembered for any of the work that I had done, but I remember doing something that I did that changed something inside of me after I did it. In The Evil, there’s Andrew Prine, and he’s standing there with a saw and he’s got his hand up on the door and the devil is in him now. He runs the saw through and he takes his hand off. There was a close-up of the hand, and we built the hand, took the fingers and everything off and I’m looking at this, and this is before monitors, and I’m right there over the cameraman’s shoulder, and I say “I’m not going to do this again. I’m not doing this kind of film again. This is it for me!” That was it. I never made another horror film. That was it. No one’s going to remember stuff that I’ve done. I’m just being realistic.

What film or scene do you want to be remembered for?

DON EDMONDS: Of these? I don’t think so. I’ve been involved in some very good pictures and I’ve been involved in some crap. Of the films that I’ve directed, to be honest with you, on the scale of all films, it’s all crap. They’re not something that I think of when I think of my most memorable scene. There are some scenes that I didn’t direct that I was very much involved in, in the production of, but the directors were really superior. Hal Ashby, John Badham. I am very proud that in the early days of this kind of picture, for $1.45, there were other kids that were with me at that time, came out of UCLA and have gone on to be nominated for the Oscar. I’ve done that more than once and I’m very proud of it. Dean Cundney, who’s been nominated for the Oscar many times, shot his first stuff with me … Michael Riva, who got his first nomination for production design, The Color Purple. Debra Hill, who started out with me going out for doughnuts, she went on to produce films like The Fisher King. She’s no longer with us.

ED ADLUM: The one scene that I want to be remembered for is the scene in the Blood Farmers. I was the player, and it ran for three-and-a-half minutes on the screen. One shot. I get the Sam Katzman award for that. Producers don’t make mistakes because film costs money! I played against a girl named Lucy Grant and it was a honeymoon scene. We were honeymooners in this motel, we shot it through an open window, and it was great. It went from beginning to end without moving the camera, not one mistake in dialogue, print it. If I could make a movie like that, I could make it for 18 cents.

GUS TRIKONIS: My mind is racing, but I cannot come up with a specific scene or film. Nashville Girl … whatever it was, I don’t even remember the movie! Moonshine County Express rings a bell because they ripped it off and made the TV series The Dukes of Hazard out of it. That’s the correlation; no one will ever know that, except the producer. Roger Corman released it, whatever deal he made with CBS, that’s the end of it. What do I remember about Nashville Girl? I had a good time shooting it, but there’s nothing in it that stands out as really special. Any scene? No. No. That’s the end of it. Shall we move on?

Do you think that exploitation films of the Seventies served as a barometer of what was going on in American society at that time?

DON EDMONDS: Interesting question. If you look at some of these films, there is a lot of expression of the Seventies that are very telling. They’re in the wardrobe; they’re in the dialogue, in some of the snap phrases that were really in the Seventies. I’ve got a couple films that I wanted to make that were very avant-garde in the early Seventies, so I dressed them – I had pimps that you wouldn’t dare dress them as you would now, but it was very telling for the time. The shoes that you fell off and you would die? All that stuff is in the films that I made, I can’t remember that I did that, but yeah! The hip phrasing that you used back then they put in scripts … the music; a lot of the music is the same thing. There’s a little testament to the Seventies in the stuff that I had done. I didn’t do especially back then, because it was the Seventies! I did that because that was hip for the day. Films lives far much longer than Don Edmonds will, but it’s there.

ED ADLUM: Remember Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood (1960) with all the beatniks? This is earlier than the Seventies, but it’s just hysterical! Sticking all these phrases into these actor’s mouths … “Cool, daddy-o!” “Far out!”

DON EDMONDS: Bigger films at the time were trying to rip it off, when they took the small films, always taking the plots like they do today. We were making all this stuff back in the Seventies, now they’re making Hostel, Saw, those are just bigger and more expensive knockoffs of what we made back then. The reality of it is they put it out for a buck-and-a-half, and they made $40 million on it, and they do! So if there was anything that was there, it was up for people to tell us! I didn’t know! I can’t make that judgment; we did what we did when we did it. I made films that I had no idea would ever show anywhere past the following Tuesday. And yet here, they are 30 or 40 years later …

GUS TRIKONIS: It took Quentin Tarrantino light to an era that was gone. It’s him that you have to say, “OK, good guy.”

