themastercylinder

[themastercylinder]

SUMMARY

The film opens as Rose is found drifting alone in a small rowboat. Two fishermen find it and pull her onto their own boat, barely alive and in a horrible state. Her voiceover indicates she had been rescued from some terrifying experience and the film’s events are flashbacks of it.

Rose is part of a group of tourists on a small commercial boat. The Captain and his mate, Keith, share a fondness for Rose. Also on board are Dobbs, who is the boat’s cook; Chuck, another tourist; and a bickering married couple named Norman and Beverly. After trouble with the engine, the navigation system goes haywire when they encounter a strange orange haze. The others sense that something is wrong. Norman in particular becomes abrasive. In the darkness of night, a hulking ship suddenly appears and sideswipes their boat. The Captain sends up a flare, which momentarily lights up the eerie sight of a huge, rotting vessel wrecked nearby.

The next morning, everyone wakes to find the Captain missing. Realizing the boat is slowly taking on water, everyone evacuates in the lifeboat and makes for a nearby island. They see the huge wreck in the light of day; it appears to have been there for decades, nothing more than a skeletal framework, and now seemingly immobile, stranded on the island’s reef. The group is startled to find the body of the Captain, apparently drowned while he was trying to check the underside of the boat for damage. They explore the island and discover a large, rundown hotel. At first they think it is deserted, but they discover a reclusive old man living there.

The man seems alarmed by their story, and he goes down to the beach to personally investigate. Under the water, strange zombie-like men gather, walking from the wreck along the ocean floor to the island. As Dobbs gathers items to help prepare food, the zombies corner him in the water and one of them attacks; before it kills him, Dobbs falls in a cluster of sea urchins and is horribly mangled. Rose discovers his body while swimming. Back inside the hotel, their reluctant host tells them that he was a Nazi commander in charge of the “Death Corps”, a group of aquatic zombies. The creatures were intended to be a powerful weapon for the Nazis, but they proved too difficult to control. When Germany lost the war, he sunk their ship. Knowing the zombies have returned, he says they are doomed. The Commander goes down to the beach again and sees a few of the zombies off in the distance; they refuse to obey and drown him.

The others locate a boat that the Commander told them about and pilot it out through the streams to the open water. They lose control of the boat, and it sails away from them, empty. A zombie drowns Norman in a stream, and another chases Rose back to the hotel, where she kills it by pulling off its goggles. Chuck, Beverly, and Keith return to the hotel, and they barricade themselves in the refrigerator unit. The close quarters and stress cause the survivors to begin infighting, and Chuck accidentally fires a flare gun, blinding Beverly. Keith and Rose escape to an old furnace room, where they hide inside two metal grates, while Beverly hides in a closet. The zombies drown Chuck in a swimming pool outside.

The next morning, Keith and Rose discover Beverly dead, drowned in a large fish tank. Now on their own, they try to escape in a small sightseeing rowboat with a glass bottom. The zombies attack, and although Keith manages to defeat one by pulling off its goggles, a second one grabs him and drowns him just as the dinghy breaches the reef and drifts free. Rose sees Keith’s lifeless body pressed up against the glass bottom of the boat and screams.

The film comes full circle, and Rose’s voice over returns. She is now in a hospital bed, seemingly writing in a journal. Her dialogue begins to repeat itself over and over, and she is revealed to be writing nonsense in her journal, showing that she has gone insane.

Peter Cushing & Fred Olen Ray

  BEHIND THE SCENES

Wiederhorn didn’t have much budget to work with on Shock Waves, but still managed to find intriguing, inexpensive ways to complete his first feature film, shooting everything in 35 days in 1975 although it wasn’t theatrically released until 1977. He was limited in how he could use Cushing and Carradine, whose contracts only accounted for four shooting days (both actors earned just $5000 each). He was able to secure a permit to film on the SS Sapona — a concrete-hulled cargo steamer which ran aground during a hurricane near Bimini in 1926 — and the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida, was rented for $250 per day, which was abandoned at the time.

Wiederhorn employed two cinematographers — Reuben Trane above the water, and Irving Pare below — who shot on 16mm (which was then blown up to 35mm for theatrical prints, accounting for the film’s grainy look).

  KEN WIEDERHORN INTERVIEW

I want to ask you first, does the idea of talking about SHOCK WAVES and revisiting this title excite you still? How do you feel today about the film’s legacy and your role in horror history?

KEN WIEDERHORN: I love the film because it’s the movie that keeps on giving

Do you mean that in a financial sense or otherwise?

WIEDERHORN: In the financial sense. When you make your first film, little do you know that it’s going to follow you around for the rest of your life and keep putting money in your pocket so that’s always a very nice feeling. I’m delighted when anything happens with SHOCK WAVES

Were you born and raised in Florida?

WIEDERHORN: No I’m from New York.

Ok, so how does a New Yorker end up in Florida with Peter Cushing and John Carradine?

WIEDERHORN: I was working as an assistant film editor for a documentarian who had also made some feature films and somehow he wound up being appointed the head of the film program at Columbia and he said well if you’re interested in taking some more courses let’s talk about it. I’m pretty sure I can get you into the film program’. He in fact did that. So I have an MFA with no undergraduate degree. Anyway, there I met Reuben Trane who is from Florida who was also in the films program and we partnered on our thesis film which was called MANHATTAN MELODY and that won the first Motion Picture Academy Student Film Award. Then Reuben decided that he wanted try his hand at producing a low budget film and raised some money. The investors said basically we’re fine with this as long as you guys make a horror movie because we heard that horror movies always make their money back so that’s how that happened. He raised a couple hundred thousand dollars and I drove down to Florida and we figured out how to do it there

Why a zombie movie? Or did you even think of the Nazi ghouls as zombies when you were coming up with this idea?

WIEDERHORN: I was not necessarily a horror aficionado. I really worked in the cutting room and was coming up that way. I was still very much thinking that I was going to become a producer at CBS news so I can’t say that I came to it with a great deal of interest or expertise in the horror genre. I simply went looking for material. I found a book called The Morning of the Magicians which purports to tell about the Nazi belief in the supernatural and in reading that book somehow I thought, ok this makes sense. We knew we were going to shoot the film in Florida. Reuben knew his way around boats, we were going to be in Miami so the water element came in and I suddenly had a vision of Nazis attacking Miami Beach which could be quite humorous. See, the thing for me about horror is that it always walks the line with comedy so you have to be very careful to make sure you’re on one side of that or the other so I thought, no, we can’t go in that direction. That led me to thinking about soldiers underwater and one thing led to another and with the help of a few joints we came up with the idea of underwater Nazi zombies!

Even if you haven’t seen SHOCK WAVES, you know the art and you know those creatures which have been riffed on several times in several films but there’s a look to them. Alan Ormsby did the makeup FX and the Nazis remind me of his work on Bob Clark’s DEATHDREAM, Did you give Ormsby much guidance when it came to creating these creatures?

WIEDERHORN: I hadn’t seen DEATHDREAM and I still haven’t seen it so I had nothing to relate to in Ormsby’s background. I know he had worked on a movie called CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS. Listen, when you’re in Miami, you don’t have a lot of choices in terms of crew and people to help you imagine the film so I was delighted to meet Alan because I felt we were very like-minded. He thought the film would be very problematic because one requirement was that the makeup had to withstand exposure to water. We didn’t want to get bogged down with it washing off and having to re-apply it eight times a day so he very brilliantly came up with a solution for that and it was amazing how that makeup withstood the constant submersions those guys had to make. Now as far as the details of the makeup, I know that we already decided that we wanted to make their vulnerability be exposure to light so hence the goggles and we wanted to make sure they were blonde and that came about primarily because we got a deal with a Cuban beauty school in Miami to take the guys and strip the colour out of the hair with bleach and that was affordable and doable and that’s what defined that. But Alan certainly, I would say was ninety percent responsible for the look of the zombies.

Obviously people that love SHOCK WAVES always cite the heavy dense atmosphere that the movie trades in. Talk about that eerie ruined boat. Did you find the boat first and make the movie around it?

WIEDERHORN: The wreck is off one of the Bahamian islands so we could get there easily enough from Miami. Somebody had a chart of wrecks in the south Florida area that was more oriented towards treasure hunting and somehow this wreck was marked on the map and we investigated it and discovered it was an old World War II cement ship. The hull of the ship was actually made from cement. We saw pictures of it and we thought ok that will do and that was that.

Did the script reflect that they would run into some sort of ruin or did the ruin end up being written into the script because of the existing wreck?

WIEDERHORN: No, the script was always scripted that way.

Is the boat still there do you know?

WIEDERHORN: As far as I know.

Amazing. The other key element of the film is Richard Einhorn’s minimalist music. Was Richard your choice or was be brought to you?

WIEDERHORN: Richard was also at Columbia and he was studying with a professor whose specialty was electronic music. So I went to the department head and said I’m looking for somebody who can do electronics for a horror movie score and Richard was one of the people who they recommended and we sat down and talked. I thought he would do a terrific job and I think he did. I think that the movie owes much to its music.

It sure does and you used Richard again for “EYES OF A STRANGER as well didn’t you?

WIEDERHORN: Yep and then used him again for the last film I made called A HOUSE IN THE HILLS

He went on to quite an illustrious career as a composer…

WIEDERHORN: He’s more of a serious classical modern composer and he’s done all orchestral score for JOAN OF ARC and he’s very active in New York. Richard was always my first choice for anything I was doing.

Now we’ve got to talk about Peter Cushing. This is, I think, one of his last notable horror roles…

WIEDERHORN: Ah yes, Peter. The horror movies that I actually knew were Hammer films. Why that is, I don’t know but I knew quite a number of the Hammer films and what appealed to me about them was that they really relied on story to some degree. But even more importantly, atmosphere and quality of acting. They were well produced and they were able to work on that level. So I very much had that in mind. We knew going on that we did not want to get into a lot of bloody special FX because we were making a low budget movie and it seemed to me that the way to succeed was not to become overly ambitious. To really make sure that what we were doing was something that we could in fact do. So the element that cost the least is all the elements of building suspense. I look at the film today and parts of it seem terribly slow to me but I understand and I see how at the time it worked in its way. It certainly worked because what I hear from people telling me about their experience of seeing the movie when they were 13 years old on late night TV is that when you’re channel surfing, this film stands out because it looks different. I personally really hated the locations because they were really difficult to work in terms of physical comfort. It was hot, it was humid and we would have to cover ourselves with mosquito repellent several times a day. There were sharks swimming in the water that we were working in Biscayne Bay so I think that worked for the film. I wasn’t the only one having a difficult time with the physical element that we were working it.

But back to Cushing, his nickname while making the Hammer films was “Props” Cushing because he would always find a way to work the surrounding props into his performance. Did you see any evidence of that in his work? Was he resourceful that way?

WIEDERHORN: The only prop I think he had was a cigarette holder that he used. He gave me a preview of the accent and I thought well it’s not really a German accent but it’s an accent so it’s fine. The great thing about Cushing was that he was very giving and very professional and even though he probably saw a lot of us walking into walls during the day, he was helpful and extended himself in ways that I certainly didn’t expect. In fact one day I was trying to figure out how to set up a shot on a beach somewhere and he was always available and he was always nearby, it’s not like between takes he went off and sat in his trailer, he was very available. So he’s watching me having a problem figuring things out and he gets my attention and motions me over and he says “Dear boy may I make a suggestion?” and I said “Sure Peter, what?” he says “I think if you move the camera a little bit off to the right and you lower the frame a bit you’ll get what you’re looking for and damn, he was right! I realized this is a guy who’s had more set experience than most of the directors he’s probably worked with and I knew that he was observant to what was going on. He was watching and so whenever we were ready, he was always ready. Whereas Carradine who came from a different discipline entirely and probably had been in four times as many movies as Cushing was in, he didn’t want to know about anything except what’s my line, where do I stand and when can I get the hell out of here.

Peter’s wife passed in 1970 and apparently those who worked with him around this period said he almost had a death wish. He always talked about her in a very morbid way. Was he a melancholy guy did you notice? Was that evident at all?

WIEDERHORN: I would say no. I do know about the wife but all I can tell you is that he was very open and frank about the fact that he would communicate with her through various mediums.

Have you seen any evidence of SHOCK WAVE’s influence in any other films or pop art?

WIEDERHORN: Well, people have pointed out to me that there is a whole collection of Nazi zombie movies now and I really have no idea if SHOCK WAVES had anything to do with that or not, that’s for other people to figure out. Other than that. I know it happens that there are references made to it. Somebody sent me a mystery show where SHOCK WAVES was a central part of the plot…

What about a remake? Since everything even borderline cult has been remade or is in the process of being remade, there must be somebody knocking on your door to try and do a remake of SHOCK WAVES…

WIEDERHORN: Yeah, I get that knock on the door a couple of times a year but frankly it’s usually ‘let us take an option and give us two years and we’ll see if we can get something done and I’ve been around that track many times and I figure if somebody is really serious about remaking it or doing a sequel in some way it will either happen or not. I don’t really have any interest in doing it myself.

  This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Promotional and Advertising Material/Lobby Cards

  SOUNDTRACK/SCORE

Richard Einhorn’s haunting experimental, analog-synth score — one of the earliest electronic compositions created for film — is often singled out for its creative use.

SHOCK WAVES LP (Waxwork Records) Original Richard Einhorn Score

  CREDITS

Cast

Peter Cushing as SS Commander

Brooke Adams as Rose

John Carradine as Captain Ben Morris

Fred Buch as Chuck

Jack Davidson as Norman

Luke Halpin as Keith

J. Sidney as Beverly

Don Stout as Dobbs

Directed by   Ken Wiederhorn

Produced by Reuben Trane

Written by    

Ken Wiederhorn John Kent Harrison

  REFERENCES and SOURCES

Delirium Issue 005

Shock Waves (1977) Retrospective SUMMARY The film opens as Rose is found drifting alone in a small rowboat. Two fishermen find it and pull her onto their own boat, barely alive and in a horrible state.

[themastercylinder]

SUMMARY

Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) is a psychic who has been using his talents solely for personal gain, which mainly consists of gambling and womanizing. When he was 19 years old, Alex had been the prime subject of a scientific research project documenting his psychic ability, but in the midst of the study, he disappeared. After running afoul of a local gangster/extortionist named Snead (Redmond Gleeson), Alex evades two of Snead’s thugs by allowing himself to be taken by two men: Finch (Peter Jason) and Babcock (Chris Mulkey), who identify themselves as being from an academic institution.

At the institution, Alex is reunited with his former mentor Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow) who is now involved in government-funded psychic research. Novotny, aided by fellow scientist Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw), has developed a technique that allows psychics to voluntarily link with the minds of others by projecting themselves into the subconscious during REM sleep. Novotny equates the original idea for the dreamscape project to the practice of the Senoi natives of Malaysia, who believe the dream world is just as real as reality.

The project was intended for clinical use to diagnose and treat sleep disorders, particularly nightmares, but it has been hijacked by Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer), a powerful government agent. Novotny convinces Alex to join the program in order to investigate Blair’s intentions. Alex gains experience with the technique by helping a man who is worried about his wife’s infidelity and by treating a young boy named Buddy (Cory Yothers), who is plagued with nightmares so terrible that a previous psychic lost his sanity trying to help him. Buddy’s nightmare involves a large sinister “snake-man.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

A subplot involving Alex and Jane’s growing infatuation culminates with him sneaking into Jane’s dream to have sex with her. He does this without technological aid—something no one else has been able to achieve. With the help of novelist Charlie Prince (George Wendt), who has been covertly investigating the project for a new book, Alex learns that Blair intends to use the dream-linking technique for assassination.

Blair murders Prince and Novotny to silence them. The president of the United States (Eddie Albert) is admitted as a patient due to recurring nightmares. Blair assigns Tommy Ray Glatman (David Patrick Kelly), a psychopath who murdered his own father, to enter the president’s nightmare and assassinate him—people who die in their dreams also die in the real world. Blair considers the president’s nightmares about nuclear holocaust as a sign of political weakness, which he deems a liability in the upcoming negotiations for nuclear disarmament.

Alex projects himself into the president’s dream—a nightmare of a post nuclear war wasteland—to try and protect him. After a fight in which Tommy rips out a police officer’s heart, attempts to incite a mutant-mob against the president, and battles Alex in the form of the snake-man from Buddy’s dream. Alex assumes the appearance of Tommy’s murdered father (Eric Gold) in order to distract him, allowing the president to impale him with a spear. The president is grateful to Alex but reluctant to confront Blair, who wields considerable political power. To protect himself and Jane, Alex enters Blair’s dream and kills him before Blair can retaliate.

The film ends with Jane and Alex boarding a train to Louisville, Kentucky, intent on making their previous dream encounter a reality. They are surprised to meet the ticket collector from Jane’s dream.

  This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The Dream Master Roger Zelazny

According to Roger Zelazny, the film developed from an initial outline that he wrote in 1981, based in part upon his novella “He Who Shapes” and novel The Dream Master. He was not involved in the project after 20th Century Fox bought his outline. Because he did not write the film treatment or the script, his name does not appear in the credits; assertions that he removed his name from the credits are unfounded.

    DEVELOPMENT

DREAMSCAPE’s title encapsulates both the film and the mental landscape that its independent filmmakers occupied for almost three years. Its creators hoped that the production would not only prove to be a success, but that it would also give them the clout to go on to bigger, even more ambitious projects. Featuring elaborate special effects by Peter Kuran’s Visual Concept Engineering Company and makeup effects by Craig Reardon, the film was launched as the first outing of newly-formed Zupnik-Curtis Productions.

Producer Bruce Cohn Curtis is one of the few men left in Hollywood who still has ties to its fabled beginnings, the nephew of the legendary Harry Cohn, one of the founders of Columbia Pictures. Looking the producer, from his immaculately clipped hair down to his tailored, sharply creased suits, a chill falls over any set that Curtis walks onto. With a military air of no-nonsense, Curtis keeps a close eye on his productions and is happy only if filming is on schedule.

“I’m tyrannical on a set,” Curtis says with a smile of relaxed authority. “That’s why I use the people I have as well as I do. Many of the people on DREAMSCAPE have worked with me before and have come back because I am a perfectionist and won’t settle for less. I have a standard of excellence in my films that I’ve always maintained, no matter what the cost, so that even though you might not like the stories I’ve done, the look of the film is always rich.”

Remembering that he had to prove himself publicly in an industry filled with people just waiting for the newest Cohn to fail, for his first effort Curtis made OTLEY, a sharp-edged spy spoof/drama with Tom Courtney as an ersatz spy who finds his make-believe assignment being taken very seriously by the other side. The film died at the box office, but drew good critical notices. The industry sat up and noticed; Harry Cohn’s nephew was off and running.

Curtis partnered with various producers for awhile, including Irwin Yablans on HELL NIGHT, but chafed at being the junior partner without clout. The matter came to a head when he was making THE SEDUCTION with Yablans and grew tired of having his ideas ignored.

Curtis resolved to start his own company and make pictures his way. He found financial backing from businessman Stanley Zupnik, and was looking for scripts to start Zupnik-Curtis Productions when associate producer Chuck Russell brought in director Joe Ruben and the DREAMSCAPE script. Curtis had worked previously with both and gave the green light for Ruben and Russell to begin revising the script, written by David Loughery.

Ruben discovered Lowery’s script in 1981 at the William Morris Agency, which represents both artists. Lowery, a television writer, had come out to Hollywood in 1979 after winning a script writing contest sponsored by Columbia Pictures, while a student at the University of Iowa. Ruben had just finished directing the TV-pilot for BREAKING AWAY, and was looking for a new project.

Once Ruben started reading the DREAMSCAPE script he found he couldn’t put it down. The vision Loughery described was breathtaking, with rivers ablaze and boats filled with the undead. Ruben was excited by the property and showed it to Russell, his assistant director on JOY RIDE and GORP (also starring Dennis Quaid), films made with Bruce Cohn Curtis for producer Samuel Z. Arkoff. Russell suggested they take the script to Curtis and his new company.

It took seven months for Ruben and Russell to rewrite DREAMSCAPE; with Curtis providing detailed criticism and ideas throughout. Loughery was brought back in to help write the final draft.

“We knew some things in Loughery’s script, like the holocaust dream at the end, were so expansive that it was virtually un-filmable,” said Russell about the changes that were made. “The original ending was set in New York. We changed that so we could do the movie out here in Los Angeles. In Loughery’s script you saw all of New York on fire after the bomb had hit. You saw the Statue of Liberty, ferry boats filled with the undead, and flames across the harbor. It was really great, but I knew we couldn’t afford to do it like that.”

Putting a screenplay into production inevitably means rewrites and not always by the original writer. In the final billing, Loughery receives story credit, while sharing screenwriting credit with director Joe Ruben and associate producer Chuck Russell. When I started writing with Joe and Chuck,” he says, “the original screenplay was pretty ferme, about 108 pages. They wanted to work some more on the characters, and their relationships. That was a good thing the development of the characters gave the audience more reason to care for the people and what happened to them.”