ED ADLUM: I would have to say he’s special. He’s got a weird name, he’s not the best actor in the world I ever saw, but I tell you he knows how to do this stuff. He absolutely does.

DON EDMONDS: I got involved with this picture, I did not know the man, and I read a screenplay given to me by an independent company, it was called True Romance. I read it, and I said, “Man, this is a writer for the decade.” And they said, “He’s got two-page speeches!” I said I didn’t care, this guy is masterful. He never made the picture. It was actually the money that he spent making Reservoir Dogs originally. I had never seen a script like that. The picture got made and Tony Scott directed it, but it is a tremendous film!

GUS TRIKONIS: Art in any history encapsulates a time. I think that film, these films that we are talking about, are films that were made in a time when they were made because of the conditions that were available to make these films. When you look at them, you see a time in the history of this country in that given moment. That can’t be found again, it’s never going to be the same. Today they are making films in a very different way, Saw II, III and IV, they’re spending $150 million, and it’s a different world. You can’t make (grindhouse) films today in the same way. It’s a different place, a different world; it’s a different outlet for these films. But in that time, that history is there locked in the Sixties and Seventies. That’s may answer to that question. It’s no different than painting, you talk about guys in the Fifties, after the war, they came in and they were the abstractionists. Try to repeat that! You try and repeat that and you know what happens? “Oh, what a cliché!”

Catch Masters of the Grind when it plays a film festival near your town!

Steckler for details: Ray Dennis Steckler's Incredibly Strange New Career Path

2008-02-15T22:09:00.002-08:00

By Greg Goodsell

His words come tripping off the phone with amazing alacrity. Director Ray Dennis Steckler, who blazed a path through the nation’s drive-ins and grindhouses in the Sixties and Seventies with such idiosyncratic gems as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies (1964) and The Thrill Killers (1964) is still cranking them out with unbridled enthusiasm. Steckler is presently putting the finishing touches on his sequel to Incredibly Strange Creatures, and finds himself in the 21st Century concentrating on a series of documentaries focusing on his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania.

Frequently dealing with low to no budgets, Steckler would often cast himself in many of his own movies. Bearing a strong resemblance to Dead End Kid comedian Huntz Hall, Steckler would often appear under the name of “Cash Flagg.” Steckler points out with a certain degree of pride that his signature costume of a blue hooded sweatshirt was used long before that article of clothing began to have street gang connotations.

Speaking from one of his two video stores in the Las Vegas area, Steckler is amazed to find out how his work in Hollywood has bled over into his hometown. “… in Reading, Pennsylvania, I found Bill Lloyd who was in Eegah! (1962) and Wild Guitar (1962), he was the lead kidnapper. I then found Richard J. Kozlowski who was in Wild Guitar, a friend of mine from Reading, Pennsylvania. We were born two days apart, lived two doors apart and he came to Hollywood with me and worked on The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), Wild Ones on Wheels (1962), Wild Guitar and my short film Goof on the Loose (1960). Then he married and decided to give up his career, I’m sorry that he did, but I tracked him down in Reading, after almost 45 years. I put him and Bill together in my documentaries and they are absolutely fantastic! Unfortunately, Billy Lloyd was just killed in an auto accident a few months ago up in Mulholland Drive in Hollywood.”

When did Steckler leave the faded glitz and glamour of Hollywood for the faded glitz and glamour of Las Vegas? “I left it in ’69. I couldn’t find a place to park! I had just had enough of it. I really needed a break. I got there in ’59, and it was an incredible ten years, what I did, without really having any money, and all the wonderful people I met and worked with. I needed a change, and I thought that Las Vegas would be a very good change. I wanted to get my kids out of Hollywood and that environment.

“When we moved to Vegas, it was really a nice place to live in those days. It was not a concrete jungle. But I commuted anyway for 18 years to Hollywood. I had to go there every Monday and come back every Friday night. It was the only place I was able to get any work, but I didn’t have my family living there.”

A longtime resident, Steckler has seen his Vegas mutate and change from a low-key gambling town to all-engulfing sensory overload tourist trap. “It started to change up here five years later. You can’t escape it! It’s impossible. There really is no place to move any more. You think you want to move someplace and when you get there, you want to go back to where you were.

“I traveled across the country for the past three years, so I could go to Reading, Pennsylvania, my hometown to visit my sister Judy, her husband Terry and my nephew Michael and make some documentaries there. I found, as I interviewed people all across America, which I did, I found out that home is where your family is. That’s home, as long as you’ve got your family, you’re home! It doesn’t matter what city you’re in. It’s not going to be different anywhere else.

“It’s just that being a filmmaker, you need new horizons, you need inspiration. The old saying is I could go out to Death Valley and I can photograph Death Valley as good as MGM, because I don’t have to build a set, you know what I mean? When I go out on the streets and shoot, it’s just the same as anybody else. But if I have to go inside and build sets and light it and all that, I get tripped up, because it takes money and time to do all that stuff. I like to go out in the streets and shoot. My new movie, the extension to the Creatures is all out on the streets everywhere, plus flashbacks and stuff.”

Favorite Pieces of Time

Still an active filmmaker with many projects in development, this writer asks Steckler what specific movie scene he wants to be remembered for.

Steckler hesitates for a moment. “That’s a tough one. One scene that I always liked was in the Lemon Grove Kids Go Hollywood (aka The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters, 1965), where I was forced by Huntz Hall to get rid of the baseball hat or he was going to sue me, so I wore this different hat. I have this scene with Carolyn Brandt, we’re on the couch, and we’re talking about school. She says, ‘What school did you go to, Gopher?’ and I say ‘Reform school!’ And that was just made up on the spot, which is kind of interesting. I always got a kick out of that, because the way I delivered it was so close to the way Huntz Hall did his scenes.

“It was like my moment where I really felt like Huntz Hall, who I loved dearly as a kid. I thought he was one of the greatest. I felt that it was good that for a moment I really was Huntz Hall. I really loved him and Leo Gorcey when I was a kid. I’m still watching their movies now; I got them all off of Turner Classic Movies. I wish they would put them out on DVD, I would buy each one of them twice for backup!

“And two, one of the film versions that I like the best is ‘White Rabbit,’ which I did with Carolyn Brandt from Jefferson Airplane’s song from Surrealistic Pillow. It was put on a video album from England, there was only one copy at Best Buy, and fortunately John Roberts, a friend of mine bought it and made a copy of it, or I wouldn’t even have it.”

This writer tells Steckler that my personal favorite scene of his is the lonely ride up Angel’s Flight in Incredibly Strange Creatures. The poetic despair of that particular sequence is memorable, and Steckler says that the scene is also very popular among fans. “Another music video that I did with Randy Boone, he was a singer in Cimarron Strip with Stuart Whitman. That had to be made in the Sixties, 1968. ‘So Hard to Tell Mama Goodbye.’ You can check the date on the song. It’s the most underrated music video ever made. It was made for Europe. I did another music video called ‘Red Balloon,’ with Boyd Rice, which was released in England.”

Many of Steckler’s films served as a vehicle for his then-wife, Carolyn Brandt. “I always tried to make her look the best. When she did The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979), it’s very important that you watch her transformation from a dull looking woman to someone glamorous. At the end when she’s on that chair, and she shows those beautiful legs … people are still talking about her legs, I tell you. When we went to The Crest Theatre in Sacramento and she walked on stage … this was her Oscar that night. Her fans were there and she wore an evening gown with a slit right up her legs. She looked like a million dollars. She gave the fans everything they expected that night. That’s the only appearance she’s made in several years.”

One Steckler film that is a step removed from a family video is his minimalist Blood Shack (aka The Chooper, 1971). “Definitely home movies. That was kind of a fun film, because I got a chance to put Ron Haydock and Carolyn together again, and I always wanted to do that again, because they did so well in Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966). I felt they made a good team, and I though they did well this time even though they were at odds with each other.