One of the things that really worried us about the character of Alex Gardner is that he’s something of a smart ass. So, we were afraid the audience wouldn’t like him. As soon as Dennis went to work, it was obvious we weren’t going to have any problem.

“My favorite character is Tommy Ray, the psychotic psychic, played by David Patrick Kelly. He doesn’t have many scenes, but when he’s on, he does a great job. The ‘have a heart scene is going to be seen by the audience as a rip off of Temple of Doom, but the fact is we shot it months before Temple of Doom even went into production. That is Chuck’s idea; he has a grisly and macabre sense of humor.”

Russell and Ruben beefed-up the character of Buddy (Cory “Bumper” Yothers), the little boy whose nightmares are cured by the film’s dream research project. In Loughery’s script Buddy wasn’t a running character. The idea for Buddy’s character arose from concepts the writers picked up from the study of dream research.

“We found the case of a little boy who was having such terrible nightmares that he couldn’t sleep,” said Russell. “It was affecting him physically; we used that case as our model for Buddy. The first time in the film when Alex (Dennis Quaid) acts unselfishly is when he enters Buddy’s dream to try and help him. He rises to the occasion and fulfills the role of hero.”

  THE DREAM CHAMBER

On an adjacent stage the set for the Dream Chamber was built. Outside, the set looked like a plywood igloo circled with florescent lights. Inside however, a small, padded chamber led to a main control room by a door and a large window. The set was a quiet haven, even when the normal racket of production was going on outside.

“The initial sketches of the set design for the Dream Chamber were some wild approaches that we felt were interesting, but not what we wanted,” Russell said. “Some of them made us feel too much like we were on a spaceship, while others were more like a classic, BRAINSTORM-type, wire-strewn lab. We decided we didn’t want a lot of whirling lights and buzzers, but something quiet and womb-like. It was a very difficult set to design because we were trying to make something that looked authentic, but we didn’t have any precedent for it.”

From an aesthetic standpoint, the design worked wonderfully. From a practical standpoint however, problems cropped up immediately that led to several delays in shooting. The set itself had been designed by Alan Jones without consulting with director of photography Brian Tufano. Jones then abruptly left the production for personal reasons so that when the set was built, Tufano had still not been consulted during the shuffle to find a new set designer. Tufano had great difficulty in setting up his lights and camera within the small confines of the set. An outside computer graphics firm had been brought in to supply authentic looking medical displays for the many small monitors built into the set. Unfortunately, the computer wouldn’t work right and left a full crew standing around collecting pay while technicians tried to figure out what had gone wrong with their expensive battery of equipment. Later, one of the technicians would quietly tell Russell that an Apple home computer would have been sufficient to give them the displays they wanted.

  BEHIND THE SCENES / SPECIAL EFFECTS

 “Some of the rough figures from effects companies were just staggering in the amount of money, research and development time they would need.” – Chuck Russell

Chuck Russell was told to shop around for people who could create the film’s extensive special effects and draw up a budget.

“It was very exciting to shop the script around and find out what could and couldn’t be done,” said Russell. “Some of the rough figures I got from effects companies were staggering in the amount of money, research and development time they would need. We just didn’t have the preparation time or budget of something like ALTERED STATES.

“When we found Peter Kuran’s VCE and Craig Reardon, and they got excited about the project, we knew they were perfect for it. They even helped sell the project because of their reputations, Reardon’s for working on Steven Spielberg’s POLTERGEIST and Kuran from his work with George Lucas.”

Russell assigned the live action makeup effects to Reardon, and the miniature and optical work to Kuran’s VCE company. Richard Taylor’s MAGI company was also asked to contribute computer animated imagery for the film’s “Dream Tunnel” effects. For the Dream Tunnel, Russell and Ruben wanted a semi-abstract look different from the other effects work in the picture, a “hazy.” dreamlike look, with an object or two from the upcoming scene to form and float towards the viewer to act as a visual cue for what was about to happen.

The effects sequences were storyboarded by Len Morganti; the budget was finalized on the basis of those storyboards. Because director Joe Ruben had not worked with special effects before, he carefully went through each scene with the storyboard artist.

“I knew that I had to be totally committed to my boards,” said Ruben. “I spent a lot of time thinking through the sequences and how I wanted to shoot them because I knew if I didn’t, the film would go out of control because the special effects people wouldn’t know what they were responsible for and what had to be done with each shot. I was able to get just what I was looking for. Morganti would sketch out something and if I asked him to move it a little lower and more to the right, he’d be able to do it with just a few strokes of his pencil. It was almost like working with a camera.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

BUDDY”S NIGHTMARE

To try and save money while providing a sense of heightened realism, Russell and Ruben had wanted to shoot the “Buddy” dream, the little boy’s nightmare, on location.

“We found an old Victorian house and were actually shooting,” said Russell. “We realized that by the time you put in the lightning and thunder, it was going to look like Vincent Price was going to come around the corner. It was too on the nose, too traditional. We asked Jeff Stags, our art director, to do something different. He came up at the last minute with the idea of a forced perspective set, sort of Dr. Caligari style. It was a small set, but much more effective, as well as inexpensive. Buddy’s dream is really my favorite because it has much more impact, even though it’s not as spectacular as the last dream.”

Another problem that cropped up involved Reardon’s Snake man suit. Although an impressive work up close, Ruben felt that at even minor distances, it would seem as just a man in a rubber suit. Ruben and Russell still hoped that flickering low-level lighting would help. but Ruben began to realize that even with the extensive work he had put into planning the storyboard angles, the lighting was not going to be enough to sell the suit to an audience. Reardon firmly disagreed, “Contrary to negative thinking about rubber suits, you’ve got to see them as something delightful, and full of potential for doing something wonderful,” said Reardon. “You have to think of them almost as toys. Right when we were about to shoot the basement struggle scene, I went aside with Ruben and said there are two ways of looking at this; you can think of this as a rubber suit which will look bad, or as something which, with the proper angles and lighting, will convince people that they’re looking at a living, breathing, snarling Snake man. Now when Ruben first saw it, he said ‘Oh boy, Reardon, I don’t know…it’s a rubber suit. I thought that had a dangerous ring to it if he really believed it, which was hard to tell because he, Russell, and Loughery had this camaraderie among the three of them based on this constant derogatory kidding. That’s well and good and worth a few chuckles, but where it begins to become pernicious is when it begins to condition thinking to be truly negative.”

Reardon also objected to the low-level lighting strategy that Ruben and cinematographer Brian Tufano used to film the suit. “Tufano seemed to have a fine contempt for any kind of supplementary light which would be, in logical terms arbitrary, but in dramatic terms exciting and interesting … something that would catch the eye, something that would fill in a face or create a little cross light to show textures,” said Reardon. “The naturalistic photography Tufano used can be very detrimental, I think, to SF and fantasy stories. You contrast this with the work of John Hora, who shot THE HOWLING and GREMLINS, and you see that special effects profit enormously from using special tiny spots and direct lighting. But I didn’t feel it was my place to raise the issue.”

Reardon did try to get his viewpoint across to the filmmakers by preparing a lighting test on video. The test was crude but illustrated the alternative Reardon was suggesting. “They ignored it,” said Reardon of the test. “Yet, when they got on the set, they were completely vapor locked on the suit. They didn’t know what to do with it, and they didn’t have any ideas. All the storyboards that had been prepared in advance were completely ignored. Not once did I see anybody bring up a storyboard and crack it open and say that for this frame here we need to set up this angle. All the audacious plans evaporated. Ruben was at a loss to shoot special effects or rubber suits.”

Aupperle s first job was to coordinate the sculpture of the stop-motion Snake man, which was being done by Steve Czerkas, with the suit being built by Craig Reardon.

“They told me that they wanted to feature Craig’s suit prominently, so I was going to try and make the miniature as close as possible to Craig’s suit,” said Aupperle. “We started with a man’s armature and sculpted Craig’s design over it. I knew we were going to have to make some changes, like making the tail longer so it could whip around, but I wanted to avoid one of those instances where the suit never matches the miniature. I’d run back and forth to Craig and measure his design with calipers just to make sure we were dead on.

“Since Craig’s suit was being done in pieces our model was the first time the producers saw the way the design was going to come together. They wanted more changes than I ever expected. They actually had Steve Czerkas re-sculpt the model. It got away from the manlike design and no longer really matched the suit. I was a little concerned that the two would intercut, but that’s what they insisted upon.”

Causing Aupperle the most concern was the production’s seeming lack of respect for the story boards. *They wanted to be able to use Craig’s suit any way they wanted,” said Aupperle. “They didn’t want to be tied down by storyboards. At one time they asked me to revise the storyboards. They said they’d just have to wing it on the set. That attitude left me little to do until they were done with the live action. I found the situation very distressing.”

  Perhaps the greatest disappointment for Reardon was the scant use made of a full snake-man costume.  The suit appears in the film for just a few frames, as the man-snake breaks through a door; most of the action originally planned for Cedar was replaced by Jim Aupperle’s animation using models built, following Reardon’s design, by Steve Czerkas.

THE SNAKE MAN

Most changes made in the script did not alter Loughery’s story significantly. In Loughery’s original draft, the creature that menaces Buddy in the boy’s dream and later reappears as the creature stalking the President and Alex was to be a rat-man. “We changed that because so much had been done with werewolves,” said Russell. “This was right after THE HOWLING and AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and we felt the difference between a man with a rat’s face and a man with a wolf’s face would be minimal.

“We wanted to take a different approach,” Russell continued. “Not the direction of John Carpenter’s Thing but something identifiable, so that when Tommy Ray changed into something to scare Alex, you would be able to see that it was Tommy Ray’s version of the same creature. Joe Ruben wanted to go with something that scared him, and since he’s scared of snakes, we went in that direction. I did some sketches of a snake creature and came up with something that really excited us because it was a departure from anything either of us had seen before. I think part of it came to me from my memories of seeing THE SEVEN FACES OF DR. LAO. When we showed it later to our effects people, Peter Kuran and Craig Reardon, they were really sparked by it too.

A stop-motion animator was the last member of the effects team to be hired, done through VCE. Both Russell and Ruben had agreed early on that the best and cheapest way to get what they wanted from the Snake man sequences would be with a mixture of live-action and stop-motion effects, but they were unsure just how they would mix the combination.

“I knew we would need a good animator,” said Russell. “I knew a live-action Snake man with its long neck and swishing tail would never work in a master shot. We didn’t have umpteen million dollars for physical effects.” Russell and Ruben planned to use low-key, flickering lighting for the sequences in order to seamlessly blend the two effects techniques.

Said Russell, “ Joe and I sat down with the special effects people on the Buddy sequence storyboards, which is the first appearance of the Snake man, and asked which way it made more sense to do it? It made sense to do the wide shots in stop motion and the close-ups in live action, and in the cases where we weren’t sure, we would have both of them overlap and whichever worked better, then that’s what we would go with.”

Although this arrangement was made in good faith and with the best intentions, the decision to let the two techniques overlap and not make a clear distinction between which shots would be assigned to each ultimately proved to be a decision that led to tensions and feelings of betrayal between makeup expert Craig Reardon and the production company.

  Opticals were also used to create the clouds and background sky for the first dream that Quaid enters, the vertigo dream where he goes into the mind of a steelworker and falls. “There’s one shot where Dennis Quaid is supposed to be falling. said Kuran. “I spent some time trying to figure out how a person should fall so it will look right on film. We had a good plate of a falling background, and they rigged an elaborate harness at Raleigh to hold Dennis. When we were on the set. Ruben asked me how a person should fall, and I went through the motions of what Dennis should do, but Joe didn’t do that. He told Dennis to do something else that looks really corny. He ruined the shot. There was no way that I could think of to fix it and I think it looks really cheesy right now.

THE PRESIDENTS NIGHTMARES

At a budget of over $300,000 for some 90-odd cuts, DREAMSCAPE was one of the largest jobs VCE had taken on, as well as one of the most difficult. As the producers were continually asking VCE to create more or make changes with what they had done, Kuran wasn’t under pressure to have all the special effects done by the original deadline. Kuran pretty much improvises his effects as he goes along. The more they wanted him to do, the less certain he was about how much longer it would actually take to finish the effects. One thing was certain. There was no way they’d be able to get the movie out in the fall as Russell had originally hoped.

In a way though, the delays had been a good thing; something everyone was almost afraid to acknowledge because of all the tribulations the film had gone through. Kuran was creating the effects layer by layer, and even with only early tests to show, the effects still looked very good. It helped convince Curtis that even though the schedule and budget had gone to hell, it was still within limits he could work with—he was getting a better product for his money than he ever dreamed possible. The more Kuran tinkered with the visuals, the better they got. The live action footage of the actors had come out better than expected, too. Quaid and Von Sydow were marvelous in their roles, and if they could just get the effects to come out anywhere near what had been described in the script, they all began to feel they might have a movie yet, even if they did have to grimace a bit when they realized that the work on the film was still far from over.

Working with Zupnik-Curtis productions was not without its problems for Kuran in the beginning. Because Curtis had never worked with special effects before, he wasn’t sure what to expect.

“We started getting pressure from them early on,” said Kuran. “They had a rough cut of some of the sequences for us to work from, and they wanted to see something. But they kept changing the cutting without realizing that it meant we’d have to go back and redo the whole scene. There was a trolley shot that they wanted to make longer by one foot of film. At that point, all the backgrounds had been shot to length. All the miniatures had been broken down. I managed to talk them out of that one.”

Another problem is the very nature of post-production work. “When somebody does a movie, they make a little mistake here and a little mistake there, and if it doesn’t work, they just kind of throw the shit over their shoulders and it lands on them in post-production,” said Kuran. “Unfortunately, this is where we do most of our work. People are at their worst to deal with in post-production. They’re under deadlines, and if the movie doesn’t work they’re in even worse shit. The people who shot the movie are gone and they usually refuse to accept the fact that the movie is crummy because of them. Lots of people can go onto a production and create a lot of shit and come off smelling like a rose because the movie’s not finished when they leave it.”

Although VCE was contributing some 90 cuts to the film, the majority of the effects were going to be clustered around the holocaust dream near the end, and at the start, including the terrific A-Bomb teaser which opens the film. “I thought the bombs in THE DAY AFTER just didn’t look right,” said Kuran. “They looked so dark and cold. You look at a nuclear test and you can see it’s a very bright fireball, so we wanted a very hot look to our bomb.”

The Trolly/Subway Cart

 Reardon’s and Kuran’s most elaborate work is seen in the climactic sequence, a surreal view of the day after Nuclear Armageddon. Dennis Quaid enters a dream which represents the President’s worst fears of nuclear war, the setting is an old trolley car that travels among the bombed-out ruins of Washington, D.C., past several surrealistic tableaux-travelling mattes and miniatures courtesy of Peter Kuran’s V.C.E. David Kelley, Plummer’s henchman, enters the dream as well, for a climactic confrontation with Quaid.

 For the holocaust dream at the end, Kuran’s basic effects strategy was to have a live-action foreground element, an intermediate miniature behind that, and then have a matte or tinted water tank shot as the background. The scenes were difficult because Kuran needed something that would convey a sense of extremely large scale while still having realistic detail, a tall order on the show’s tight budget.

Russell had originally wanted to do the holocaust effects scenes first and rear-project them as they were shooting the live action. Kuran pointed out that it would take thousands and thousands of feet of film to try and generate the footage they would need, and that they would have a better chance of making sure the background footage matched with the live-action trolley car if they shot the trolley first and then had it to play the backgrounds against.

“Jim Belohovek and Sue Turner built the miniatures for the scenes, and we photographed them in different layers,” said Kuran. “To get good depth of field, we shot them at one frame per second. Then we started adding the fires. Because those had to be slowed down, we shot them at 72 frames a second. We don’t have any motion control equipment. I set up a dolly for the camera, filled the room with smoke, then lit the fires. It takes a couple of seconds to get the camera up to speed. Then we pushed the dolly down the tracks until eventually timed the push right and got it to look the same speed that we thought the trolley would be moving at. The background is a water tank shot that we used to make it look moody by adding some glows and fires. Counting everything I’d say there’s about 20 elements in that shot.”

While Kuran labored in the bowels of VCE, director Ruben and Academy Award winning editor Richard Halsey were slowly cutting the film together using unfinished optical tests that were the right length and Jim Aupperle’s Snake man animation. Kuran had been able to find them an east coast underground filmmaker named Dennis Pies (pronounced “pees”) to do the Dream Tunnel effects and the stuff looked wonderful. It was exactly what they wanted. But now it was time to decide how they were going to mix the live action Snake man and the animation, and to a great degree, they were coming down against the live action footage.

With the will to manipulate the dream to his own ends, Kelly at one point extends his fingernails into stilletos, which he uses to rip the heart from the car’s conductor, with the logic of dreams, the trolley then becomes a subway car, populated with a dozen grisly war victims, looking more dead than alive, Shortly after, Kelley transforms into a snake monster.

Reardon details the other effects he did for Dreamscape. “Tommy Ray Kelly transforms with knives springing from his fingers. He uses these to tear out someone’s heart which sits beating in his fingers,” the effects Technician says. “We made a prosthetic hand and an artificial heart for this scene. 

  This slideshow requires JavaScript.

“We made 12 mutants up for them, Reardon says of the subway denizens, “all extremely exaggerated in their ugliness, so that, in the heavy shadows and flickering light that was planned for the shot, they would still prove effective. The design is heavy-handed, but suitably macabre for the scene.

“I hogged all the major sculpture on the picture for myself, but there were a number of other people working with me on this that also deserve mention. My greatest praise must go to Bruce Kasson, who took the weight off my shoulders where mechanical work is concerned. He worked out the mechanical effect used for the death of one of the characters at the end, as well as the stilleto fingernails. David Miller was our acrylic man, doing all the hard plastic pieces, and certainly one of my right hand men in doing the sculpture, along with David Cellitti.

Snake Man Transformation Effect

Following the completion of principal photography, there was a brief hiatus, during which Reardon re-stirred his somewhat-dampened enthusiasm, before tackling the transformation sequence.

Replacement animation is a variety of stop motion that uses separate, slightly differing sculptures, rather than the movable models most frequently associated with the form. Pioneered by George Pal, replacement animation is nowadays seen mostly in David Allen’s television commercials featuring such animated characters as Mrs. Butterworth and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Reardon’s suggestion to try this technique for an unusual transformation. Because of the frame-by-frame nature of the animation process, the sequence would be a short one-less than two seconds in sculpting work than Reardon (or, most likely, anyone else) had ever expended on a transformation effect of such short duration; 32 heads, each altered slightly from the previous head in sequence, each making a barely more than subliminal appearance in the film. It was this rapidity, and the violence of the change, that Reardon felt would make it entirely unique.

“The major problem was one of time,” Reardon says. “How was I to produce 32 different heads for this sequence within a reasonable schedule? The first thing you want to consider in a situation like this is, can you do it full-size? It took me about 15 seconds of heavy thought to realize that would be a killer, because of the molds that would be involved, and the sheer awkwardness of doing such an extensive sequence in full scale. From the beginning, they wanted David Kelley’s features discernible in the snake head’s face, so l also briefly considered taking a cast of Kelley’s face and using reduction techniques, like special shrinking molds, to bring it down to scale-but there is enough distortion in the reduction process that it wouldn’t likely be worth the effort. So I finally decided on doing a miniature portrait sculpture based on his features.

“One way to have gone would have been to produce molds of each and every stage cast one head, alter it a little further, make a mold from that and cast another stage. I ruled that out; it takes about a day to make one mold, so it would have taken a full month to prepare for the sequence.

“Instead, I took a master mold of the first stage turned out a dozen or so duplicates of that, and altered each of them to cover the first third of the total transformation. I then made another mold from the last of these, and changed those progressively. That way, I had to make no more than three molds. As the work progressed, I did some rough tests on video, which helped to show up a number of small glitches. Some of these proved very difficult to correct-seen side by side, two heads might appear to match perfectly, but tiny variances would show immediately on video.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

A chief problem with all stop motion effects is that of temporal aliasing,” a term used to describe the unnatural look of objects seen to be in motion, but not blurred as they would be if actually filmed in real-time. All along, Chuck kept saying, ‘I hope this won’t look like animation,” says Reardon, “and of course all I could say was, I hope so, too.’

“Jim Aupperle, who did the stop motion animation on the snake monster, and my friend Randy Cook, made some suggestions to counter that problem. Both suggested that if each stage would be slightly dissolved into the next stage, that would soften the edges, and disguise whatever anomalies there were from one head to the next. So Peter took the negative and a dupe negative, printing them to a single positive with overlapping frames, so that no single frame gives a really razor sharp image of one sculpture.

The Caves

Another kind of problem arose in shooting the climax of the President’s holocaust dream, set in a cave-like underground grotto decorated with fires, twisted girders and a glowing pool of green water. Originally it was planned to shoot the scene on a section of the ruins” set at Raleigh Studios. But Russell found out that he could get a few days shooting time at Bronson Canyon. The site, long a favorite locale for low-budget productions, is actually a short “Y” shaped tunnel through a jutting canyon wall in the nearby Hollywood hills. Open at all three ends and with a high ceiling, Ruben and Russell felt they could put up a more effective set inside the cave at relatively little cost to the production.

The art department scrambled on something like 48 hours notice to come up with a revised set for the cave. They did well, but lighting the set so that the lights themselves wouldn’t show was a difficult task made harder by the fact that creating the pool of water just past the junction of the “Y” in the cave had turned the rest of its sandy floor into gritty muck that forced the crew to support the lights and camera on wooden planks and sandbags the best they could. Working in the enclosed confines quickly turned miserable too. Brian Tufano, who had been hired because of his work on QUADROPHENIA and THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE, is yet another British cinematographer who likes to use smoke to diffuse his lighting to give the set greater visual depth. Every time Ruben went for a take, Tufano’s assistants would pump the small, sealed cave full of hot, oily smoke and wait to see if the density was right. While the crew and stars quietly gasped behind their respirators, either more smoke would be pumped in if it wasn’t enough.

According to Craig Reardon, the first scenes that were supposed to be shot in the caves were thought to be relatively straightforward. Quaid, followed by Albert, is moving through the cave when they are attacked by a mutant dog. For the dog’s costume, Reardon’s assistant, Michiko Tagawa, had made some wonderfully revolting costumes.

“They were beautiful.” Reardon said. “They had entrails bulging out of the body and exposed rib cages and boils and french fried skin. Now we were told that a Doberman would wear the costume, and in fact, the trainer had auditioned the dogs in a costume they worked in on the BUCK ROGERS television show. So Michiko went to a great deal of trouble to measure the Dobermans and I contributed sculptures for the heads while she built the body parts up from reject castings for the subway zombies.” Once we got them suited up at the Bronson location however, the Dobermans refused to perform.

“The dogs trouped around in the mud and the zippers and their fur got packed with it,” said Reardon. “It was a disaster. They took one of the suits and tried to put it on a German Shepherd, a dog which is considerably different in body build.”

In his big scene the dog was supposed to run a short distance and jump at Quaid. In take after take however, the dog merely trotted up to Quaid and stopped at his feet to try and shake the costume off. Eyes turned on the dog’s embarrassed handlers who quickly explained that the dog usually didn’t act like that; it was probably because he felt uncomfortable with the costume.

Reardon snipped parts of the costume’s legs away, hoping to make it more comfortable, but this produced no better reaction. Next, the dog’s owners took to furiously waving a little furry target at the dog. then quickly sticking it just inside Quaid’s shirt while everyone enthusiastically urged the dog to attack. This made the dog think everyone just wanted to play. It would run up to Quaid, half-hop once, then bark excitedly while waiting for his trainers to get the toy again.

Quipped Reardon, Bruce Cohn Curtis said the mutant dog looked like someone’s dirty laundry running across the floor.” Finally the dog made one decent leap past Quaid and Ruben called it a take. The shot is still in the film, although the rest of the mutant dogs were replaced with German Shepherd with their fur shaved in patches and dabbled with red goo.

“The script also called for these two raggedy dogs to chase after Quaid and Albert in the dream. It seemed that the easiest way to achieve a really striking appearance for the dogs would be to suit them in a costume covered with foam latex. I consulted with the trainers on the feasibility of it, and they said

‘Yeah, sure.’ So l sculpted two mutated dog heads, and Michiko Tagawa, a very good craftsperson who’s done work with Winston and Burman, did a beautiful job on the body suits-really hideous and nasty. She took some reject castings from the subway mutants, and reworked them into twisted body shapes, warped, burned and decked with growths. But the dogs wouldn’t wear them, and the trainers sort of shrugged, and said ‘What do you expect?’

“Those trainers were let go, and replaced by Karl Miller, who allowed them to shave his dogs in erratic patches, and we gobbed all kinds of blood, goo and crap on them. Good enough, but it’s unfortunate that Michiko’s suits will never be seen.”

VCE generated the bits and pieces that would help add life and highlights to the live action effects. A red glow was added to the mutant dog’s eyes, as well as crawling purple electrical effects when the dogs vanish. Opticals materialized David Patrick Kelly’s nunchaku weapons smoothly into his hands as well as allowed Dennis Quaid to heal his wounds and transform himself into Kelly’s father.

  Snake Man Showdown

The next scene planned for the cave involved Quaid and Albert, discovering it is a dead end and that the Snakeman is right behind them. It comes out of a side tunnel, snarls, and attacks Quaid. Ruben decided he wanted to use the full-sized Snakeman suit for the shot, and Reardon was given short notice to get it ready. At the time, Reardon was working full tilt to prepare the suit needed for the basement struggle in the boy’s nightmare. A different head would be needed for the cave sequence.

“Russell got a hold of Bronson Canyon and said we’ve got to do the Kelly head to look like David Patrick Kelly, playing the President’s assassin) right away. You can’t change things around like that. I said I’d try when I should have told him no.”

Ruben shot Reardon’s live Snakeman suit in the cave, although eventually discarded most of it and replaced the scene with a stop-motion cut. Also discarded was a small but important effect Reardon had worked very hard on getting right, a brief shot where Dennis Quaid “heals” a wound in his shoulder.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

“We created a sort of bite effect, then put a plastic membrane over it and melted it with a plastic solvent so that when they ran the film backwards, the wound would heal,” explained Reardon. “It didn’t work as well as it did on the bench, which is frequently the case, but you did get a feeling of the actual fleshy material knitting itself. They opted to have Peter Kuran redo it with animation.”

More successful was a Reardon designed effect where Kelly, now distracted by an ingenious ploy of Quaid’s, reverts to a half-human, half-snake form. While diverted, Albert sneaks up behind him and drives a length of pipe through Kelly’s chest. For this shot, Reardon made a false chest with a mechanical rubber pole section inside that was connected to a spring and operated by cable. Albert would sneak up holding the pipe, then drop it out of camera sight as he lunged for Kelly, and the rubber pipe would burst through a section of painted tissue paper. Although the complex mechanical effect took some time to rig, it was accomplished in only three takes and is gruesomely realistic. It made for a happy interlude before the crew was to run into yet more problems once they left Bronson Canyon and returned to Raleigh Studios.

                                      Dave Millers Unused Snake Man

“I also worked on a snake man head, the one that was originally going to be in the elevator sequence, emerging from the head of Dennis Quaid. But then, they had some kind of quibble over Craig’s head of Quaid–they said it didn’t look like him, or some such garbage-and they hired Greg Cannom to do that sequence over. Greg did another head of Quaid, which they wound up not even showing, though it looked perfect, and another snakeman, which-sorry, Greg I didn’t care for too much. It didn’t seem to have much definition; it was hard to tell what it was. Plus, it was pretty badly edited.” – David Miller

  BOB BLAIR’S DREAM DEMISE

The “Buddy” dream completed the bulk of the main shooting. DREAMSCAPE moved from the largest soundstage at Raleigh into one small stage for what was hoped would be the final shot of the would grasp what was happening. Because Quaid’s strike against Plummer was to be a surprise, Ruben and Russell felt it was absolutely necessary to make sure that the lighting look realistic right up to the moment of the attack. This meant shooting the effect not with lighting that would highlight the makeup, but with ordinary florescent lighting. Reardon hated the lighting, but went along with Ruben’s insistence that changing the lighting would tip-off people that something was about to happen.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

About a month earlier, in late June, Reardon had supplied a transformation head, known as a “change-0” head in the business, for a scene late in the film in which Dennis Quaid confronts political schemer Christopher Plummer in the one place where Plummer is vulnerable, inside Plummer’s own dream. Quaid borrows a trick from dream assassin David Patrick Kelly and changes into his own version of the Snakeman before killing Plummer. The effect was planned to first show Quaid’s head beginning to change, cut back to Plummer as the Snakeman’s hands shoot out for his throat (a very brief scene which was shot earlier) then a quick cut back to Dennis Quaid’s Snakeman head coming for the camera.

“We prepared a head, which I felt was better than a lot of THE HOWLING heads,” said Reardon. “We didn’t content ourselves with just having the face bulge out. We had the eyes blink, and when they opened they were snake eyes. At the same time the neck elongated and the cheeks distended, and the eyes began to pop out of their sockets. The mouth opens unnaturally wide and the teeth elongate. But nobody liked it. Ruben said to me, ‘Geez Reardon, I expected something like AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.’ That’s great. You give me six months and six hundred thousand dollars and maybe you could get that. Besides, that effect was five different heads. I told them all along that I was only going to come up with one head and do as much with it as I could.”

Neither Russell nor Ruben had been happy with the head when Reardon had brought it in. Under the flat lighting of the elevator mockup, the hair looked too bushy and still, the face too lifeless, and the neck far thicker than Quaid’s. The head didn’t work well either. with eyes that frequently jammed as they started to roll up. It took several takes to get the mechanism to work right. But beyond that, when Ruben and Russell saw footage of the effect, they realized that what they thought would be a good visual just wasn’t that exciting.

“Forget that it wasn’t convincing on film,” Ruben said. “When I saw it, I just realized that we needed a more shocking effect.”

“It wasn’t exciting enough,” added Russell. “We didn’t realize that until we saw it. It was a subtle effect that just wasn’t explosive enough. Craig’s head didn’t show anything either that would connect it with the Snakeman, and we decided we needed that, so we racked our brains and decided on something simple, like a guy’s head ripping apart with the Snakeman’s head coming out of the pieces.”

Russell contacted Reardon, but by this time, Reardon was both fed up with the production and busy trying to finish the replacement animation for David Patrick Kelly’s Snakeman transformation so he could be done with the film. Since Reardon was busy, Russell had to find someone who could do the effect and do it quickly. He decided on Greg Cannom, a former assistant to Rick Baker and Rob Bottin.  Cannom’s first solo assignment was THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, and more recently he assisted Baker with the apes for GREYSTOKE.

Cannom had talked with Russell about a year before DREAMSCAPE about another film project that never went through. Cannom was interested in the assignment, but checked with Craig Reardon first, before committing himself. Reardon gave his blessing. Cannom went into his workshop and tried an effect which would combine the two concepts that Russell discussed, creating a skull that would not only split apart, but split apart and turn into a monster at the same time. “I could see the use of the Snakeman with the kid’s nightmare, but going into an adult’s nightmare, I thought it should be a lot more horrendous and scary,” said Cannom.

Cannom’s first prototype makeup was deemed unacceptable by producer Bruce Cohn Curtis. It was a bitter decision because of the amount of effort Cannom had put into it. Cannom took a fiberglass skull which he cut and hinged so it could be pulled apart. Inside the skull, Cannom used a soft foam and sculpted a hideous face so that when the skull was pulled apart, the jaw would drop down and the foam face would come out to form the monster.

“I loved Cannom’s first approach,” said associate producer Chuck Russell. “I think it was terrific. The dangerous thing about the makeup was that in a very quick cut, with a man splitting his head open and something gooey, dark, and spongy coming out, it might look like brains. It was hard to argue for it because of that.”

Curtis told Cannom that they wanted something closer to Reardon’s Snakeman concept. Cannom tried to figure out how to fit Reardon’s Snakeman design into a reworked version of the splitting skull but finally gave up and settled for a two-piece approach. Cannom first built a small, embryonic Snakeman head which would be moved like a hand puppet inside the skull after it split apart. Cannom wanted to stop the camera and replace the small head with a fullsized but slimmer Snakeman head that would rise out of the neck and lunge for the camera dripping goo and skin. As with Reardon before him, Cannom was less than happy with the treatment he felt his makeup got from Ruben and Curtis. Assisted by Jill Rocklow, Kevin Yagher and Brian Wade, Cannom did the effect, but felt little enthusiasm for the final product.

“Bruce Cohn Curtis and the other producer, Jerry Tokofsky, were so insulting and rude to me it was incredible,” said Cannom. “It was like they already had something against me and wanted to find fault. I never want to see Bruce Cohn Curtis again.

“I don’t really think my effect works either,” added Cannom. “It’s not done the way we wanted to set it up. We were very careful about it. First, the skull would split apart, then we would cut away, put the snake creature back into the neck and put skin all around it, and then have it come at the camera. I spent hours getting the chicken skins for the makeup and preparing them, then setting-up the effect. Ruben looked at it and said, ‘That’s not what I want. No neck and no skin. I just want the head coming at the camera.’ I told him that didn’t make any sense! But that’s what he wanted, so we did it his way.”

POST PRODUCTION

Because Ruben and Halsey had been able to do much of the editing work while the final opticals were being generated, the final scoring and assembly of the footage was completed quickly. Curtis had a finished film only a month later and premiered it to his friends in mid-January at a small mixing theater in Hollywood. Although there were some clunky spots that hadn’t been fixed because of time and budgetary problems, the final cut was deftly edited around most of them and they were visible only if you knew what to look for. The audience gave the film a big hand and Curtis was very happy, as well as Kuran. Russell, Ruben and Loughery, who now looked forward to having a potential hit associated with their names. Although Craig Reardon liked the film, he was still unhappy with director Ruben.

Ruben defended his decision to replace Reardon’s work. “Craig was under tremendous pressure to deliver an awful lot of complicated physical effects,” said Ruben. “I wouldn’t be able to see a finished physical effect practically until the day we were ready to shoot it. That was a rough way for both of us to work. I was disappointed some times, and I’m sure he was disappointed in the way I was shooting things, although at no time can I remember him making specific suggestions. I think that the main thing I would change if I were to do it again, and I wouldn’t mind working with Craig again.

  Dreamscape (1984) Music by Maurice Jarre 01.DREAMSCAPE 2:58 02.THE JOURNEY 4:22 03.FIRST EXPERIMENT 1:55 04.SUSPENSE 2:09 05.JEALOUSY MERRY-GO ROUND 2:56 06.THE SNAKEMAN 1:08 07.ENTERING THE NIGHTMARE 4:17 08.LOVE DREAMS 4:10

REFERENCES and SOURCES

Twilight Zone v04 n01_ Fangoria 44 Fangoria 27 Fangoria 34 Fangoria 39 Cinefantastique v15 n02

  Dreamscape (1984) Retrospective SUMMARY Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) is a psychic who has been using his talents solely for personal gain, which mainly consists of gambling and womanizing.

[themastercylinder]

  SUMMARY

In the film’s prologue, two geological researchers for the American multinational corporation NTI encounter an ancient alien laboratory on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. In the lab is an egg-like container which is keeping an alien creature alive. The creature emerges and kills the researchers. Two months later, the geologists’ spaceship crashes into the space station Concorde in orbit around Earth’s moon, its pilot having died in his seat.

CREATURE, 1985

NTI dispatches a new ship, the Shenandoah, to Titan. Its crew, consisting of Captain Mike Davison (Stan Ivar), Susan Delambre (Marie Laurin), Jon Fennel (Robert Jaffe), Dr. Wendy H. Oliver (Annette McCarthy), David Perkins (Lyman Ward) and Beth Sladen (Wendy Schaal), is accompanied by the taciturn security officer Melanie Bryce (Diane Salinger). While in orbit, the crew locate a signal coming from the moon—the distress call of a ship from the rival German multinational Richter Dynamics. Their own landing turns disastrous when the ground collapses beneath their landing site, dropping the ship into a cavern and wrecking it. When radio communication fails, a search party is sent out to contact the Germans.

In the German ship, they find one of the containers from the prologue breached, as well as the dead bodies of the crew. The creature appears and kills Delambre when she lags behind the escaping group. Fennel enters a state of shock at the sight and Bryce sedates him. When they return to their own ship, the Americans find that one of the Germans, Hans Rudy Hofner (Klaus Kinski), has snuck aboard. He tells them how his crew was slain by the creature, which was buried with other organisms as part of a galactic menagerie. He proposes returning to his ship to get explosives, but the crew are unwilling to risk it.

It becomes apparent that the creature’s undead victims are controlled by the creature through parasites. Unsupervised in the medbay, Fennel sees the undead Delambre through a porthole and follows her outside. She strips naked, and he stands transfixed while she removes his helmet. He asphyxiates, and then she attaches an alien parasite to his head. Now under alien control, Fennel sends a transmission to his crew mates, inviting them over to the German ship. Hofner and Bryce are sent to get some air tanks for the Shenandoah and stand guard over it, while the rest of the crew go over to the Richter ship.

Hofner and Bryce stop over at the menagerie on their way, and are attacked by Delambre, who has had a parasite attached earlier. The rest of the crew go over to the Richter ship, and find Fennel with a bandage on his head to conceal his parasite. Davison insists that medical officer Oliver examine his head, so Fennel has her accompany him to the engineering quarters to feed her to the creature. Davison and Perkins notice Fennel doesn’t sweat and go check on them. They are too late to rescue Oliver, who is decapitated by the creature, but Perkins blows up Fennel’s head with his pistol.

Soon afterwards, Sladen runs into an infected Hofner. She escapes the ship, and in her haste, only puts on her helmet after exiting. Perkins spots her outside and opens the airlock. Now unconscious, Sladen is carried in by Hofner to lure the others. They fight, and Davison manages to defeat Hofner by ripping off his parasite. The three survivors formulate a plan to electrocute the creature with the ship’s fusion modules, which can only be accessed by going through the engineering quarters.

Alarms suddenly sound as a creature makes its way through the ship, committing sabotage. Sladen and Davison go through engineering to construct an electrocution trap, while Perkins goes to the computer room to monitor the creature. Sladen finishes rigging the trap just in time for the creature’s arrival, and they apparently electrocute it to death. However, when Davison leaves, it captures Sladen.

CREATURE, Robert Jaffe, Klaus Kinski, 1985

Davison and Perkins follow her screaming and find her locked inside engineering. Studying the ship’s blueprints, they find another entrance to engineering and sends Perkins to lure away the creature while Davison retrieves Sladen. On the way, Perkins locates one of the bombs Hofner had mentioned, just before the creature jumps him. Dying, Perkins manages to attach the bomb to the creature and set off the countdown so Davison can jettison it through the airlock.

It climbs back aboard, however, so Davison tackles it, throwing himself out the airlock in the process. When the bomb fails to explode, Bryce appears and shoots it, which sets it off and kills the creature. She recovers Davison and dresses his wounds, then they reunite with Sladen and finally launch the ship.

  Director William Malone

BEHIND THE SCENES/ PRODUCTION

Even though in space, nobody can hear you scream Bill Malone still wants you to try. The 37 year old director of SCARED TO DEATH is getting ready to try and scare audiences again with his second feature, THE TITAN FIND. The $4.2 million production is set to open this spring, and Malone is cautiously optimistic about its chances.

The film is set in the near future, when the commercialization of space is well under way. On the surface of Titan, a research ship has discovered the remains of an ancient alien laboratory and its collection of specimens. One specimen, however, turns out to be much livelier than originally thought, and kills all but one of the crew. The survivor lives long enough to make it back to Earth, setting off a race between two competing multinational firms for whatever is there, both unaware of just how deadly the alien is.

Despite its small budget, the film boasts good production values, with set design by Robert Skotak and effects by the L.A. Effects Group, and stars international weirdo Klaus Kinski as a German space commander.

Malone, a baby-faced man who resembles DREAMSCAPE’s villain David Patrick Kelley, explained the roundabout way THE TITAN FIND got off the ground. “After I did SCARED TO DEATH, I was trying to get another project going.” said Malone. “One of the people my producer Bill Dunn and I went to see said they’d really like to make a picture like SCARED TO DEATH. They signed us up to do one of our projects, MURDER IN THE 21ST CENTURY, a detective story. After we did the screenplay, they didn’t think it had enough exploitation value. ‘What else do you have,’ they asked, and can you have it to us by tomorrow morning?’ This was in January, 1984.

“On that short a notice, all I could do was go through my files and see what I had kicking around. I found a two page story synopsis of THE TITAN FIND which I had written six or seven years earlier, and I took that in to them. It was basically just the beginning of the picture as it is now. I read it to them with some background tapes of classical music and they loved it. I said to myself, ‘Great…, now how do I make a film out of this?”

Not only was how a problem, but where as well. With a tight budget and little lead time given the company, it would have been nearly impossible to get studio space to shoot the film. The production’s answer was to create its own studio, setting up shop in an abandoned industrial plant in Burbank. The small warehouse became a tight maze of different bits of spaceship interiors and planet exteriors, with Malone’s crew shooting on one set, while another was torn down behind them and another built just ahead of them. Filming began June 25th.

Construction of the bridge of the NTI spaceship ‘Shenandoah

“We’ve been on it now for 8′ weeks, and I’m tired,” said Malone. “This has been a particularly tough picture because everything’s got smoke and dust and lava rock, which not only creates a lot of noise when you step on it, but makes this gritty dust and gets into everything. We’re forever wearing filter masks. Initially it sounded like a good idea doing everything in one location where you wouldn’t have to be moving people around, but after a while, all you want to do is go outside and see some sun.”

Malone is taking a lot of liberties with the Titan setting. “Well, I figure it will be a long time before anybody gets there to find out what it is actually like,” he said. “Everything’s got this sort of Dante’s Inferno look to it. There are these tremendous lightning storms going on all the time. The picture almost winds up looking like gothic horror. In fact, when we designed the miniatures, that was the instruction, make them look like Dracula’s castle. From the dailies, someone said they thought it looked like a Mario Bava picture, which I take as a compliment.”