“We shot the movie with three days of shooting, one day at the rodeo and one other day at a different rodeo in Pahrump, Nevada, five days altogether. The whole crew was me. I did the sound, everything. The shooting ratio was about one-and-a-half to one. I actually didn’t have enough film left over to make a trailer, so I never made a trailer of the movie. I used every frame of film in that feature, and that was in 16 mm shooting on short ends. Whoever thought of filming short ends with 16 mm? When you’re broke, you’re broke! You’ve got to make it work!

“My daughters Linda and Laura were so wonderful in the film and now they’re glad that they did that as children. Linda shows her movies all the time to Jade and Garrett, my grandkids. They just love to see their mother the same age! It’s kind of neat.”

All “Dolled” Up

While many of his X-rated films have come to light in the digital age, one of this writer’s favorite Steckler films is the moody, atmospheric Sinthia The Devil’s Doll (1968). On a double feature on the Something Weird DVD of Satanis, the Devil’s Mass (1970), Sinthia spins the tale of a troubled young woman coming to grips with the childhood murder of her father and his mistress. Sinthia is replete with exotic and colorful imagery filmed on a less-than-a-shoestring budget. Steckler says that casting the feature was a challenge.

“When I was going to make Sinthia the Devil’s Doll, I hadn’t even cast the movie. I didn’t cast it. I couldn’t get someone to play the lead, I could not find a girl that I was happy with, no matter what. I must have interviewed 500 girls, I swear, because I had nice offices at Sunset Boulevard and Doheny in Los Angeles. A friend of mine, Ted Roter (aka Peter Balakoff), who played the father, he was on his way over there, and he had car problems. So he asked this girl who was a Sunday school teacher, to give him a lift. She brought him in, and he said ‘I’m here.’ And I gave him the script and everything, and I looked at her and I said, ‘Oh! You’ve found my Sinthia!’ And he thought I was crazy, because she was this Sunday school teacher. Well anyway, the rest is history.”

Steckler has fond memories of his lead actress, directing her in her first – and only – film. “Her real name was Bonnie Allison, but because it was the type of movie it was, she was also engaged at that time to Jack Marin, who was a basketball player for the Detroit Pistons, but she wanted to do the part. It was her dream to star in a movie, and she was so cooperative, she was wonderful in the movie. Everybody loved her. She changed her name for the movie to Shula Roan.”

The visuals in Sinthia call to mind the work of America’s foremost “cinemagician” Kenneth Anger, whose films are now getting widespread acclaim due to a restored, two volume DVD release. Was Steckler trying to mimic Anger with all the colored gels in Sinthia? “I never saw Anger’s work, but if you say so, I’ll accept it! I had done a lot of commercials using colored gels, and I did a lot of music videos using colored gels. So it was nothing new for me. It’s just the way it worked out.

“Sinthia was shot on the beach in Malibu and it was shot in the same soundstage that I shot The Thrill Killers (1964), on Santa Monica Boulevard, near Kenmore Avenue. You had Herb Robins playing the devil, and then I had Brett Pearson play the psychiatrist. He also played the heavy in Body Fever (1969). He had done a lot of movies. One in particular, he had a fight scene with Steve McQueen. Believe it or not, he was a real psychiatrist! And of course, you saw Brett Zeller, portraying the gypsy fortune teller. She also played the drug addict in Body Fever. As long as people hung around me, they’re always going to get another part! But they gotta hang around me, because I don’t know how I’m going to do anything. It’s hard to pre-plan if you don’t have any money.”

Sinthia’s lush and beautiful music score was composed specifically for the film. “Henry Price, André Brummer is his real name. He did all my films. The same guy who did the Creatures. I stayed with him for almost every movie up until Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher, which was the last one he did for me. He recently passed away (in 2006). He was brilliant. I have a sort of ‘film family,’ although the people I work with work for other people, hopefully. Some of them never work for any other people. They were my team as long as they could find me or I could find them. And of course when I shot Summer Fun (aka Camp Robinson, 1997), I found Herb Robins, and he starred in it with my two daughters Bailey and Morgan.”