To get the most out of the sets and special effects, Malone decided to shoot in widescreen Panavision. “A space picture practically demands that kind of format,” said Malone. “I had to do some fast talking because most of the people involved didn’t want to go anamorphic. Initially it’s a pain in the ass to deal with the Panavision company. If you’re not a major company, they tend to want all their money up front, and that’s very hard to deal with, but once we had set the deal with them, they were easier to get along with. Using Panavision really paid off in the long run, because it gives the picture a bigger look. With Panavision, you gain about 40 percent in image area, and it tremendously improves the image and clarity. This is only my first Panavision picture, but after working with it, you get kind of spoiled.”

Robert Skotak on the set of the Richter Dynamics spaceship from ‘Titan Find

One group that found it a little harder to work up enthusiasm for the widescreen format were the people involved in physically producing the special effects for the film, the year old L.A. Effects Group headed by Larry Benson. The company includes Alan Markowitz, director of animation and optical effects, and Corman effects graduates Robert and Dennis Skotak. Robert serves as director of visual effects while brother Dennis is director of photography.

“The single biggest problem we had was the anamorphic format,” said Dennis Skotak. “Bill Malone likes widescreen, and I like widescreen, but for a limited budget, it’s a problem. It’s real hard to force depth of-field because you have to have a great deal of light to close the camera aperture down.

“Because the budget was so low on this picture, we had a limit on how much time could be spent building the models. The ships are not large enough for a lot of the things that are necessary. One of the producers wanted a shot of the Shenandoah much closer than what we had planned it to be. I had to pull out the bag of tricks to get it done. We had to have the ship so close to the camera that it was grazing the film magazine.”

“I storyboarded the film, designed all of the miniatures (except for the American ship, The Shenandoah, which Bill Malone designed himself), and worked closely with Bill on the planning and staging of each shot,” Skotak explains. “He pretty much left me with a free hand to design the look and layout of each scene. His input was heavily along the lines of what the mood and coloration of something should be, the things that were important to convey a building feeling of suspense. For example, when the ships are approaching Titan, they’re not zooming by. They’re moving very slowly, almost serenely. Then as they enter Titan’s atmosphere, there is all of this lightning going on around them and huge dust storms everywhere. “In the same way, we wanted the interior of the Richter Dynamics ship, where a lot of the action takes place, to look very German Gray, functional, much like a battleship. We wanted it to look like a weird place without getting ludicrous. I made it a little expressionistic, gave it buttresses and bulkheads to shoot from behind. There is also a geographic quality to the bridge; the area is broken up into planes by several different shapes.”

An Early Concept

Robert Skotak’s Creature Design

Skotak also designed the look of the alien, which Malone finally approved after choosing elements from dozens of different sketches that Bob drew. Mike McCracken and Don Pennington were among several people who contributed molds and mechanics to the snakish suit, but it was Doug Beswick, who was called upon, under a heavy deadline, to pull the whole suit together.

“I was real skeptical about it being finished on time,” Beswick recalls. “Bill could only push the shooting schedule back 13 days. The neck and jaw had to be rebuilt to give the creature a larger bite radius, the fingers had to be extended and given long claws, legs and arms had to be built, we had to get a truly vicious look into the face.

This is the small scale maquette, which estabilished the look for the Monster — which would have only minor modifications. It was built by Michael McCracken’s team.

“We would have liked to have done more, but it was a very limited schedule. Considering that, I’m very happy with the way the thing turned out. I haven’t seen many dailies, but what I’ve seen looks good. They are shooting it right, taking their time to light it correctly. I hesitated at first to take on this job, because of the time limit, but I was able to do it and I’ve learned quite a lot, so now I’m glad that I took it on.”

Beswick also built a mock up version and a one-third scale gelatin replica of the rubber suit, both of which will be used in surprise special effect scenes. But monsters from other planets aren’t all you’ll be cringing at. Besides your basic assortment of gouged necks, chewed limbs and decapitated skulls, Titan Find will grace screens with the spectacle of ripped faces, exploding heads and flying cow bellies.

Special effects makeup was originally designed by Bruce Zahlava, who left the production due to creative differences halfway through the shooting. Jill Rockow, a makeup veteran of The Howling, Frightmare, Deadly Eyes, Conan the Destroyer and Friday the 13th-The Final Chapter, among numerous others, is responsible for the daily applications. One of her primary tasks was to destroy parasite victims Robert Jaffe and Klaus Kinski from the inside out.

“Robert Jaffe has the most makeup of anybody.” Rockow explains. “He attacks people and spits blood at them. His face deteriorates and pulls off. In fact, it’s my hand that rips his face off! The actress he’s fighting with in the scene had to go home, and the actual ripping was done with a fake head. I just reached into the frame and pulled off a section of it to expose the underneath, which was a duplicate of the makeup Robert had on.

Jill Rockow Applies Prosthetics

“His face peels off more later on, to reveal this whole bloody and slimy underface. Eventually, his head explodes completely. That was done with another fake head and pyrotechnics. The head was filled with cow bellies, cow brains; it was a real party there. It was made out of gelatin and we planted pieces of primacord inside it. Primacord’s an explosive that is so powerful that a piece of it wrapped around your neck will shoot your head right off. It cuts things off clean. People who do blasts for oil wells use it.

“Robert Jaffe really gets destroyed in this. He’s a producer as well as actor; he produced Motel Hell and Demon Seed. He was wonderful to work with, very cooperative. We went through five hours of makeup application every day and two hours of taking it off. He never moaned once.”

Three overlapping appliances are used to create Klaus Kinski’s makeup. The chin goes on first, then the nose, and the forehead and cheek pieces last. As his character starts to deteriorate, plugs on his cheeks and chin are pulled out to uncover the monstrous mutation going on underneath. Rockow and her crew, which included Jerry Quist and Paul Rinehard, have their work cut out for them with these designs; because of the limited budget (estimated at $4 million), Kinski does not appear in all of his scenes, and two doubles, neither of whom resemble the Polish actor, or each other for that matter, have to stand in for him in a number of action scenes. Luckily, Rockow’s foam rubber appliances cover the entire face, so the differences in actors is impossible to detect.

“The alien itself and all the parasites were covered in K-Y,” Rockow explains, “and everyone’s face was K-Y’d too. We tinted it a yellowish-brown for all of the decomposing human stuff. The neat thing about K-Y is that it dries about an hour or so after you apply it, to a point where it’s not slippery. A lot of makeup people use Methocel for creating slime, but that dries hard and you’ve got to peel it off before you can put a new batch on. This stuff just keeps dripping until it dries.

“About the gore, I tend to sort of pull back in that area,” says Malone. “There are some dramatic scenes that have some gore in them, but I think that if you do it all the way through, then it loses its punch. My basic approach is that I really like suspense more than gore, but the problem is that you have to remember that we also have to try and sell the movie overseas. There are countries that won’t buy your picture without a certain amount of gore in it. Look at the Italian zombie movies, and Japanese kid shows, they have people getting hacked to pieces and arrows that go through eyes … that sort of stuff, so you have to have some pretty heavyweight material in your picture for them to be interested in it.”

Regarding Klaus Kinski

Surprises and difficulties were in store for the live action crew as well. No sooner had Malone worked out the story line for the film and started work on the script when his backers threw him a curve. To help give the film a stronger selling point, his investors had gotten a “name” actor, Klaus Kinski. The problem was that they only had Kinski for a week, and there wasn’t a part in the film that would suit him.

“Previously, we had clues in the original story as to what happened in the German ship, and the audience was supposed to draw its own conclusions,” Malone said. “But once we had Klaus, it seemed the best thing to do was make him the commander of the German ship and work from there. I think he enjoyed working on the film, but it was very hard to tell. He’s got an unusual personality. He worked with me on his part in the script, and actually, I think he would make a very good story editor. He was very helpful with suggestions and with working with the other actors.

I think it helped everyone else too because they really seemed to be working harder because they were working with him.

“Klaus was crazier off camera than the part I wrote for him, and I wrote him as a total looney. The first day of shooting he shows up, and the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I raped my 12-year-old daughter, you know.’ I thought, oh great, this is going to be fun. “Halfway through the first day of shooting, the crew came up to me en masse and said, ‘Billy, we want you to know we’re all going to take Klaus out back and beat the shit out of him.’ I said, ‘Look guys, you have to wait until the end of the week, and then you can do everything you want.’ He was a madman, really, but I will say this, when he’s on screen, he just lights up the screen. He’s definitely one of the best things in the picture. He really added a lot to it. When we write a script, a lot of times the actors don’t give you what you heard in your head. Klaus was one of the few people who gave me exactly what I was writing, the intonation and delivery that I heard for this stuff.”

A running gag on the set occurred after Kinski tried to make a pass at the female makeup artist who was applying his makeup by sticking his knee between her legs and telling her, “That is not my knee, that is my cock.” From then on, whenever anyone on the set bumped into someone else, it became de rigueur to say, “That is not my knee, that is my cock,” regardless of the circumstances.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

ALIEN rip off?

 “You have to understand that this movie has turned out to be a lot bigger picture than we set out to make. We started out small, but after the second week of shooting, the investors looked at the footage and said they loved it and wanted us to make it bigger and better, so they kept throwing money at us, which is really a filmmaker’s dream. We’re using a Dolby stereo soundtrack, which isn’t something we were originally designed for. When we put together a rough cut of the movie, we decided it would add a lot to the film, even though it was going to cost another $80,000.”

Aside from the technical aspects of the film, Malone knows he’s going to run into objections about the film: is it an ALIEN rip off?

“I don’t know what to say about the ALIEN question,” Malone continued. “I guess it depends on whether you consider ALIEN an original story. I don’t look at that many films as real originals. I know ALIEN had elements of several films in it that I could name, but beyond that, most genre films are pretty derivative. I think that THE TITAN FIND has got some unusual and interesting things in it. Certainly the film is going to be compared to other films, but I don’t think you can help that. I actually think there’s a lot more of 1950’s science fiction in it than anything else, and that it resembles ALIEN because Dan O’Bannon and myself were probably inspired by the same pictures. I like Spielberg’s JAWS also. I think it’s probably one of the best monster movies ever made; when I was writing Klaus Kinski’s part, I wanted to try and capture more of the feel of Robert Shaw’s part in that, than ALIEN.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Cast

Stan Ivar as Captain Mike Davison

Wendy Schaal as Beth Sladen

Lyman Ward as David Perkins

Robert Jaffe as Jon Fennel

Diane Salinger as Melanie Bryce

Annette McCarthy as Dr. Wendy H. Oliver

Marie Laurin as Susan Delambre

Klaus Kinski as Hans Rudy Hofner

  Directed by   William Malone

Produced by William G. Dunn

Screenplay by William Malone Alan Reed

  Produced by

Moshe Diamant       …       executive producer

William G. Dunn      …       producer (as William G. Dunn Jr.)

Ronnie Hadar          …       executive producer

William Malone        …       producer

Don Stern     …       associate producer

    Art Direction by Michael Novotny

  Stephen Glassman  …       scenic artist

  Special Effects by

Wayne Beauchamp …       pyrotechnician

Doug Beswick         …       creature coordinator / miniature construction

John Eggett  …       pyrotechnician

Michael McCracken …       creator: “Titan Find” creature

Gerald Quist …       special effects makeup assistant

Paul Rinehard         …       special effects makeup assistant

Jill Rockow    …       special effects makeup assistant

Robert Short …       weapons creator

Bruce Zahlava         …       special effects makeup supervisor

  Visual Effects by

Larry Benson          …       visual effects executive producer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Suzanne M. Benson          …       visual effects production associate: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Bob Burns     …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Steve Caldwell        …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

George D. Dodge    …       effects cinematographer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. (as George Dodge)

Judith Evans …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Alec Gillis      …       special thanks: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Sanford Kennedy    …       model maker: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

John Lambert          …       optical consultant: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Alan G. Markowitz   …       animation supervisor: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. (as Alan Markowitz) / director optical effects: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. (as Alan Markowitz)

Pat McClung …       special thanks: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Jake Monroy …       mechanical engineer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Jay Roth       …       model maker: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Dennis Skotak         …       director of photography: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. / stage supervisor: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Robert Skotak         …       special designer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. / visual effects director: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Kathleen Spurney    …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

George Turner        …       effects animator: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Steve Benson         …       visual effects supervisor (uncredited)

    REFERENCES and SOURCES

Cinefantastique v 15 n02

Fangoria 041

      Creature (1985) Retrospective SUMMARY In the film's prologue, two geological researchers for the American multinational corporation NTI encounter an ancient alien laboratory on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

[themastercylinder]

PLOT

While praying in St. Agnes church in New Orleans, Father Dennis is confronted by a demon taking the shape of a seductive woman. The woman tears his throat open, killing him. Several years later at a New Orleans hotel, Father Michael is called to talk to a man named Claude who is threatening to jump from the top floor of the building. When he offers Claude a cigarette, Michael is pulled out the window and falls to the ground. Inexplicably, he survives the fall without injury. After the incident, Michael is appointed to the St. Agnes parish by the Archbishop Mosely; the parish had been closed after Father Dennis’s unsolved murder.

Upon moving into the rectory, Michael is notified by Lieutenant Stern that another priest was murdered there before Father Dennis. Michael finds mention of Millie, a waitress at the Threshold, a local black magic performance art club, in Dennis’s journal; Michael goes to visit her, but she is evasive. She later comes to the parish, claiming to Michael that she saw Father Dennis for confession before his death; during the confession, she admitted to giving her soul to Luke, the owner of the club, whom she claims is the Devil incarnate. Luke visits Michael shortly after, claiming that the Satanic shows put on at the club are only gimmicks, and that he does not actually believe in them; however, he says he’s been recently experiencing supernatural phenomena and begs for Michael’s help. Michael agrees to spend an evening in Luke’s apartment, where he witnesses furious poltergeist activity.

When Michael brings the information to Archbishop Mosely, he is informed that Father Dennis was approached by Millie and Luke in an identical manner before being murdered. Father Silva, an elderly blind demonologist, informs Michael he has been “chosen” to fight the devil, but Michael dismisses the notion. Millie is incarcerated in a psychiatric ward after attempting to kill Luke, and Michael goes to visit her. In a fit of madness, she claims Luke tried to rape her, and that Father Dennis has been talking to her. That night, Michael has a nightmare of the Demon, and receives a disturbing phone call from Father Dennis, who claims he is “waiting for him in hell.” Millie arrives in the middle of the night begging for help, and Michael agrees to let her stay in the rectory.

While cleaning the church with the housekeeper Teresa, Millie is fascinated by a statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which Teresa tells her was salvaged from a church in a foreign country that burned down. Lieutenant Stern warns Archbishop Mosely that Michael is in danger, suspecting Millie was responsible for the previous murders of the St. Agnes priests; Mosely assures him that Michael is safe. Meanwhile, Millie discovers a book in which she reads of a demon known as the Unholy, which seeks to corrupt and then take pure souls. To prevent herself from being a target, she propositions Michael to take her virginity, which he refuses. Convinced Luke planted the book, Michael confronts him, but Luke denies it.

The next day, Michael finds Luke’s eviscerated corpse hanging above the church altar in the pose of the Cross of Saint Peter. Seated in a pew is Claude, who begs Michael’s forgiveness for pulling him out the window. Suddenly, Claude begins to bleed profusely from his eyes and mouth, and bursts into flames at the foot of the Immaculate Heart of Mary statue; Luke’s corpse also ignites. Michael meets with the Archbishop and Father Silva, who warns him that the Unholy will manifest to Michael between Ash Wednesday and Easter, when it will try to tempt and then kill him. In the church, Michael is confronted by the Unholy (taking form as the woman), and she attempts to seduce him, but he denies her.

The Unholy reveals its true form—a monstrous creature—and two mutant creatures crucify Michael. Millie enters the church and is confronted by the creature, but before it can harm her, Michael calls upon God for strength, and damns the Unholy to hell. He collapses, and when he awakens, is blind. As Millie walks him out of the church, the Immaculate Heart of Mary statue begins to weep tears of blood.

   PRODUCTION BACKSTORY

 Shot during late 1986 and early ’87 in South Florida, with additional filming in New Orleans and post production in California, The Unholy is a big-budget thriller in the tradition of The Exorcist and The Omen. Though The Unholy features scenes of extreme violence, gore and an appearance by a monstrous incarnation of hell itself, director Camilo Vila balks at calling his third feature directorial effort a “horror film.” “I don’t consider this a horror film,” he says. “Of course, we’re gonna have a demon and a monster, but in a context that’s not going to have teenagers running wild.”

Speaking English in a thick Latin American accent, Vila describes his developmental work on the screenplay of The Unholy. “Originally, it was very much like The Exorcist,” he remembers. “I changed it. I created a myth about a demon that tempts priests during the 40 days of Lent and then, on the night of the Resurrection, does his final temptation.”

A Catholic himself-and a former altar boy-Vila admits that his religious upbringing had a strong influence on his approach to the material. “You never get over it,” he says, adding. “The story is very Catholic but it doesn’t have a Catholic message. It’s about temptations and how deceiving they are. They’re not black & white.”

Barry Anderson sculpting a ripped apart chest prosthetic for the film ‘The Unholy’

Though Vila created the myth of the Lenten season temptation, another aspect of The Unholy’s premise comes from actual Catholic lore. “On Good Friday, they take all the communion Hosts out of the church and extinguish the sanctuary light,” he explains. “From Friday at 3:00 to Saturday at midnight, the church is not holy. This is the time when the demon makes his last strike.”

The screenplay for The Unholy has an interesting history, beginning life as a treatment by old-time Hollywood writer/producer Philip Yordan. Although best known as the author of the cult classic Johnny Guitar and prestigious epics such as King of Kings, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Battle of the Bulge, Yordan is more familiar for Day of the Triffids. He wrote his Unholy treatment some years before The Exorcist and The Omen created a vogue for major horror films. Too far ahead of its time, the story collected dust on Yordan’s office shelves until Vila discovered it while working with Yordan on another project. Vila turned the treatment into a full screenplay and a production deal was struck, with filming set to begin in January 1986. This deal collapsed before shooting started, but Vila found new backers while in Florida later that year. New producer Matthew Hayden brought in writer Fernando Fonseca to polish another draft before the script was taken before the cameras.

Most of The Unholy was shot in Miami’s Limelite Studios, with studio owners Frank Tolin and Wanda Rayle serving as executive producers. The film is the initial project of Team Effort Productions, Inc., a Florida-based company formed to make Hollywood-caliber films in the Sunshine State.

In the lead role as Father Michael is Ben Cross. Veteran actors Ned Beatty, Hal Holbrook and Trevor Howard round out the supporting cast, along with William Russ. The leading lady is Jill Carroll, who plays a young woman involved with Father Michael. Nicole Fornier another lovely-and mysterious-lady. Fornier’s role reportedly required a very unusual bit of prosthetic makeup: The application of an extra nipple on her left breast.

Assuming responsibility for the special makeup and prosthetics on The Unholy was Isabel Harkins. A veteran of 12 years in the business, her credits include Scared Stiff and dozens of rock videos and commercials. “I’ve done lots of ‘doubles,'” she laughs, “making people up to look like Abe Lincoln and George Washington, or bears or sandwiches.” She also assisted creating the elves and fairies for Ridley Scott’s Legend. About the extra nipple on Fornier, Harkins says, “I just made a cast of her real nipple and then doubled it. She’s a beautiful girl. I bleached her dark brown hair into a fiery red and made her up glamorous, the Christian Dior look.”

Harkins served up several generous helpings of gore FX for The Unholy, including bloody bodies both human and canine. At one point, a man is butchered and crucified upside down on a cross in a Satanic parody of Christ’s death. “He gets ripped open from his crotch all the way to his neck,” reveals Harkins. “His heart and a liver are hanging out, the ribcage gets all torn up, and his bones are sticking out. It came out beautiful.  They did it with the real actor and then again with the stuntman the next day. I had to match exactly how the blood ran hanging upside down.”

The Unholy also features the gory slaughter of a German shepherd.  “But we didn’t hurt the dog!” Harkins hastens to assure everyone.  “We had a veterinarian anesthetize him. Once the dog was sleeping, we had to work really fast to apply the prosthetics and special blood I made. It looks very, very real.” And what did the pooch think of this? Harkins chuckles. “He was just licking himself off, licking up all the Karo syrup and pancake stuff. He liked it.”

Another interesting challenge came on Halloween night, when the filming of an accident victim prosthetic job was repeatedly postponed. “I put on the makeup at 5:00 p.m.,” she recalls, but the first shot wasn’t until midnight, and they shot the close-up at 6:00 the next morning.” The delays necessitated constant maintenance to preserve realism. “Appliances start going bad after you daub them up with all the glue and blood. The edges start coming up. But I used some products from RCMA, the same stuff Tom Savini and Rick Baker use. They keep the appliances going for a long time.”