Coleman Francis … again

One of Steckler’s many contemporaries was bad filmmaker extraordinaire Coleman Francis, whose directorial trilogy The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), Red Zone Cuba (aka Night Train to Mundo Fine, 1966) and The Skydivers (1963) would gain renewed cult appreciation with their skewering on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show. Francis had fallen on hard times at that point in his life, and yet continued to find work as an actor in countless low-budget features. His work with Steckler is a frequently told tale that has since become legend in independent filmmaking annals.

“I get e-mail and letters from all over the world, and I’ve been getting them for thirty, forty years now from people who are fans of mine. There are moments in my movies that they think are the greatest. I had someone call me yesterday from North Dakota and tell me about the scene in Body Fever (1969), with the old man in the Laundromat, which I think is one of the best scenes that I ever did. Whether you like the movie or not, and most people like the movie, it’s one of my few films that played on French television, maybe because they dubbed it and couldn’t tell any of the weak acting that way. But the faces in my movies tell my stories.

“The story is that Coleman Francis, who was also in Lemon Grove Kids, Coleman also starred in a movie with Rock Hudson The Sea Devils (1953). He had a nice career as an actor before he became a director. He was known to drink a little too much. Ron Haydock and I had just finished shooting Body Fever, which at that time we were calling The Last Original B Movie, we have that version out now. The only thing was I took all the Los Angeles scenes out and put in San Francisco. I did it for my few fans in San Francisco.

“We were at Hollywood and Vine at the Ranch Market there, we used to go there to get the ribs after we were done, and it was dark, a little damp out and we walked up to where we parked the car in the parking lot next to it and right in the corner there was somebody laying in the gutter. I said, ‘Oh my God! There’s someone laying there! And I pulled him up and put him on the bus bench there and I saw that it was Coleman Francis, who had already worked for me.

“I said, ‘Coleman, what the hell is going on here?’ He was disheveled and filthy and drunk and completely broke. He had no money, nothing. And he just felt that life was over for him. I said ‘Well, I’ll try and get you some work.’ He said, ‘As an actor, I hope? I want to act!’ He wasn’t concerned about getting some money to help me fix my house or anything like that. Specifically, if I was going to help him, it would have to be as an actor! Right to the end! ‘I am an actor! Find me work! That’s what I do!’ I said, ‘Yeah, I have a part for you tomorrow.’ Ron looked at me because we had just finished the movie, in fact that’s what we were there celebrating for with the ribs, that was our cast party, Ron Haydock and me. I gave Coleman fifty bucks and I said ‘Here Coleman, here’s $50, I’ll give you another $50 tomorrow, I want you to meet us at Sunset and Bronson, where’s there’s an old deserted Laundromat. There was a lot of light coming in there, especially from the windows. I said, ‘we’ll meet you there,’ it was about nine o’clock and I described it one more time, and Francis says ‘I will be there, ready to go to work!’ We left him, and he had some money, and I knew he could get something to eat and everything. Ron basically said ‘You’ll never see him again!’ I said, ‘Oh, sure he’ll be there!’

“So all night long I start thinking about this scene, about a derelict that is sleeping in a Laundromat. I’m thinking about it all night long, I get down there and I call Paul Bram my assistant, he meets us there, Keith Wester shows up -- who’s now nominated for seven Academy Awards for sound. We’re all there, its 9:05, 9:10 and (Coleman is a) no show, and Ron is looking at me like ‘you know, you shouldn’t have given him the money!’ And I said, ‘hey! He’s an honest guy.’

“Then all of a sudden, down on the street I saw this figure a long way down Bronson about a quarter of a mile below Sunset and I saw him coming closer and closer and closer, and here he comes. And when he gets across Sunset Boulevard and gets to the Laundromat, which is right next to the freeway. Coleman comes up and he’s all dressed up, clean as a whistle. His hair has been trimmed and cut, he’s had a shave, he has a sport coat on him and he looks like a used car salesman! He took the fifty dollars and got himself to look professional and look good for me; you know what I’m saying? He didn’t spend the money on booze or nothin’! The only thing was I was expecting a derelict! Coleman says ‘I’m here, Ray, and I’m ready to go to work! What would you like me to do?’ We shot the scene, we made it up. Some people have said certain things as to why they didn’t like it and so forth. One girl in particular, Brett Zeller said ‘You should not have asked him if he wanted the money! You should have just took the money and put it in his pocket!’ I told her that did not fit Charles Smith’s character.”