Harkins says she would prefer to work with more lighthearted fantasy-oriented projects like Legend, but for now the splatter jobs are keeping her employed. “I know everything about anatomy,” she says. “I’ve been doing this for 12 years now. I go to the morgue for research.

Creating a plan for the spectacular climax of The Unholy was the duty of special FX designer Michael Novotny. No stranger to fantastic films, Novotny served as production designer on the upcoming Invasion Earth, as art director on Flight of the Navigator, and worked on the mechanical sharks for Jaws 3-D as well as the robots for Chopping Mall. Advance word on The Unholy was that a 6-foot demon appeared at its finale, but Novotny shrugs this off. “That’s a rather pedestrian description of what, in fact, is going to be revealed,” he says. “We are making a physical shape which is much larger than 6 feet, and we have several different versions of this, uh, shall we say, ‘demon.’

“It’s hard to describe exactly what it is,” Novotny explains, “because some of the versions of the ‘demon’ are meant to be seen only from certain points of view. One might be just a profile. Another might be just a background piece that’s meant to be interpreted as a shadow, and another is what I’d call a ‘full-on jeopardy shot’ where you’ll be confronted by him directly.”

This evil entity manifests itself in many forms. “The whole concept is that the power of the devil is at its extreme as a deceiver,” says Novotny. “He’s changing constantly. At one point he becomes a holocaust of fire, with the entire church splitting open and forming a hell.” This last effect required the assistance of Star Wars FX Whiz John Dykstra’s Apogee company to execute Novotny’s plan.

Charged with building the monstrous entity that Novotny designed was makeup FX creator Jerry Macaluso, who has worked under Rick Baker. Macaluso was assisted by Linda Arrigoni, Barry Anderson, and Brian Burgstaller, all veterans of Romero’s Day of the Dead. Working with mechanics built .by Ken Wheatley, Macaluso and his crew assembled the demon by first sculpting in clay, then molding in fiberglass. “It was quite an experience because none of us had ever done anything this big before,”  recalls Macaluso. “Standing straight up, she’s 9 feet tall.”  She? Yes, you read that right.

“You can definitely tell it’s a female. It has large, sagging breasts, fully articulated. We’ve got her mounted on a crane in back, and her arms are puppeted. There’s some pneumatics, also.”

Construction of the creature took over three months, followed by an entire week of screen tests before the monstrous creation was pronounced film-worthy. “There are actually three demons,” Macaluso reveals. “There’s the full-scale demon, then there’s the costume, which is basically for head and shoulders shots, and then there’s a special demon for… something else.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The Jerry Macaluso Creature

One person particularly impressed with the Macaluso crew’s demon work is Fernando Fonseca. “There’s six guys in there, working it,” he says with obvious amazement. “It’s fantastic to watch.” The multi-talented Fonseca, who served as the Unholy’s production designer, also composed the music score and co-wrote the screenplay. Fonseca sheds a bit more light on the subject of that extra nipple applied to Nicole Fornier. “An additional nipple is supposed to be a sign of witchcraft,” he explains. “That was one of the ‘tests’ for witchcraft back when the Spanish Inquisition had its bonfires. It was called ‘the devil’s mark.”

Although Fonseca’s scripts have been performed on the theatrical stage, The Unholy is his first produced screenplay. He describes his rewrite of the Yordan and Vila script as a matter of fleshing out the characters and filling in important details. For example, in the earlier script, Father Michael was invulnerable to temptation. “To me, this left much to be desired in the way of dramatic conflicts,” recalls Fonseca. “The demon is trying to get to him by tempting him. If he’s not susceptible, then we’ve given you the conclusion at the beginning of the story. In Yordan’s script, the demon was sent back to hell when the bell struck midnight, kind of like Cinderella.”

Another addition was a background story of elderly Father Silva’s own experience with the demon. The earlier draft had Father Silva lecturing at length about demonic lore but never explained how he acquired the knowledge. Fonseca added an explanation for Father Silva’s inside information and linked it to a new, bone-chilling finale. Due to Fonseca’s innovations and the skilled work of the entire crew at Team Effort Productions, The Unholy should provide ample thrills for even the most jaded horror film-goers. Vestron Pictures will release it this Halloween.

  The Bob Keen Creature

THE BOB KEEN RE-SHOOTS

Unfortunately for Vila, the people at Vestron who picked up the feature for distribution apparently wanted a horror film. Impressed with Waxwork, another of their genre offerings, Vestron contacted that piece’s producers, Christopher Anderson and Gary Bettman, and makeup FX man Bob Keen to shoot a new ending for The Unholy. Keen, who handled the FX on Waxwork in addition to directing second unit, was asked to rework and direct The Unholy’s climactic church battle. “The film is not that bad, it stands up by itself. The ending just needed a little polish,” Keen comments. “It’s still the original director’s and the original team’s film. I’m just doing the ending. I’ll probably get back-end credit as ‘Additional sequences directed by …’ and I’m happy with that. I’m here to help people out.”

For the reshoot, shop was set up for 10 days at the Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, right across the street from Paramount Pictures. The original church set was the only thing shipped in and reconstructed from The Unholy’s Florida shoot. A new production crew consisted mostly of Waxwork veterans in addition to Keen’s British team of Simon Sayce, Neill Gorton and brother David Keen. As scripted by Keen, the new sequence’s main purpose was to provide a more exciting and satisfying plot resolution. “The ending is bigger now, we expanded its scope,” notes producer Bettman. “The battle between God and the devil, heaven and hell, Father Michael’s fight with the Temptress, the question of should he or shouldn’t he be attracted to a woman, that’s a lot going on in just a few minutes. There’s also more action. We’ve added two other little demons, and there’s more happening with the monster. Visually, it’s a fantastic creature.”

The new creature, the demonic transformation of the Temptress who torments Father Michael, is a departure from the original Jerry Macaluso creature. It’s still very tall and noticeably female, but now the demon is meatier, slimier and looks like it’s covered in rotting entrails. Its head is larger and more menacing, with fiery red eyes and sharp claw like teeth. Explaining how the new creature was designed, Keen says, “We started from scratch. We had to simply scrap everything or we would botch up what had already been done. Vestron believed in this movie, so the decision was made quite early on, ‘Let’s spend the money, go back to square one and see what we can do.’

“There were little problems that I don’t think became evident until everything was in place,” Keen continues. “The original creature didn’t have any teeth and had very little personality. Since the scene cuts between a real person and the creature, it was important that the creature move and behave like it had a personality. That was the basic reason for abandoning the original design.”

Keen’s demon began its life as two separate pieces: an articulated head and shoulders for close-ups, and a suit worn by Gorton and Sayce for the long shots. “Midway through a scene in which the creature, on all fours, stalks the fallen priest at the church altar, we decided we needed something halfway between the two and grafted the close-up head onto the suit to make a giant puppet,” Keen reveals. “I wanted the creature to have a hands-on conflict with the priest. The conflict was very important; I didn’t want something that took place with them 200 yards away from each other.”

The finale also includes “a trip to hell which is structured with very strong images,” says Keen. “The priest eventually wins and dispatches the demon back to hell. We built the miniature set (of the church opening up into a deep pit) upside down so we could control the creature’s fall. The camera was aimed up at it, and on film it looks like the creature is dropping down a huge hole. We used the 2001 technique and hid all the wires behind the model as it gets pulled up.”

To keep the film a cohesive narrative, some of the additional footage is being edited into the body of the film as dream sequences experienced by Father Michael. While many who leave the church never go back, British actor Ben Cross did return almost a year later to reprise his role as Father Michael. “It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible,” he judges. “I’ve really forgotten a great deal, so I relied on Bob Keen, who had seen all the footage, to remind me. Basically, it’s acting by the numbers.”

The Unholy marks Cross’ first horror/FX film, as well as his first performance as an American. “Father Michael, rather than being Super-priest,” the actor observes, “is actually a bloke who can’t come to terms with the fact that he’s gifted. There’s a human side to the character. He has a strong will and strong faith, but he’s also very cynical. He doesn’t believe that evil can personify itself in fleshly form. Of course, he finds out otherwise.”

Throughout the rigorous FX shooting – including the afternoon he had to don painful contact lenses to simulate Father Michael’s ultimate blindness – Cross tried to keep a sense of humor. After one difficult shot, he announced to the cast and crew, “I’ve just been through hell.”

“These movies are tough,” Cross laughs. “When I studied at drama school, I received a classical actor’s training. I was prepared for all sorts of things; we were trained for radio. But no one ever trains you to scream and shriek while you’re crucified to an altar, and the thing that’s actually coming toward you is a prop man lighting up a cigarette behind camera. These things are so embarrassing and undignified that you just try to get it in one or two takes. After that, you start to analyze, and that’s not good.”

Puppet created, shot, but ultimately cut from a film. Created by David Sosalla, Rick Lazzarini, and Mike Sorenson at Apogee, Inc.

Preferring to view the 10-day filming as “additional stuff” rather than a reshoot, Cross doesn’t consider this an opportunity to add anything to his performance, “This is to improve the film,” he maintains. “It’s the final 10 minutes. By that time, you either have a good movie or you don’t. The whole film builds toward these last 10 minutes. If they don’t work, then I along with many other people look a bit ridiculous, and the audience will go out laughing.”

Gary Bettman agrees, give or take five minutes. “Often what people will leave the movie theater with is the last reel. It’s what they remember most,” he nods. “The final climax leaves you with the thought of the picture, that last 15 minutes. Hopefully, we’re going to leave them so they tell their friends.”

And just in case there are any doubts left, the final word belongs to Bob Keen, who expects his sequences to comprise to 10 minutes of screen time. “Now,” assures the director, “The Unholy is definitely a horror movie.”

Keen says he doesn’t plan to emphasize his film’s FX aspects. “I’m a special effects man, but I don’t want to be labeled a special effects director,” he notes. “The area I want to develop is the character. How the story is important to the character’s structure and growth is the part I’m going to spend all my time on. If I don’t know how to do special effects by now, and how to direct them, I might as well give up.

  https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/rogerbellon4

  Cast

Ben Cross as Father Michael

Ned Beatty as Lieutenant Stern

William Russ as Luke

Jill Carroll as Millie

Hal Holbrook as Archbishop Mosely

Trevor Howard as Father Silva

Claudia Robinson as Teresa

Nicole Fortier as Demon

Peter Frechette as Claude

Earleen Carey as Lucile

    The Unholy (1988) Retrospective PLOT While praying in St. Agnes church in New Orleans, Father Dennis is confronted by a demon taking the shape of a seductive woman.

[themastercylinder]

SUMMARY

A teenage girl purchases a baby American alligator while on vacation with her family at a tourist trap in Florida. After the family returns home to Chicago, the alligator, named Ramón by the girl, is promptly flushed down the family’s toilet by her surly, animal-phobic father and ends up in the city’s sewers.

Twelve years later, the alligator survives by feeding on covertly discarded pet carcasses. These animals had been used as test subjects for an experimental growth formula intended to increase agricultural livestock meat production. However, the project was abandoned due to the formula’s side effect of massively increasing the animal’s metabolism, which caused it to have an insatiable appetite. During the years, the baby alligator accumulated concentrated amounts of this formula from feeding on these carcasses, causing it to mutate, growing into a 36 foot (11 m) monster resembling a Deinosuchus or Sarcosuchus, as well as having an almost impenetrable hide.

The alligator begins ambushing and devouring sewer workers it encounters in the sewer, and the resulting flow of body parts draws in world-weary police officer David Madison (Robert Forster) who, after a horribly botched case in St. Louis, has gained a reputation for being lethally unlucky for his assigned partners. As David works on this new case, his boss Chief Clark (Michael Gazzo) brings him into contact with reptiles expert Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker), the girl who bought the alligator years earlier. The two of them edge into a prickly romantic relationship, and during a visit to Marisa’s house, David bonds with her motormouthed mother.

David’s reputation as a partner-killer is confirmed when the gator snags a young cop, Kelly (Perry Lang), who accompanies David into the sewer searching for clues. No one believes David’s story, due to a lack of a body, and partly because of Slade (Dean Jagger), the influential local tycoon who sponsored the illegal growth experiments and therefore doesn’t want the truth to come out. This changes when obnoxious tabloid reporter Thomas Kemp (Bart Braverman), one of the banes of David’s existence, goes snooping in the sewers and supplies graphic and indisputable photographic evidence of the beast at the cost of his own life. The story quickly garners public attention, and a citywide hunt for the monster is called for.

An attempt by the police to flush out the alligator comes up empty and David is put on suspension. The alligator escapes from the sewers and comes to the surface, first killing a police officer and later a young boy who, during a party, is tossed into a swimming pool in which the alligator is residing.

The ensuing hunt continues, including the hiring of pompous big-game hunter Colonel Brock (Henry Silva) to track the animal. Once again, the effort fails: Brock is killed, the police trip over each other in confusion, and the alligator goes on a rampage through a high-society wedding party hosted at Slade’s mansion; among its victims are Slade himself, the mayor, and Slade’s chief scientist for the hormone experiments and intended son-in-law. Marisa and David finally lure the alligator into the sewers before setting off explosives on the alligator, killing it. As the film ends with David and Marisa walking away after the explosion, a drain in the sewer spits out another baby alligator, repeating the cycle all over again.

  Lewis Teague Interview

Did you work closely with John Sayles in creating Lady in Red and Alligator?

Lewis Teague: We collaborated very closely on Alligator but not on Lady in Red because the script was virtually finished on that movie when I was brought in. But when Brandon Chase offered me Alligator he had a completely different script. I loved the idea and thought we could have a lot of fun with it, but I accepted the job on the condition that I could bring in a writer of my choice and rewrite the script from scratch. Brandon Chase was agreeable to that; he was familiar with Sayles’ work and admired it, so, to his credit, he said yes. Sayles and I quickly fleshed out an idea and Sayles wrote the script very, very rapidly.

  What were the changes you wanted to make after seeing the first screenplay?

Teague: The story we came up with is completely different. The only thing that remains from the original idea is the existence of alligators in the sewers. There was virtually nothing in the original script apart from that basic idea that I was interested in doing. What I was interested in doing, and the two big changes we made in the story, was that I wanted to do a film with some humor and I wanted to do a film that would be allegorical in some way. I’m not interested in doing a horror film or a suspense film just for suspense’s sake. There was a concern of mine–and John and I spent a great deal of time talking about this—that the film should be allegorical in the sense that the existence of the alligator should be a manifestation of the hero’s nightmares or fears. So then the discovery, pursuit and eventual vanquishing of the alligator by the Robert Forster character is allegorical to the conquering of the fears and guilt that exist in his soul.

  Something I especially liked about Alligator was the way it incorporated humor into the story without defusing the thrills and suspense. When you were directing the picture, what were your ideas about maintaining this balance between humor and horror?

Teague: I didn’t think of it so much as a balance, because I never felt that the elements were in conflict. I never felt the balance of humor in relation to the suspense was critical. I tried to maximize the suspense as much as possible within the limits of production and story, and maintain a sort of consistent droll attitude toward the material. Although I didn’t think the balance of humor versus suspense was critical, the nature of the humor I felt was important. I never allowed it to drift into camp, in other words, the humor always came out of the comedy of the situation and never made fun of the situation. The characters always had to take the situations seriously. If I ever allowed the characters to not take the situation seriously, the humor would then become camp, and then suddenly the audience would become distanced from the material and that would destroy the suspense.

  Robert Forster seemed particularly well suited for the role of the cop-hero in this movie. Were you involved in the casting of this part?

Teague: Yes, I fought for Bob in the picture. There was some pressure on producer Brandon Chase to go with somebody who might have been a little more commercial and, to Brandon’s credit, he recognized that Bob would be more suitable than some of the other-quote-unquote-more commercial choices and ultimately decided to go along with Bob and make a better picture. I’m a big fan of Forster’s. I directed second unit on a picture called Avalanche and had a chance to work with Forster on that; I was really impressed with his skill. So when I directed Lady in Red, I cast him in a small cameo in the picture. I was enormously appreciative of his help in that movie and I thought his cameo really stood out. I was just waiting for an opportunity to work with him again, and he was perfect for Alligator.

What was involved in the effects for Alligator?

Teague: Before I became involved in the picture, Brandon had hired an industrial designer to construct a full-sized rubber monster-alligator-I think it was 26 feet long. It never really worked. It looked great as long as it was stationary. We did a test with it to try to get it to walk, and I think that’s what convinced me to do this picture as a comedy. We ended up using a variety of techniques to film the alligator. We had that full-sized rubber alligator, which was only useful for stationary shots; we had a mechanical head that was mounted on a moveable rig that we could use for closeups of the alligator chomping on things; we had a mechanical tail which was very strong and moved on a crane that we used for scenes of it swatting things; and we also used real alligators on miniature sets for a few shots. So we intercut all of those methods, and used a lot of shots from the alligator’s point of view and tried not to show the alligator whenever possible.

  You seem to have liked working with Brandon Chase on this picture.

Teague: Yeah, Brandon was very supportive. He made three critical decisions that I think are largely responsible for the success of the picture. First of all, the decision to go with me (laughs), secondly to let me work with John Sayles, and thirdly to go with Robert Forster.

    These two film veterans should know. 1980’s Alligator, which Sayles wrote and Teague directed, surprised both critics and fans by being both intentionally funny and scary, an all-too-rare combination.

“There was a story in the New York Times a couple of years earlier, remembers Chase, “about sewer workers who found baby alligators that had grown up a bit. These were from people who had visited Florida and Louisiana and bought cute little alligators from roadside stands, and they brought ’em home and then–what next? They flushed ’em down the toilet! And I thought, ‘Alligators in the sewer system that’s sensational movie material.’ We embellished it for our purposes, of course, but it’s essentially a true story.”

Chase then commissioned longtime friend Frank Ray Perilli to flesh out the idea. Perilli, a stand up comic turned screenwriter, had hit recently with two heist comedies, The Doberman Gang (dogs robbing banks) and Little Cigars (midgets robbing banks). But according to the director, his draft of Alligator didn’t quite cut it. “I liked the idea, but I didn’t like the script,” Teague says of his initial exposure to the project. “I had just finished The Lady in Red, which John Sayles had written, so I did the film on the condition that John could come in and rewrite it. The original script had a child as a protagonist; it was totally humorless, and it wasn’t scary or funny, so I didn’t see much purpose in doing it.”

“All I remember about it was that it was set in Milwaukee,” says Sayles about the original script, “and that the alligator getting big had something to do with beer running off into the sewers. Which is why people from Milwaukee are so big, I guess. I also remember the finale took place in an old abandoned sawmill, so there were a lot of chainsaws and such.”

At the time, Sayles was a novelist (Union Dues) whose screenwriting skills had recently helped make Battle Beyond the Stars and Piranha far better than the average Roger Corman quickie. Teague hailed from a background in documentaries (including work on Woodstock), and had spent 10 years editing and directing 2nd unit for Corman’s New World Pictures, where the two met.

Writing Alligator at the same time as The Howling, it took Sayles all of two weeks to come up with a first draft, and, after suggestions from Chase and Teague, another two weeks to arrive at the final version. The man who gave horror a much-needed shot of originality in the early ’80s grew up watching Hammer and Godzilla movies, and saw fit to make an unprompted mention of The Manster, an obscure Japanese two-headed man movie (!), while discussing Alligator.

“Because the alligator didn’t tower over buildings like Godzilla,” he explains, “and wasn’t big enough to be a huge, terrifying threat to everybody, what I had to play with was the spookiness of going down into the sewers—the unknownness of it.” Sayles, who witnessed baby alligators being sold through the mail as a child, studied animal behavior in college. Thus Alligator, like Piranha, benefited from scientific accuracy, down to the monster’s mating call.

The script opens in Florida, as a family on vacation buys a pet alligator at a roadside stand for their little girl. Back home, “Ramon” is soon flushed down the toilet by the disgruntled father. Thirteen years later, gunshy cop David Madison begins to notice a rash of corpses showing up in the city sewers. After losing a partner to the mysterious predator, he teams up with herpetologist Marisa Kendall, who remembers having lost her pet alligator oh so many years ago…

Not content to crank out just your basic no-frills monster movie, Teague and Sayles sought to add levels of depth behind the fun and scares. “One of the things I like about horror films is that the monsters can easily be used as parables or metaphors for something,” Teague says. “I thought it would be interesting if the main character was pursued by some demons from his past that the alligator could symbolize. And his only way to exorcise them would be to face his fear and go out and slay the dragon, so to speak. I talked in conceptual terms about that with John, and he ran with it and came up with a backstory about Madison having a partner who was killed and who he felt guilty about, and it was ruining his life.”

“Something I consciously did was have the monster, like all social ills, start in the sewer and slums and eat its way up through the socio-economic classes,” Sayles says. “You’ll notice that only when it starts attacking the upper middle class do people start doing something about it.”

While shooting 2nd unit on 1978’s Avalanche, Teague became friends with that film’s costar Robert Forster, who later offered his services, unpaid and uncredited, as Turk the hit man in Lady in Red. Impressed with the actor’s work in his debut feature, Teague insisted on Forster as Madison over the possibility of other, better-known actors.