Steckler is proud to have given Coleman a favor in his time of need. “Regardless of the fact that he was an alcoholic, you look at that film and you see that day, he was trying to get his Oscar nomination. If there was an Oscar nomination for a B-movie, I think he would have won it that day. I played off him completely. By playing off of Coleman, he made me look really good. That’s one of my favorite scenes in my movies.

“Of all the scenes I’ve done in all my movies, I always think about that one and Coleman Francis who did The Beast of Yucca Flats and the way he was winding up in Hollywood. When it was all over and years go by now, I know for that one day, that one moment I gave him life again. I gave him respect. I’m proud that I did that. Should I ever get in that position, I hope that somebody would do it for me, too. But I think that’s what you’re supposed to do with your fellow men and fellow talent and fellow performers …”

Out of the mainstream

Steckler is indifferent that his films have never found widespread, mainstream acceptance or popular adulation. “I have to tell you, I’m out of the mainstream, the low-stream, everything. I’m completely isolated now from everybody in the industry. People come to me and do interviews, and film me and all that stuff all the time. Somebody will call me, up, I have no idea who they are, they want me to answer a few questions, sometimes they’ll get rude on the phone and I’ll just say ‘we’re done!’

“Not everybody loves me, by the way. Some people think my movies are terrible, they think they’re crap and junk, but even John Ford, they knocked a few of his movies. I don’t understand why people who don’t make movies bother to knock other people’s movies. I think that if you a re a filmmaker and you’ve made movies, you have a right to give your opinions because it’s your trade. Critics, if they’ve never made a movie, they should shut up because they don’t know what could possibly go through a filmmaker’s mind on the set. There’s no way. Some of the greatest moments in movie history, whatever they are, and they’re so many of them that they probably happened accidentally. It’s just because all the cards fell into place, like in Casablanca (1942). It just happens!”

Steckler relates a story about one of his favorite filmmakers, Michelangelo Antonioni. “At the Cannes Film Festival, Antonioni made L’Avventura (1960). They booed it off the screen. They were so bored with it, it was so tedious. The critics just crucified it! He went home and two or three days later, it dawned on him that the critic had crucified it, because he had never seen anything like it before. He didn’t interpret it right because it was completely different. The critic, after three or four days, he saw it again, and then he really understood the movie and looked at it in a completely different view. The first time, it upset him, because there was no music, there were just sounds and the shots seemed to be overly long and it did not have the conventional, classical type editing that movies have. The pacing was different. All the people who thought they didn’t like it went back to see it again, and again and again, and its history. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made!

“I’ve never had the money to make a movie, the money upfront, in my whole life! I have never been able to say ‘I want twenty dancing girls and fourteen sets. I’ve never had anything as far as that goes. I’ve always said, ‘gee, when I was a kid, playing baseball, we would get a pickup team of whom ever was there. You get them, I get them, whatever. You get a good game going, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You can’t say ‘I have to have $50 million dollars or I can’t make the movie.’ I gave up teaching film at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on account of that, although I had some nice students. Most of them just wanted to go to Hollywood and become another Steven Spielberg, because all they see are the final results, the big expensive movies. I’ll challenge any filmmaker in the world to go into the street here with me and a Hi-8 camera, with no money, not even lunch money and match me with what I’ll do that day with my camera. Anyone. So put the word out.

“If Spielberg wants to come out with his Hi-8 next to me, at the same street corner and start a movie, with no money, we’ll see what he can do. I think that what I do is the best as anyone can do it. Another thing that I will not be modest about is what I do is me, it’s my stuff and my originality. I’m not running around and copying anybody else’s stuff. I have been impressed many times by filmmakers. Spielberg, who I think is a wonderful director. He was born to make Schindler’s List (1993). I think John Ford was born to make the Western Trilogy with John Wayne. I think Antonioni was born to make L’Avventura. Fellini, who could make 8 ½ (1963) better than Fellini? Bergman’s The Silence (1963), who could make that? All of us were born to make something on film, they were born filmmakers. I think filmmakers are born, that’s their calling the moment they’re put on this earth. That also includes plumbers and doctors, because we sure need them!