“Robert gave the picture so much of its character,” says associate producer Marianne Chase.  “Alligator worked because it was tongue-in-cheek. His performance in the lead stopped it from being another dumb serious horror movie. With him as the hero, you knew it was supposed to be fun.”

“Often when you write a low budget movie, you have no idea who’s going to be in it, and you just cross your fingers that it’s not going to be the second stuntman,” says Sayles. “The gun-shy cop who lost a partner is a standard device in police and military movies, but because Robert Forster is a good actor, all that stuff played out well. He made the guy more interesting than they usually are. If you can make a character three-dimensional in a horror movie, you’ve done a lot. That way the action stuff is more powerful, because you care about whether the guy lives or dies.”

Forster, the star of everything from the classic Medium Cool to Satan’s Princess, also gave the film its most memorable running gag.

Alligator! Oh, boy, that’s a favorite of mine. I was losing my hair at the time, and… I was in Schwab’s Drugstore, one of the great meeting places for actors from 1941 to 1983, when it closed, but everybody, everybody, everybody went there for breakfast, including the governor, Jerry Brown. Actors, directors, writers, publicists, hookers, horseplayers, and hangers-on—you name it, they were all at Schwab’s.  And I was sitting there in a booth, reading my paper, and some guy was standing there waiting for a table, and I looked up. I thought he was reading over my shoulder, and I looked up to make sure he had finished before I turned the page, and he wasn’t looking at the newspaper. He said, “Hey, Bob, I’m a friend of yours.” I said, “Yeah, Lenny.” He said, “I’m gonna tell you something, but… I’m a friend of yours.” I said, “Lenny, what is it?” He said, “Bob, you look better with hair, and you’d better do something about it.” And I thought to myself, “Jesus, the guy’s right.” I had gotten to the point where I was making jokes about hair loss.

 Now, you may remember that, in Alligator, there are a series of little jokes about a guy who’s sensitive about losing his hair. You remember that? I put those jokes into the movie. I wrote ’em, I asked the director if I could put ’em in there. He said, “Yes,” and the very first time we saw a rough cut of the movie, they were all in there, and in the second rough cut, they were all gone. And I figured, “Oh, God, this director didn’t like them,” or something, and I was sorry about it to myself. But then the third time, I said, “You know what? I think those belong in the movie.” And he called me back and said, “I’ve had friends tell me that they miss those hair jokes, so I’m gonna put ’em back in the movie.” And you may remember that when the movie was released, those hair jokes, every single reviewer commented on them. Without knowing how they got there, sure, but they all recognized that it was something human about the character, which gave it a little plus. Because, you know, it was a genre movie. It was a spoof of Jaws, basically. With a guy who was losing his hair. So when Lenny said what he said to me, that’s when I said to myself, “Losing my hair is not good enough to make the next joke. You’d better do something about it.”  – Robert Foster

After coming to Los Angeles with $35 in her pocket a few years earlier, Robin Riker made her screen debut as Dr. Kendall, the young scientist who helps defeat the killer gator. Riker and Forster together create one of the few love affairs in monster movie history that doesn’t seem horribly forced.

“What I liked about the script was that Kendall was a woman of substance,” Riker recalls. “She was a herpetologist, she was strong, she had a sense of humor, she kept up with the boys when the alligator broke out and the action started happening. When people asked me about Alligator when we were making it, I would say, ‘It’s like Jaws and I’m the Richard Dreyfuss character. ”

While Teague had his choice for the leads, Chase suggested they round out the cast with some familiar American character actors for their drawing power with overseas audiences. Michael Gazzo, the gravel-voiced screenwriter turned performer, famous for playing mobsters in films like Fingers and The Godfather, Part II, was cast as police chief Clark. Septuagenarian Dean Jagger, who began his career making monsters (1936’s Revolt of the Zombies), ended it that way too: His role as amoral industrialist Slade, the man responsible for dumping the hormones that created the beast, would be one of his last before dying in 1991 at age 87.

“He was wonderful,” Teague says of the late actor, famous for films like 12 O’Clock High and Vanishing Point. “He was 100 percent alert, had a great sense of humor. We were both fans of Rudyard Kipling, and we had a lot of fun between takes reciting Kipling poems to each other. Charming, erudite, very interesting guy.”

Henry Silva, the unforgettable chiseled-faced villain in films such as The Manchurian Candidate, Thirst and Dick Tracy, landed a rare non-traditional role as Colonel Brock, the big game hunter brought in to tackle the overgrown reptile. In an inspired touch, Brock goes to the South Side ghetto to recruit local “natives” to help him navigate the urban jungle.

“I’m cast so much as the heavy in films, and what people are not aware of is that when I was in New York doing theater, a lot of the plays I did were comedy,” says Silva, who left school at age 14 and became a dishwasher to pay for acting lessons. “I liked Alligator because of the humor in the film. I was killing so many people in all my other pictures, and it was getting a little boring. It was nice to make people smile again for a change.”

Unable to afford to recreate a sewer system on their slim $1- million budget, the filmmakers spent much of the 25-day shooting schedule in the actual Los Angeles sewer drains, the same locale where the classic Them! was filmed. “It was really nightmarish—it was a good thing it was a non-union movie where we could abuse everybody and keep them down there all day,” Teague laughs. “It was odorous and damp, and we were usually standing up to our hips in toxic waste water.”

“One day, when we were shooting the scene where the SWAT team is trying to chase out the alligator, some people saw these actors with fake guns and called the police, recalls Marianne Chase. “By the time we came out of the sewers, there was this fleet of cop cars waiting for us. And the wardrobe man, who was last to come out, saw all these cops and jumped right back down into the tunnels. We all had a good laugh about that.”

A low-budget horror film shot in the sewers doesn’t seem like it would make for pleasant memories, but all involved with Alligator share positive feelings about its lensing. “A lot of that had to do with Lewis,” says Marianne Chase. “He used to be an editor, and so he knows beforehand exactly how he wants things to be shot. There’s no Maybe we’ll do it this way, maybe we’ll do it that way. He’s editing the movie in his mind as he is shooting it. That gives everyone working with him a confidence, and gives the shoot a momentum. Nobody’s hanging around till the director decides what to do.”

“There was only one thing that made me very sad during the film,” says Silva. “Sue Lyon, who played Lolita, had one day’s work on the picture.” Lyon, who set the movie world on fire at age 14 as James Mason’s object of desire in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, and later made headlines by having a brief, unconsummated marriage to an imprisoned murderer, had a single scene as a TV reporter, and has not made a film appearance since. Lyon’s scene with Silva, where he comes on to her by imitating alligator mating sounds, is one of the film’s comic highlights.

Sue Lyon

“She was such a warm, beautifully dressed woman-yet I knew she had fallen on hard times,” says Silva, who continues to actively work in films, mostly in Europe and Asia. “That bothered me a great deal. Here’s a girl, taking this bit part, who was once a film star in her own right. She’s a talented person, but the industry had somehow found no more use for her. She was so young! To think that when you’re 21, you’re through-it really shook me up. It says a great deal about the American film industry, and not something positive either.”

The shooting progressed smoothly on the tight schedule, though how the film would end was still up in the air. “We had to go back and forth about the endings quite a bit,” says Sayles. “I had one ending where it was doused with gasoline and set on fire. They weren’t going to do that with a real alligator, and couldn’t see a way to do it to the fake one without destroying it. That meant that it would have to be the last shot of the movie, and also, the advertising value of the giant alligator that they had planned to utilize would be gone. If it was all melted rubber, it wouldn’t be able to make personal appearances at shopping malls. In the final draft of the ending. I wound up writing things like ‘EXCITING CROSS-CUT MONTAGE-YOU KNOW HOW TO DO THIS, LEWIS!’

“I watched a lot of movies with underground locations to get ideas on how to shoot Alligator,” Teague recalls. “Especially The Third Man, where the hero, Harry Lime, dies in the sewers at the end. When we were down there shooting, I got inspired and spray-painted ‘Harry Lime Lives on the tunnel wall, which you can barely see in the last shot.”

For a film of its era and budget, Alligator’s creature FX are surprisingly good. “We tried to farm the job out to various special effects houses to build us a giant mechanized alligator, but the costs were enormous,” Brandon Chase remembers. “We figured we could go with an alligator that we could put two people inside instead.”

To test his theory, Chase commissioned industrial designer and then-mayor of Beverly Hills Ben Stansberry to create a prototype monster suit. “The original 26-footlong gator was cast in rubber on a frame of rattan and wicker with wire hinges, and two guys would wear it,” explains Teague. “I went down to this warehouse where the alligator was in storage, and it looked fantastic, so I was very excited. They cut it down from the ceiling, and it just crumbled into dust. The rubber had gotten totally dried out.

“Brandon then hired Bob Short to make a new alligator from the original mold,” Teague continues. “They were worried about it falling apart again, so they overbuilt it. It had a thick rubber shell, with an aluminum-and-steel armature. It weighed a ton. We had a screen test out in the valley where these guys had their shop, in their parking lot, and a huge crowd had gathered to watch. We hired these two ex-football players to be inside it. Now remember, a real alligator takes long strides; that’s how it moves so fast to kill its prey. The two guys inside it took long strides in human terms, but it looked like the alligator was taking these short mincing steps.

“So the cameras are rolling, and I’m calling a cadence so these guys can walk in sync, and this gigantic monster starts taking these little baby steps. Well, the 200 passers-by that gathered to watch this thing just burst out laughing. At that point I made two decisions that it was gonna be a comedy, and that I would show as little of the alligator moving as possible.”

“It didn’t look real for very long,” Brandon Chase says of the monster suit. “They couldn’t walk for more than a few moments because of the heat inside and the weight of the thing. Lewis sensed that problem beforehand, so we shot all the profile moving shots with a real alligator on miniature sets. Also, when we did tight close-ups of a head or eye or mouth, we’d use the real one. Cutting between the movement of the real gator and our fake one created much greater credibility.”

In describing the cost of making Alligator, Teague revealed, “The budget was a little under one and half million, and we had about a four week shooting schedule. The musician’s strike began shortly after we finished the movie, which was unfortunate, because James Horner was writing the score, and he had just completed the score when the strike began, so he wouldn’t let us have it. I think he recycled that score and used it on a movie called Wolfen. There you go; not a bad picture either.”

Like Teague’s first film, Alligator got excellent critical notices but fared less than spectacularly at the box office. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby (asked personally by the director to review it) raved, stacking it up against mega hits Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman II as one of the best releases of summer 1981. Alas, Alligator never made even half the money those blockbusters did, coming and going from theaters in a flash. “It didn’t do that well in theaters because Brandon booked it into houses that only had one week’s availability, never imagining that it was gonna get the reaction it did,” Forster says in his typically outspoken, from-the-hip style.

“Brandon thought he could make more money releasing it himself, rather than take what the studios had offered him,” says Teague. “They would have done a better job publicizing it, and it would have played in theaters longer, but they would have had complete ownership, and it would have been the last we would ever see of it.”

John Sayles Interview

Sayles had traveled this Jaws-inspired territory earlier in Piranha, which I think is slightly superior to Alligator. But Alligator and Piranha both share the spirit of unpretentious B-movie glee, and both include a little social commentary with their humor and gore. Alligator is at least better in one respect: it stars the great Robert Forster as the unshaven cop hero. Forster’s low-key sincerity gives Alligator a pathos that Piranha lacks, although Piranha has better rhythm, action, and humor. I also think Piranha handles the gore better, as some of the severed arms and legs in Alligator are plainly gross.

Both films employ the old-fashioned monster-movie pattern of depicting a kill early on, showing glimpses of the monster from time to time, having the heroes discover telltale signs of the monster, putting the heroes in conflict with corrupt or ignorant authorities, and finally setting the monster loose at some kind of big festival at the conclusion. Both films, thanks to Sayles, are very good at foreshadowing and at setting amusing patterns in the narrative. An obvious example: the gator’s name is Ramon, and in Madison’s apartment are posters of Ramon Santiago

How did you get involved with Alligator?

Sayles: I had already worked with its director, Lewis Teague, on Lady in Red, a movie that’s very popular in Europe. That was one of the best scripts I’ve written, though Lewis had only twenty-one days to shoot it, a budget of under a million, and no voice in casting the first four leads. Robert Conrad was Dillinger, a small part. Pamela Sue Martin, recently on Dynasty, was the lead. She’s okay, but she hadn’t done a big part before. Anyway, they had this script for Alligator, but it wasn’t a good script. So Lewis talked the producer, Brandon Chase, into hiring me. They gave me this script that was set in Madison, Wisconsin. The alligator lived in a sewer for the whole movie. It never got above ground.

What turned the alligator into a fantasy monster in the original script?

Sayles: A brewery had a leak and the alligator was drinking the malt, or something like that. It never made sense why it was a giant alligator. They killed this alligator at an old abandoned sawmill. Someone had left the power on at the old abandoned sawmill. And someone had left a chainsaw lying around the old abandoned sawmill. They plugged the chainsaw in and threw it into the alligator’s mouth. All the alligator’s thrashing around didn’t even pull the plug out, even as the chainsaw cut him to bits. So I rewrote Alligator. All I kept was a giant alligator, and I started from scratch. I wrote the whole first draft on the cross-country flight from L.A. to New York.

Were you following concrete instructions?

Sayles: No, Lewis just said, “This script needs plot, character, mood.”

What was the alligator like?

Sayles: They had built an alligator years earlier, and it was sitting on a shelf. When they took it off the shelf, it fell apart. They had to build another alligator. Well, there was a lot of good stuff I wrote that never got shot, whole subplots, because this alligator couldn’t cut it. This alligator couldn’t do the things they said it could. It couldn’t go in the water, for instance. Since there was only one foot of water in the sewer, I decided the alligator should end in the Mississippi River and drown. But that wasn’t filmed. Earlier I’d wanted to burn the alligator, have a guy pour gasoline on it. I liked the idea of the alligator walking around on fire. They said no, because the alligator was booked for a personal appearance in a flatbed truck for publicity. We couldn’t destroy it. We had to cut away from it.

So what did you do?

Sayles: Finally we blew it up. I wrote the scene over the telephone. Lewis called and said, “Well, it’s time to shoot the end.” I said, “Oh well… let’s have the alligator take dynamite off somebody. We should do some crosscutting at the end. Also, someone should drive a car on top of the manhole cover…”Lewis said, “That sounds fine.” He story-boarded the conclusion and did a great job. I said, “Don’t put any dialogue in except, ‘Move your car! My boyfriend is down there with the alligator!'”

  This slideshow requires JavaScript.

(Alligator) A tabletop game based on the film was distributed by the Ideal Toy Company in 1980.

    Cast

Robert Forster as David Madison

Robin Riker as Marisa Kendall

Michael V. Gazzo as Chief Clark (credited as Michael Gazzo)

Dean Jagger as Slade

Sydney Lassick as Luke Gutchel (credited as Sidney Lassick)

Jack Carter as Mayor

Perry Lang as Officer Jim Kelly

Henry Silva as Colonel Brock

Bart Braverman as Thomas Kemp

John Lisbon Wood as mad bomber

James Ingersoll as Arthur Helms

Robert Doyle as Mr. Bill Kendall, Marisa’s father

Patti Jerome as Mrs. Madeline Kendall, Marisa’s mother

Angel Tompkins as newswoman

Sue Lyon as ABC newswoman

Leslie Brown as young Marisa

Buckley Norris as Bob

Royce D. Applegate as Callan

Tom Kindle as Announcer

Jim Brockett as Gator wrestler

Simmy Bow as Seedy

Jim Boeke as Shamsky

Stan Haze as Meyer

James Arone as Sloan

Peter Miller as Sgt. Rice

Pat Petersen as Joey

Micole Mercurio as Joey’s mother (credited as Micol)

Alligator (1980) Retrospective SUMMARY A teenage girl purchases a baby American alligator while on vacation with her family at a tourist trap in Florida.

[themastercylinder]

SUMMARY

The movie, which Cimino also wrote, is loosely based on, and named after, two infamous early-nineteenth-century Irish bandits. As a young ne’er-do-well, Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) steals a car. In the other sub-story, an assassin attempts to shoot a preacher delivering a sermon at his pulpit. The preacher escapes on foot. Lightfoot, who happens to be driving by, inadvertently rescues the preacher by running over his pursuer and giving the preacher a lift.

Lightfoot eventually learns that the “minister” is really a notorious bank robber known as “The Thunderbolt” (Clint Eastwood) for his use of a 20 millimeter cannon to break into a safe. Hiding out in the guise of a clergyman following the robbery of a Montana bank, Thunderbolt is the only member of his old gang who knows where the loot is hidden.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

After escaping another attempt on his life by two other men, Thunderbolt tells Lightfoot that the ones trying to kill him are members of his gang who mistakenly thought Thunderbolt had double-crossed them. He and Lightfoot journey to Warsaw, Montana to retrieve the money hidden in an old one-room schoolhouse. They discover the schoolhouse has been replaced by a brand-new school standing in its place.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot are abducted by the men who were pursuing them—the vicious Red Leary (George Kennedy) and the gentle Eddie Goody (Geoffrey Lewis)—and driven to a remote location where Thunderbolt and Red fight each other, after which Thunderbolt explains how he never betrayed the gang.

Lightfoot proposes another heist—robbing the same company as before—with a variation on the original plan; the variation being due to Lightfoot inadvertently killing their electronics expert, Dunlop, the man who tried to assassinate Thunderbolt in the earlier scene. In the city where the bank is located, the men find jobs to raise money for needed equipment while they plan the heist.

The robbery begins as Thunderbolt and Red gain access to the building. Lightfoot, dressed as a woman, distracts the Western Union office’s security guard, deactivates the ensuing alarm, and is picked up by Goody. Using an anti-tank cannon to breach the vault’s wall, as they did in the first heist, the gang escapes with the loot. They flee in the car, with Red and Goody in the trunk, to a nearby drive-in movie in progress. Upon seeing a shirt tail protruding from the car’s trunk lid (which is a strong indication one or more people are hiding in the trunk to avoid paying), the suspicious theater manager calls the police and a chase ensues. Goody is shot and Red throws him out of the trunk onto a dirt road, where he dies.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Red then forces Thunderbolt and Lightfoot to stop the car. He pistol-whips them both, knocking them unconscious, and kicks Lightfoot violently in the head. Red takes off with the loot in the getaway car but is again pursued by police, who shoot Red several times, causing him to lose control of the car and crash through the window of a department store, where he is attacked and killed by the store’s vicious watchdog.

Escaping on foot, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot hitch a ride the next morning and are dropped off near Warsaw, Montana, where they stumble upon the one-room schoolhouse—now a historical monument on the side of a highway—moved there from its original location in Warsaw after the first heist. As the two men retrieve the stolen money, Lightfoot’s behavior becomes erratic as a result of the beating.

Thunderbolt buys a new Cadillac convertible with cash, something Lightfoot said he had always wanted to do, and picks up his waiting partner, who is gradually losing control of the left side of his body. As they drive away celebrating their success with cigars, Lightfoot, in obvious distress, tells Thunderbolt in a slurred voice how proud he is of their ‘accomplishments’, and slumps over dead.

Thunderbolt snaps his cigar in half (as it is no longer a celebration), and with his dead partner beside him, he drives off down the highway into the distance.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  DEVELOPMENT

Stan Kamen of the William Morris Agency came up with the initial idea for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, but gave it to Michael Cimino to write on speculation with Eastwood in mind. Due to the great financial success of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, road pictures were a popular genre in Hollywood. Eastwood himself wanted to do a road movie. Agent Leonard Hirshan brought the script to Eastwood from fellow agent Kamen. Reading it, Eastwood liked it so much that he originally intended to direct it himself. However, on meeting Cimino, he decided to give him the directing job instead, giving Cimino his big break and feature-film directorial debut. Cimino later said that if it was not for Eastwood, he never would have had a career in film. Cimino patterned Thunderbolt after one of his favorite ’50s films, Captain Lightfoot. The music is composed by Dee Barton but the song “Where Do I Go From Here?” is composed and performed by Paul Williams.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY/BEHIND THE SCENES

Although Eastwood generally refused to spend much time in scouting for locations, particularly unfamiliar ones, Cimino and Eastwood’s producer Robert Daley traveled extensively around the Big Sky Country in Montana for thousands of miles and eventually decided on the Great Falls area and to shoot the film in the towns of Ulm, Hobson, Fort Benton, Augusta and Choteau and surrounding mountainous countryside. The film was shot in 47 days from July to September 1973. It was filmed in Fort Benton, Wolf Creek, Great Falls, and Hobson. St. John’s Lutheran Church in Hobson was used for the opening scene.

Eastwood did not like to do any more than three takes on any given shot, according to co-star Bridges. “I would always go to Mike and say ‘I think I can do one more. I got an idea.’ And Mike would say ‘I gotta ask Clint.’ Clint would say, ‘Give the kid a shot.'” Charles Okun, first assistant director on Thunderbolt, added, “Clint was the only guy that ever said ‘no’. Michael said ‘OK, let’s go for another take.’ It was take four, Clint would say ‘No we got enough. We got it.’ […] And if [Cimino] took too long to get it ready, [Clint] would say, ‘It’s good, let’s go.'”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot 1974 (FILMING LOCATION)

  “They said the writer wants to direct it himself.” Michael Cimino wasn’t unknown to Eastwood – he’d done a pass on Magnum Force the previous year. “So I said, ‘Well let’s take a shot with him, he writes rather vividly he should direct rather vividly.” This is perhaps best-remembered as the film Cimino directed on time and under budget. As the title suggests, it’s a light-hearted buddy/caper movie with an underlying melancholy suggested by the very ’70s ending in which one of the buddies dies (these days, it would preview badly and be changed). Korean War veteran John ‘Thunderbolt’ Doherty (Eastwood), who sometimes poses as a preacher, spends his time with his wilder pal Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) robbing banks. What starts out breezily in Butch and Sundance vein, darkens as it realizes just how self-destructive the mock marriage of male-bonding can be.

 “Everybody there was on a no-nonsense road,” asserts Eastwood. “His extravagances came out several pictures down the line. There was no reason it shouldn’t be on time,” says Eastwood. “To go in and do one shot after lunch and another one maybe at six o’clock and then go home is not my idea of something to do. I like to move along.” – Eastwood

  DISTRIBUTION/RELEASE

Thunderbolt was released on May 23, 1974. The film grossed $9 million in rentals on its initial theatrical release and eventually grossed $25 million overall, making it the 17th highest-grossing film of 1974. The film did respectable box office business, and the studio profited, but Clint Eastwood vowed never to work with the movie’s distributor United Artists again due to what he felt was bad promotion. According to author Marc Eliot, Eastwood perceived himself as being upstaged by Bridges.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Given that for Eastwood this was an offbeat film, Frank Wells of Warner Bros. refused to back Malpaso in the production, leaving him to turn to United Artists and producer Bob Daley. Eastwood was unhappy with the way that United Artists had produced the film and swore “he would never work for United Artists again”, and the scheduled two-film deal between Malpaso and UA was cancelled.

  Eastwood took a big chance on you with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which you directed in 1974 with him and Jeff Bridges starring. Huge. It was [Eastwood’s production company] Malpaso’s first picture. One of the great things about him is that he’s never been afraid to take a chance on new people. I remember we saw The Wild Bunch together in New York at a theater. It was myself, my producer, Joann Carelli, and Clint. We watched it and then walked down to P.J. Clarke’s and had a hamburger. No big deal. Jeff Bridges, the same way. I was unbelievably fortunate to have both of them in my first film. And never have I had such a good time making a movie. I would go to Clint every day and say, “Hey, boss, you happy with the dailies?” He said, “Michael, you just keep shooting what you’re shooting.” He said, “I’ve done so many films with great backgrounds, and it looks like it could have been shot in Burbank, but you have an eye for scope.” When I look back, given all of my experiences, it was by far the best. And I’m still collecting checks on that movie, if you can believe it. It’s still shown all over the world. – Michael Cimino

  Edgar Wright on THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT (Trailers From Hell)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Paul Williams – Where Do I Go From Here (1971)

  Cast

 Clint Eastwood as Thunderbolt

Jeff Bridges as Lightfoot

George Kennedy as Red Leary

Geoffrey Lewis as Eddie Goody

Catherine Bach as Melody

Gary Busey as Curly (credited as Garey Busey)

Jack Dodson as vault manager

Gene Elman as tourist

 Directed by   Michael Cimino

Produced by Robert Daley

Written by     Michael Cimino

Music by       Dee Barton

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

REFERENCES and SOURCES

https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/clint-eastwood/

http://theclinteastwoodarchive.blogspot.com/

http://www.money-into-light.com/2011/09/paul-rowlands-review-of-thunderbolt-and.html

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/deer-hunter-directors-first-interview-773132

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) Retrospective SUMMARY The movie, which Cimino also wrote, is loosely based on, and named after, two infamous early-nineteenth-century Irish bandits.

[themastercylinder]

  SUMMARY

In the distant future, at a genetic research station located on the remote desert planet of Xarbia, a research team has created an experimental lifeform they have designated “Subject 20”. This lifeform was built out of the synthetic DNA strain, “Proto B”, and was intended to stave off a galaxy-wide food crisis. However, Subject 20 mutates rapidly and uncontrollably and kills all of the laboratory subject animals before cocooning itself within an examination booth. After Subject 20 hatches from its cocoon, it begins killing the personnel at the station, starting with the lab tech charged with cleansing the subject lab of the dead animal test subjects.

Professional troubleshooter Mike Colby, accompanied by his robot assistant SAM-104, is called in to investigate the problem. After Colby settles in, his decision to terminate Subject 20 to prevent further deaths is met with research-minded secrecy and resistance. The staff of the station includes the head of research, Gordon Hauser, his assistant Barbara Glaser, lab assistant Tracy Baxter, the station head of security and Cal Timbergen, the chief of bacteriology.

As Subject 20 continues to kill most of the station crew, the reason for the deception is revealed. Subject 20’s genetic design incorporates human DNA, and its method of killing is to inject its prey with the Proto B DNA strain which then proceeds to remove all genetic differences within specific cells. The result is that the victim’s living body slowly erodes into gelatinous pile of pure protein which Subject 20 consumes for sustenance. After its final mutation, where the creature evolves into a huge insect-like being with a large mouth full of sharp teeth, the creature is slain when it eats Cal’s cancer-ridden liver, its body genetically self-destructing from within. Mike and Tracy are the only survivors.

  DEVELOPMENT

FORBIDDEN WORLD is the proving ground for first-time director Alan Holzman, another in a long line of Corman’s protégés (including Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese). Holzman put together Corman’s theatrical trailers for the last couple of years, and like Joe Dante, another Corman promoted editor, asked for a chance to direct. Sets used in filming GALAXY OF TERROR were still standing and camera equipment was not due back at the rental outlet till the end of the week, so Corman agreed. “Show me what you can do in one day,” he said. Frantically, Holzman convinced character actor Jesse Vint to don a mothballed uniform, came up with a make-shift script overnight, incorporating left-over footage of dog-fight effects from BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS and enthusiastically completed an incredible 94 set-ups in one day. With his trailer experience, Holzman then edited the footage into an action sequence which Corman adjudged so accomplished that he not only gave Holzman his chance to direct. A few months later, using a screenplay by Tim Curnen based loosely on a story by New World marketing whiz Jim Wynorski, Holzman went to work on FORBIDDEN WORLD, using the space battle as the film’s exciting pre-credit sequence. The film was shot on a break-neck 20-day schedule for under $1 million, and it displays every penny of its budget right up on the screen.

Tim Curnen’s screenplay of a constantly evolving mutant on the prowl in a remote scientific outpost on the planet Zarbia is from a story by New World publicist Jim Wynorski and R.J. Robertson. Both acknowledge ALIEN and THE THING as “inspiration.”

The project actually began about 3 years ago when the motion picture ALIEN was making so many bucks at the boxoffice. Jim Wynoroski was approached by a producer who wanted to make another picture just like ALIEN so Wynoroski & his friend Robertson cooked up a 10 page treatment that Wynoroski titled MUTANT.

“My first concern,” said Robertson, “was getting our plot as far away from ALIEN as possible while maintaining the elements which had made it popular in the first place.”

The essential elements, as Robertson saw it, were an isolated group of people who were being murdered by a particularly unappealing monster. Wynoroski & Robertson’s original story was set on a lunar base near the end of the century. A group of scientists are working on an experiment to speed up the evolutionary process with the ultimate goal of allowing humanity to function in alien environments without the need of life support systems. (This proved to be a good idea since in the movie the monster attaches itself to the base’s life support system at one point in the story. That way the humans couldn’t kill the monster without killing themselves.)

A beautiful view of the model showing the outside of the research station.

One of the experimental subjects, a laboratory mouse, succeeds in adapting to various atmospheres. A little too successful for after the little critter consumes all of the other test animals in the lab it not only is able to absorb the minds & memories of its victims but also takes on whatever physical characteristics it needs to survive. After eating a cat the mouse can see in the dark. After digesting a dog it has acquired a keen sense of smell. A monkey gives it agility. The scientists are unable to capture the thing and eventually it consumes one of the technicians. From that point on, the remaining scientists battle the creature for control of the lunar base & their lives.

Unfortunately, the producer who asked for the treatment lost interest in the project, “You get used to that sort of thing.” Robertson said with a wry grin. “I guess producers work on the assumption that you’re so grateful to get a chance to break into the motion picture industry that you’ll put up with treatment that you’d never accept in any other line of endeavor.” So MUTANT met a quick death, or so Robertson & Wynoroski thought.

Building the cocoon for the Mutant in FORBIDDEN WORLD (1982

Two years later Roger Corman, president of New World Pictures, was looking around for another outer space type movie. Jim Wynoroski in the meantime has become the advertising director for New World Pictures. So he dusts off the old MUTANT treatment and hands it to Corman, who appreciates the commercial potential. Another writer was brought in to finish a script.

When Robertson saw the completed motion picture at a sneak preview he was surprised that the ending of the film was neither the one from the original treatment nor the clever ending of the screenplay in which the creature was treated like a bacteria, was given an injection of penicillin and blew up & burst like a balloon. It was completely different and we won’t spoil anything by revealing it here.

The film is now about a group of scientists working on developing a new source of synthetic food on an outpost on planet Xarbia. One of the scientists decides to try a little experiment of his own. He takes a new type of protein that grows wild on the planet and splices it together with human sperm which he then injects into a female volunteer who must have also short-circuited for a few minutes. They don’t have long to wait for the results. In 2 weeks the offspring is born. It immediately kills its mother and then goes into hiding inside a cocoon. Everyone concludes that since the new life form is inside a shell, it is therefore harmless. It is quite obvious that these scientists are completely ignorant of sci-fi literature or motion pictures for no sooner have they ceased to concern themselves with the creature than it emerges from its shell, stronger & more deadly than before. One by one the scientists fall prey to the clever creature.

Draft of the 2nd stage of the MUTANT monster by Jim Shaw

BEHIND THE SCENES

Most of FORBIDDEN WORLD’s live-action filming was done right at the Venice Studio, which meant that as the camera was rolling on one setup, another area of the stage was being struck, repainted and or redressed. Hammering stopped only long enough for rehearsals and takes. Actors and technical crew had to be careful where they stepped and leaned during production-many of the sets still had wet paint even as they were being filmed. Administration offices, hallways and various lab areas were pressed into service. A corrugated metal storage shelter served as a not-so-soundproof soundstage; an entire wall of New World’s main building was dressed and painted to provide a massive two-story space station exterior as a backdrop for one of the mutant’s killings, and a nearby vacant lot was converted into a sandy alien desert.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The sets for FORBIDDEN WORLD incorporate a lot of ordinary components in unusual ways. A standing joke during production, as volunteers went to pick up fast-food, was the effects men saying, “See if you can grab an extra handful of food trays!” A few thousand trays from McDonald’s can look impressive when spray painted and strapped to walls, augmented by such “high-tech” bricabrac as PVC piping, sheets of plastic “packing bubbles,” cut and formed upholstery foam, and cannibalized radio and TV parts.

In FORBIDDEN WORLD, you were the pilot of the first spaceship constructed entirely out of Big Mac containers and egg cartons.

Vint: Oh yeah. I was pretty amazed when I walked through that set. “These are egg cartons!” They said. “Yup. that’s what they are.”as they were tacking them to the wall and spray-painting them silver. And whenever we turned a comer and went through another portion of the ship, we just walked down the hall again and all the egg cartons would be spray-painted gold. – Jesse Vint

  SPECIAL EFFECTS

FORBIDDEN WORLD’s special effects are provided by a talented in house” effects team supervised by Bill Conway and headed by Bob and Dennis Skotak. Effects newcomer Steve Neill was given less than five weeks to come up with four major, fully operational embodiments of the evolving, rampaging life form. Neill and his constantly growing staff (which came to include Michael F. Hoover, Rick Lazzarini, Michael LaValley, Mark Shostrom, Anthony Showe and Gene Barsamian) found themselves saddled with some unworkable concepts from a previous production designer. Subsequently they agonized over several major changes from upstairs” with no easing of deadlines.

Though Neill’s delivered fourth stage design failed to operate properly, it was filmed anyway, over his objections. Since the “monster” proved so difficult to wrangle, it was decided to go heavy on the monster’s wrath. John Carl Buechler, was tapped to whip up some “death scenes” for assorted crew members.

The design and execution of the carnage fell to Buechler and a hastily assembled staff, including Stephan Czerkas, Chris Biggs and Don Olivera (who also played, in his own home-made robot suit, SAM-104, the hero’s robot sidekick). The on-screen result is a series of escalating Mutant murders, the style of which Buechler sardonically calls punk rock horror.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

POST PRODUCTION

When the hectic shoot was wrapped, Holzman locked himself into the editing room and fashioned a quick first cut. It soon became apparent that, in his time-pressed decision to “Do it anyway” on some of the Mutant effects, Holzman had shorted himself on footage of his title-star. An urgent call went out to Buechler to come back and re-do some of the third-stage Mutant work, of which there was critically insufficient footage. Within a week, Buechler delivered a Mutant head which blinked, snarled and opened wide its ravenous jaws.

Then, it was back to the editing room for Holzman, the place where many New World pictures are eventually saved. That just may be the reason Corman promotes his directors from the ranks of trailer editors. Preliminary word from insiders who have seen Holzman’s final cut of FORBIDDEN WORLD is that despite the production’s hurried pace and budget limitations, the film races.

REFERENCES and SOURCES

Shock Cinema 18 (2001)

Cinefantastique v12 n02

Famous Monsters 185

  Promotional and Advertising Material

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  Susan Justin on her “Forbidden World” Score

  Forbidden World AKA Mutant (1982) Complete Soundtrack Composed by Susan Justin

    Track listing

Theme From “Forbidden World” (02:35)

Titles (02:36)

Birth And Death (01:27)

Mourning (01:26)

Alone (03:24)

Steam Room (01:23)

Mutation (02:31)

Xarbia (02:29)

The Hole (02:43)

The Doctor Returns (01:27)

Laser Shower (01:16)

Communication (01:43)

The End (03:58)

End Title Theme From “Forbidden World” (02:13)

Total Duration: 00:31:11

  Credits

Jesse Vint as Mike Colby

Dawn Dunlap as Tracy Baxter

June Chadwick as Dr. Barbara Glaser

Linden Chiles as Dr. Gordon Hauser

Fox Harris as Dr. Cal Timbergen

Raymond Oliver as Brian Beale

Scott Paulin as Earl Richards

Michael Bowen as Jimmy Swift

Don Olivera as SAM-104

 Makeup Department

John Carl Buechler  …special makeup effects (as J.C. Buechler)

Sue Dolph     …       makeup artist

Karen Kubeck         …special makeup effects artist: assistant makeup artist

Susan Moray …       hair stylist

Steve Neill    …       prosthetic fabricator

Don Olivera   …       special makeup effects

Jim Shaw      …       prosthetic designer

Christopher Biggs …special makeup effects artist (uncredited)

Bart Mixon    …       special makeup effects artist (uncredited)

Mark Shostrom       …special makeup effects artist (uncredited)

                                                                Forbidden World (1982) a.k.a Mutant Retrospective SUMMARY In the distant future, at a genetic research station located on the remote desert planet of Xarbia, a research team has created an experimental lifeform they have designated "Subject 20".

[themastercylinder]

PLOT When a powerful storm knocks Fly Creek, Georgia’s power lines down onto wet soil, the resulting surge of electricity drives large, bloodthirsty worms to the surface and out of their soil-tilling minds. The townspeople soon discover that their sleepy fishing village is overrun with worms that burrow right into their skin. Inundated by hundreds of thousands of carnivorous creatures, the terrorized locals race to find the cause of the rampage before becoming tilled under themselves.

  Richard Curtis novelization of the screenplay

Richard Curtis novelization of the screenplay

  BACKSTORY

“The script for Squirm was actually based on a true event.” Lieberman continues. “My brother Gary, who is now a noted pediatrician. hooked up an electric train transformer in our backyard to get worms out of the ground to go fishing. And it was amazing-all these worms suddenly came up out of the earth! Being very young, it scared the shit out of me, and those impressions emerged into a story.”

Within six weeks, Lieberman completed a draft of the arthropod epic, which he then gave to producer George Manasse. whose credits include a dramatization of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal called The Wild Party. He saw the potential in Lieberman’s script and passed it on to independent producers Edgar Lansbury and Joseph Beruh, a team who were mainly known for prestigious Broadway theater productions like Godspell and The Subject Was Roses. Fortunately, as Lieberman notes, the pair also had their lowbrow side.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

“The whole thing happened really fast,” he recounts. “Lansbury and Beruh loved Squirm, they thought it was a sure thing when they read the script. and they bought it immediately. They read it in the summer of 75, and we shot in November of that year. Although they had a few investors, Edgar and Joe mostly used their own money ($470,000) to make the picture.”

Squirm’s scenario was originally set in New England, but the weather conditions of the fall season forced the filmmaker to seek an alternative site for his worms to invade. Scouting for a well foliated shoreline location. Lieberinan settled on Port Wentworth. Georgia, a small town just outside of Savannah. “Since those large sandworms weren’t common in the area where we were shooting, we had to get the worms from Maine, refrigerate them and bring them down to Georgia,” Lieberman recalls. “The next spring there were articles in the paper about how Squirm threw off the whole fishing industry in Maine because there weren’t enough worms left after we got through!”

While half of Squirm’s slithering hordes were of the fake rubber variety. the multitude of authentic worms caused several major production dilemmas. “To get the real worms to act the way they did, we electrified them,” Lieberman reveals.

“We ran wires over the floor and juiced them with a rheostat. But we’d only get three good jolts out of ‘em before the room would start to smell like burning hamburger!

“The one setup that stands out in my mind is when we had to fill an entire living room with worms. We built a scaffolding that was about four feet off the ground, and covered it with worm-colored canvas material. We poured thousands of worms over the top of it until it was about six inches deep in them. Then we brought in a local Cub Scout troop, and they got underneath the scaffolding. They were all hunched over, and I directed them to pick their shoulders up and make the whole sea of worms undulate. It was pretty effective.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Even more memorable is the now legendary “Worm face” scene, in which a young Rick Baker transformed actor Richard A. Dow into what is perhaps Lieberman’s most striking vision of horror. The hideous sight of a slew of sandworms burrowing through Dow’s prosthetically modified countenance has churned many a young, impressionable stomach over the years.

“I had that scene vividly etched in my mind I knew exactly how it had to be shown.” Lieberman says of the show-stopping effect. “I felt it was the most crucial element in Squirm. to the point where I told the producers that we shouldn’t do the movie unless we could find somebody who could figure out how to create Worm face. If we couldn’t convince the audience that worms are much more horrible than just something gross that you can stomp on, we wouldn’t have a movie. That’s why I thought Bug was the stupidest thing I ever saw, or Frogs for instance: What are they gonna do, gum you to death? There’s no sense in doing these movies if you can’t deliver.”

With these concerns in mind. Lieberman brought Baker to New York during preproduction to cast Dow’s face for the fateful scene. “Rick told me. I’m not sure this is gonna work.” Lieberman recalls. “Prosthetics were brand-new for him. We didn’t have the budget to test it out, and when Rick finally made the facial appliances, he said. “You’ve got two takes. We put these artificial worms on monofilament line, and they were soaked in high speed machine fluid so they’d be lubricated enough to go through the channels under the latex: if the appliances tore, we were out of luck. There was a puppeteer standing just off camera, pulling the lines to make the worms go up through Richard’s skin. We actually got it done in one take, because I didn’t want to spend three hours putting the whole rig back on his face.”

According to Lieberman. the impact of Baker’s artistry was felt instantly on the set. “There was a 340-pound grip on the crew named Mongo, and I saw him walk away because he was so grossed out the director remembers. “I knew right then and there that we had a hit on our hands!

Ironically, while the film’s fragile femme Patricia Pearcy had no problem handling the slimy creatures, lead actor Don Scardino (who later starred in He Knows You’re Alone for the same producers) was reportedly disgusted by his wriggling co-stars. Fortunately, the actor’s aversion to Squirm’s subject matter didn’t dampen his friendship with Lieberman: years later, as producer of the sitcom The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. Scardino had his old friend brought in to direct the show’s Halloween episode.

One supporting actor found a surefire method of dealing with the film’s unpleasant shooting conditions. “The actor who played Willie Grimes, the old man who is found eaten by worms, was just a local guy who wanted to be in the movie, Lieberman reveals. “He was required to lie there in a hole for eight hours with a fake body that had worms in its gut. He just had us give him Southern Comfort, and as long as we kept him drunk, he was happy as a clam!