With the easy availability of home video cameras and easy, digital editing software, countless would-be auteurs are filling the world with their own idiosyncratic visions. It’s a trend that Steckler enjoys seeing. “Those three guys made a film and did every scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) on 8 mm film years ago. Did you see that? Spielberg and George Lucas gave them their blessing to do whatever they wanted. It’s getting a lot of notoriety. They never did another film because they plagiarized the whole movie. At least they started out with a good script anyway. Now, if somebody else were to do that, we’d be in jail!”

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

Steckler has seemingly come full circle with his series of hometown documentaries he’s currently producing. “In my documentaries that I did on Reading, Pennsylvania, I told my wife Katherine to drop me off at any street corner and come back in an hour. I tried to capture stuff on the streets. When I would interview people and they would talk, I would put their interviews in the film, I would not edit them. If they were four, five, six minutes, I didn’t want to edit it. Because it’s a real truthful moment of time, form the time they start talking to the interview is over, I thought it was more important to capture those moments exactly – if those moments drag the film, who cares? They’re in my movies, I can do what I want with them.

“I found this wonderful old man who was in his nineties, and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Kegerice, I videotaped them, and it went on for eight or nine minutes, I swear. He told me about his whole life in Reading, from the time he was a kid to now. That’s like eighty, ninety years of time that he brought to the screen. Why would you one to take one precious moment out of that? Let the people, who like to hear about Reading or hear about Reading of that particular time, let them see what someone has to say. Why chop it up? I like real time. Antonioni movies were so great, because if someone were to cross the street, he would let them cross the street, he wouldn’t cut it to save one 15th of a second like in Hollywood, to move it a little faster. If it takes you that long to cross the street, let it go man! I like that.

“That was what I was saying about Bill Lloyd and Richard “Punchy” Kozlowski from Reading, Pennsylvania, getting them together for my Reading series again. After all those years, it’s like 1963. Looking them up and getting them back into my life. Both Lloyd and Punchy gave me so much energy and so much enjoyment to be with my friends who are still alive after all those years. It’s like finding a long-lost relative and being able to share that love again …”

Steckler is also excited about his sequel to Creatures, starring alternative mainstay and sometimes Screem contributor Johnny Legend. “The one film that I’m doing now, which is an extension of the Creatures, is so bizarre, I can’t even describe it! I’m making it up as I go along and it’s all a part of me, what I feel like doing that day. What happens happens and I let it ride. We were shooting Johnny Legend at the Bunkhouse here in downtown Las Vegas. All kinds of things happened. The girls started jumping all over him and falling in the floor in the dark spots where there were no lights. Fortunately, I had a night light on my video camera, shooting in Hi-8 by the way. That’s what I felt like doing this time. I flipped the night light on, and there they were in the dark. They’re hugging him and kissing him and he’s singing “Rat Pfink A Boo Boo” I said, ‘boy! You could never do this on film!’ These girls just came out of nowhere; you know what I’m saying?”

Steckler is supremely confident that his movies, no matter how low budget, individual or quirky will always have an audience. “We’re capturing these moments, and this is so much fun! Who cares? Do you have to shoot in 35 mm with a major star and actress in order to get it made? Who cares? Who would want to see it anyway? The only people that I’m making this movie for are for my fans! Fans, family and friends! That’s why I’m making the movie! I don’t care about the rest of the world! If they want to see it, if they want to watch it, if they enjoy it, fine! But I’m going to tell you something … even after they see the movie and they stare at the movie and say to themselves, ‘what was that?’ Was it good, was it bad? I’m not sure! Oh, it was terrible, oh, it was fantastic, and that’s what’s going to happen anyway. The thing is, is that I would like everybody to have a copy in their back pocket. I’ll release it and then release it with the original Creatures as a dual pack. It’s the only way to send it out.”

Steckler does offer a friendly warning. “I’m only going to release one million copies of One More Time and then it goes into moratorium for 30 days. Please order your copies early!”