“One of the interesting things about Squirm is the actors who aren’t in it.” Lieberman continues. “For instance, we could have had Kim Basinger in the female lead. I personally auditioned her, but like an idiot. I said, “Nah, the audience will never believe that she lives in this hick town.’ I didn’t understand that the horror audience would rather see a beautiful girl with a body like that being covered with worms than anything else.”

The young Basinger wasn’t the only star to be deprived of Squirm’s golden opportunity. “At one point. we had Martin Sheen to play Scardino’s character. Lieberman says. “But he started talking to me about changing the character and making him an actor, so that in the scene where he holds up the skull. he could say, “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well… He said it gave him a handle. I told Edgar Lansbury, with all due respect, that if I had to spend time on Sheen, we’d never bring the movie in.”

After five weeks of the most exhausting labor Lieberman had ever experienced. seven days of which was solid worm work. Squirm was in the can. But the filmmaker’s toil didn’t end with the conclusion of principal photography. “I was heavily involved with the post production on Squirm,” he notes. “In fact, I created the sound of the worms. I rubbed two balloons together and recorded them at different speeds. Then, on another track. I recorded big shears snapping open and closed to create the sound of the worms’ teeth. We put these together on a multi track machine and made one loop that would be for a few worms, another for a thousand worms and another for a million worms.

The director also reveals that the endearing “worm scream” sound heard during close-ups of the critters was appropriated from the hog. slaughter scene in Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Trivia buffs may have noticed a Squirm poster hanging in the background of several scenes in De Palma’s Blow Out, which Lieberman claims is not a coincidence. “De Palma was my idol back when I was doing Squirm.” he admits. “I met him years later, and when I asked him about that poster in Blow Out, he said, ‘Only use the best!

The MPAA didn’t take to Squirm as kindly as De Palma. Not surprisingly, they fingered nearly all of Squirm’s scary moments as objectionable to PG-rated sensibilities. “It was so annoying!” Lieberman fumes. “They cut the effects scenes so short that it looked like a mistake in the editing! Even the scene with the worms falling on the girl in the shower, which is all in your head to begin with, had to be cut down! AIP didn’t care about stuff like that, they weren’t exactly artistes, they just wanted to get the film a PG. In the theatrical version, there was just enough of the worm attacks left for them to work; on TV. the cuts are ridiculous!” Squirm eventually went out with an R rating.

Thankfully, the edits didn’t stop Squirm from raking in the long green, Lansbury and Beruh recouped their investment from foreign theatrical advances alone. When Lieberman came up with another horrific screenplay concept, the producers gave him the go-ahead almost instantly. The resulting film, 1977’s Blue Sunshine, is viewed by many fans (and the director himself) as Lieberman’s finest hour in the low-budget arena.

  Jeff Lieberman Interview

Your film Squirm from 1976 is a somewhat offbeat horror film and not quite in the vein of the traditional horror movies from the 70’s. It has more in common with the Creature features of the 50’s. Do you agree or do you see the film as something completely different?

I was heavily influenced by the creature features of the 1950’s, in fact the radiation films inspired my late 70s film Blue Sunshine. But Squirm was directly influenced by The Birds which was from 1963, so it doesn’t fit into that 50’s-70’s decade thing. It’s a big mistake that so many people make, trying to force movies into fitting into trends of certain decades, no matter whether reality enters into it or not. Ninety percent of  the movies made in America during the Vietnam war had nothing to do with the war, yet pretty much all of them are attributed to it.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

How did the project start and what inspired you to write the story?

Well, it was inspired by The Birds but also by an experiment me an my brother did as kids and that can be found in Roger’s monologue about how, in his childhood, he used electricity to get worms out of the ground. I did the exact same thing with my older brother, who read all about it in Boy’s Life magazine.

How long did it take to write the screenplay and did the story change along the way?

It only took me about six weeks to write Squirm, and that was in long hand on yellow legal paper. I couldn’t type at all back then. And no, the story didn’t change.

Why did you decide on using sea worms instead of…well, any other type of worms?

Because, as Gerri says in the movie: “They bite”. Only kind of worms I know of that have those sharp pinchers and scary looking mouths.

Did you already have a studio interested or did you shop the script around? And how did the executives react to your story about killer worms?

I had nothing when I was writing. No studio, no interest, just sat down and wrote it. Then someone I knew got it to some producers and instantly there was a mini bidding war between them and using that leverage, I got to direct my first movie. Material is everything.

Regarding the casting, did you have a regular casting process or did you write the script with any specific actors in mind?

I had nobody in mind at all. It was my first film and I didn’t even know any young actors at that time.

I have read that Kim Basinger auditioned for the female lead. Is this true?

Sadly that is true. She was fresh out of the Ford model agency and incredibly stunning. And from Georgia too. But I decided that nobody would believe she lived next door to a worm farm so I nixed her. What a jerk I was.

Yep haha. So I guess it’s right that Sylvester Stallone and Martin Sheen were interested in being a part of Squirm?

Martin Sheen was first cast in the lead as Mick and Stallone wanted to audition for Roger. Though I have an enormous respect for Sylvester Stallone, and he went on to have a monster career, I still think he was totally wrong for the role of Roger. Martin Sheen would have been fine, except that he saw the movie for something other than what it was and I’m sure it would have been a clash had we proceeded.

Tell me about the production and how the shoot went down.

It was a rag tag, non-union crew, all New Yorkers transplanted to the swamp lands outside of Savannah Georgia, very rural South. We didn’t quite fit in. Burt Reynolds was filming, I think Gator or one of those other red neck movies he did at the same time down there, so our two crews go on great. It took 25 days in all, including all special F/X with worms. Of course there was not only no CGI back then, but no money to do SFX opticals later either, so we had to figure out how to do most of it right there on location in the camera.

The make-up is designed by acclaimed make-up artist Rick Baker. How did he come aboard and how was it working with him?

The producer found him, but I had a great working relationship with him. It was mostly him telling me exactly how it needed to be done and me doing what he said. I didn’t know squat about special F/X make-up back then and on top of that, he was using the very latest technology that he learned from the great Dick Smith. So I got really lucky in that regard because to this day, the signature of the film is still the worm face shot designed by Rick.

Now where does one go to get so many sea worms? And do you have any idea how many you used in the film?

I think we used around a quarter of a million of them, all off the coast of New England.

I have always wondered about what you did with the rest of the worms after the production wrapped. Did you sell them or throw then into the sea or what?

Actually there were none left, they were all dead and many of them from electrocution!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

About the original poster artwork painting (with all the colors and the skull), I have always loved that and I think it’s a shame it hasn’t been used as cover artwork for the DVD release. But who came up with the idea for the poster and did you have anything to do with it?

I had nothing at all to do with that poster, it was all the marketing department at A.I.P. Didn’t have any input on the MGM DVD either. Purely marketing people.

Where do you see Squirm as far as its place in the overall canon of hallowed horror films from the 70s?

 As far as the movie itself, I think Squirm holds up amazingly well. There isn’t a lot to date it; it’s sort of ever green, it’s almost Nancy Drew mystery but with killer worms. It sounds funny, but it keeps on playing around the world on TV and now the hi-def channels and all that, to this day, I believe because of those reasons. There is a timelessness about it. It still makes money, too.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  Cast Don Scardino as Mick Patricia Pearcy as Geraldine “Geri” Sanders R.A. Dow as Roger Grimes Jean Sullivan as Naomi Sanders Peter MacLean as Sheriff Jim Reston Fran Higgins as Alma Sanders William Newman as Quigley Barbara Quinn as the sheriff’s girl Carl Dagenhart as Willie Grimes Angel Sande as Millie Carol Jean Owens as Lizzie Kim Leon Iocovozzi as Hank Walter Dimmick as Danny Leslie Thorsen as Bonnie Julia Klopp as Mrs. Klopp

Directed by Jeff Lieberman Produced by George Manas Written by Jeff Lieberman

Music by Robert Prince Cinematography Joseph Mangine Edited by Brian Smedley-Aston Distributed by American International Pictures

Squirm (1976) Retrospective PLOT When a powerful storm knocks Fly Creek, Georgia's power lines down onto wet soil, the resulting surge of electricity drives large, bloodthirsty worms to the surface and out of their soil-tilling minds.

[themastercylinder]

Hansi: The Girl who Loved the Swastika is an American one-shot comic book, published in 1973 by Spire Christian Comics and drawn by Al Hartley. It is a story set in Nazi Germany in 1938 that condemns Nazism and Communism and promotes the Bible. It is based on the real-life story of Maria Anne Hirschmann.

Origins

After becoming a born-again Christian in 1967, Hartley in the 1970s published a series of comics promoting the stories of Christians in the modern world, and decided that Hirschmann’s story would fit in with his series.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Plot

Hansi is a naïve young peasant girl in Sudetenland, who is mesmerized by the Führer and reading books. After the Sudetenland is transferred from Czechoslovakia to Germany in October 1938, she welcomes the Sudetenland “going home to the Reich”. She wins a contest, organized by Adolf Hitler, that picks students for special training in National socialist schools in Prague. Her mother is delighted, but warns her in advance to “never forget Jesus Christ”. As Hansi arrives in Prague, she is educated into antisemitism, but has doubts since Jesus himself was a Jew. Still, despite people informing her about the famine and horrors of the war she remains enthusiastic about Hitler.

Hansi is also in love with a German U-boat sailor named Rudy, but his parents disapprove of the marriage because she is just a peasant. Since she doesn’t want to break him and his parents apart she breaks the relationship off. By now Hansi is so brainwashed that she condemns the Bible as “outdated” and only fit for “cowards and weaklings”. As the war progresses Hansi and other people have to evacuate Prague because the Russians are on their way. Despite other people around her realizing that the war is a lost cause, Hansi remains confident in the Führer. She is sent off to a Russian prisoner camp, where she and other girls have to work in slave labor and become victim of rape, except for Hansi who is too skinny to be taken advantage of by the men. Hansi and a girlfriend decide to escape to the American prisoner camps, despite her friend’s objections about the USA. They manage to cross the border safely and escape Red Army soldiers trying to shoot refugees. Despite all the misery around her, Hansi still has her faith in Jesus. As Hansi reaches the American prisoner camp, she is amazed how good the American soldiers treat her. As the war is over and Germany lies in rubble Hansi decides to become a teacher.

Then it turns out Rudy is still alive. They become a couple again, but after a year they feel something “is missing from their lives”. Hans re-introduces Hansi to the Bible, but she feels unsure whether she can still believe as she suffered through so much misery. Over the years she and Rudy raise a family and become good Christians. They travel to the US, where Hansi wonders whether all the materialism “obscured God’s blessings” and made her students “troubled” and “unsure where to give their allegiance”. As Hansi takes the flag salute, she is finally convinced about the goodness of the United States, when she hears the phrase “one nation under God”, because “it’s all right to love what God has blessed”. Now Rudy and Hansi decide to promote the Bible to young people and explain the splendor of America’s freedom.

  Reviews

The Swedish historian Fredrik Strömberg called Hirschmann’s story fascinating, but wrote the comic was “questionable” in its message. Strömberg wrote that the character of Hirschmann was little more than a blank slate, who uncritically follows whatever she is reading, starting out as a Catholic, becoming a Nazi, and ending the story as a Protestant, writing was the comic was “not much of a statement for free thinking”. Strömberg also expressed concern about the message the comic gives in that the women who were raped by the Red Army soldiers were “rewarded” by being killed, saying the comic was highly misogynistic despite having a female protagonist. Another reviewer complained that the comic was extremely objectionable in its message, citing the line from the comic “Germany surrendered! The dream ended! The nightmare began!”, leading the reviewer to sarcastically state in response “Unless you were a Jew, Communist, gypsy, homosexual or dissident, in which case, the nightmare had ended- the authors of this book, I can’t believe ’em”. The same reviewer noted that the character of Hirschmann as presented in the comic was “…the most gullible girl in the world! She believes anything she reads, f’r cryin’ out loud. She starts off believing the Bible cause it’s the only book she has, then some Nazi gives her ANOTHER book so SHE becomes a Nazi, then she hears the Bible’s cool again, so she picks that up, then she hears America’s cool, and goes there, only it isn’t”.

      Hansi: The Girl who Loved the Swastika Hansi: The Girl who Loved the Swastika is an American one-shot comic book, published in 1973 by Spire Christian Comics and drawn by Al Hartley.

[themastercylinder]

STORY LINE

While cleaning one of his father’s rifles as a birthday surprise, young Ed Jr. accidentally shoots his mother. Ed never forgives his son for this, and the two become estranged. Years later, while Ed and his friends are trying to think of something to do for their college’s fall break, Big Ed calls, and demands Ed come to his beachfront condominium, and close it up for the winter. Ed’s friends convince him to accept the job, and take them with him, so it will be finished quicker, and they can spend the rest of their break hanging around the condo.

Ed’s group arrives at the condo, which Big Ed is passed out drunk in the basement of, having dreams about killing his son. After dinner, everyone goes for a walk on the beach, and Mike and Linda go skinny dipping in the pool. Big Ed discovers the two, drowns Linda, and uses a trail of her and Mike’s discarded clothes to lure Mike back to the condo, where he kills him with an outboard motor. A police officer stationed on the beach then stops by the condo, and is killed when Big Ed decapitates him with an axe.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The others return to the condo, and as his friends get ready for bed, Ralph searches for Mike and Linda, and is killed when Big Ed impales him through the throat with a pitchfork. When Ralph does not return, Sue goes looking for him, and is caught by Big Ed, who stabs her in the crotch with a fishing gaff, and chops her head off. Ed and Pam find Sue’s mutilated remains, and the bodies of the other victims, in the basement, and are attacked by Big Ed. The two incapacitate Big Ed and try to drive away, but Big Ed jumps onto the car, and tries attacking them through the roof. Pam puts the car into reverse, and backs into a wall, crushing Big Ed into it, and cutting him in half at the waist. When a police car arrives, one of the deputies goes to inspect Big Ed’s body, and has one of his legs sliced off when Big Ed springs to life. As Ed and Pam look on in horror, Big Ed finally dies laughing maniacally.

  BACKSTORY

When North Carolina-based lawyer Buddy Cooper had an idea for a horror movie, he set out to be unique. His first attempt at film making required a special angle to break it apart from the dozens of recent predecessors. He recalls, “I was walking down the beach with a guy and we started talking about horror movies and how a low budget one could use nautical things to do people in. We came up with about four or five nautical ways of killing people. I also think it’s a primordial fear that boys have a fear of their father. I think it’s true of almost all animals that the father will attack and kill their young, Cats are the ones that come to mind, I believe it’s particularly fearsome for a small child to be threatened by his father. I think that’s why I chose that concept for the structure of the movie because it might strike a chord with the audience. The rest fleshed itself out.”

Not having any previous motion picture credits whatsoever, Cooper wanted to produce what he calls, “A real popcorn muncher “Thus, The Mutilator was born. His desire to make movies had, up to that point, only been a dream in the summer of 1982, Cooper enrolled in the American University in Washington, DC. “I’ve always wanted to make a movie. And I felt that I would someday. I had only taken one or two courses in college and read some, but really hadn’t done much, I went to the American University for a two week intensive course on script writing and film production, I got to know the guys that were teaching the course and one of them was John Douglass.” Cooper began writing The Mutilator during this time while Douglass and he stayed in touch throughout the process. “John counseled me and I sent him various treatments and rewrites. He made suggestions right along. He recommended graduate students from the university to work as production assistants. He worked with the talent for two weeks while we did other things. All his work together, I thought, earned him co-director credit. It’s a legitimate credit.”

The original intention of the Mutilator project was to make a low-budget quickie, with Cooper and a few choice associates to shoot the picture themselves. “We were going to shoot it in two weeks… maybe three. Four of us were going to do it! I would do camera and special effects makeup and a friend of mine was doing sound and someone else would cover other jobs. The original budget was $80,000, We left that a long time ago! It came in at about $650,000. We kinda made the budget up as we went along! The need for professional opinions and expertise became more obvious. Cooper and Douglass went to New York City where Cooper interviewed a director of photography. “The first one disillusioned us with his opinions and views of what it would be like. It was a bad day for me. The next day we interviewed another one, Peter Schnall, and he seemed to strike a better chord with me. Once I decided to hire Peter, he asked who could run my sound, who’s the matter and so on. He suggested that needed hardcore professionals. We used all New York NABET National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians) people. They were great teachers and very dedicated. It was not the easiest of shoots, Without the NABET people, it probably wouldn’t have been made.

The Mutilator began production on May 4th, 1983. His script in hand, Buddy Cooper recollects that first day of shooting. “The first day we were shooting in a country store where the character of Ralph (Bill Hitchcock) buys some beer, It was drizzling rain. I was unprepared for all that was going to happen … the big lights were being unloaded and they were laying dolly tracks down and pulling the camera on it. Peter Schnall took me to the side and said, When you see something you like that’s what we’re going to do.” He kind of led me by the hand that first day and I needed that. It was exciting but I was more lost than aware.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Aside from the unique story approach, The Mutilator manages to entertain its audience on another level. Cooper felt that the look of the picture should be as special as its script. This goal is amazingly achieved by the film’s crisp and moodily lit scenes. Cooper explains. “We wanted a very low light… almost a film noir look. That meant, because we were using low light, focus would be critical. We wanted deep, dark blues and rich blacks where it falls off into shadows and sometimes depth of focus was just a few inches. I think you’ve got to admit that the look of the picture is a little bit different for its genre and sort of special in its own right. Peter and John Newby, I think, are responsible for that.”

Heading up the special makeup effects team was Mark Shostrom, Anthony Showe and Ed Ferrell, Faced with a screenplay requiring nearly a dozen makeup effects, they successfully executed some of the genre’s grisliest murders. Ferrell, who assisted on all the makeup, relates some of the finest behind-the-scenes moments. During the course of the movie, a photograph is shown that reveals a graphic scene of a swimmer who was run over by a motorboat. The swimmer in the still is director Buddy Cooper ( making a Hitchcock-like appearance). “On my first day, I didn’t know what to expect,” says Ferrell, “We practiced that afternoon on the scars for Buddy and the next day we went over to his office where he cleared off a 10-foot long meeting table. He laid down and as we were applying the gelatin scar material, secretaries were bringing in checks to sign and his partner, Neil Whitford, brought in briefs to review. Then we walked next door where there is a restaurant with a dock on the back where the still was taken. At that point there was a food delivery and the truck driver’s reaction was one of the best I’ve encountered. He walked around the corner and there stood Buddy with these gaping holes in his side.

Not all the special effects went as easily. Certain designs had to be altered and some never worked at all, forcing alternate plans at the last moment. In one instance, it was to the picture’s advantage. In a highly effective drowning sequence, masterfully edited by Hughes Winborne and Stephen Mack, the initial intent was to eliminate the first victim by a fishing spear. When the effect did not handle as well as thought, a last minute change in script forced a drowning of the character, Linda (Francis Raines). But the unusual presentation of this sequence actually enhances the tone of the film and perfectly sets up” the audience for the subsequent bloodshed.

H.G. Lewis vet Ben Moore makes a brief but memorable appearance in The Mutilator. Ben played the axe wielding wacko in 2000 Maniacs, Buddy Cooper knew Moore for years and when it came time for the casting of the ill-fated deputy, Cooper explains, “Ben is from Morehead, North Carolina, where part of the film was shot and I’ve known him a long time. He used to come by the office and ask, ‘When you gonna make that movie? When we finally had the tests for the deputy, Ben would say how good he’d be for that part. I’d tell him not to worry because we would test him. We knew we were going to give him.

Ed Ferrell continues about the unforeseen complications with the effects makeup and cited Ben Moore’s decapitation as the most time-consuming “We had back-up heads and everything was set and ready to go. We primed the blood into the head and just before we rolled the cameras it started bleeding from the mouth! We stopped and Mark Shostrom tried to repair it but was taking too long. The crew went elsewhere and filmed some pick-up shots. Problems wise, that scene took the longest. Mark sculpted an amazingly large appliance for Morey Lampley’s death scene. He used a foam-latex formula created by Dick Smith and it went from Morey’s neck to his waistline. It wasn’t very comfortable but it had to be worn by him for five hours or so. He gets chewed up by an outboard motor when Big Ed’ jams it into him. That went four takes and used two cameras.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The Mutilator script, while containing several scenes of graphic violence, would be just as unsettling if the effects makeup were played down. Cooper’s theme of a father seeking revenge on his son, played by Matt Mitler, called for an actor whose range could carry the non-speaking role through facial nuances. This was a critical factor in casting the part. Jack Chatham (pronounced, Chatham) imparts a brilliant portrayal of the lead nemesis, Big Ed. Not having a hockey mask to hide behind, Chatham was extremely conscientious about the role. As Cooper explains, Jack was a former teacher and basketball coach. He called and asked for a script before he tested. We sent him a script and he came in dressed as he thought Big Ed would dress. We used a video camera for tests and when we saw him on the monitor, we knew he was it. I remember him asking on the phone what type of character the father was and all I could tell him was, ‘He’s a mean son-of-a-bitch, And that’s what Jack practiced!”

The Mutilator spilled over 35 gallons of blood throughout its production. A portion of that is amply displayed in Big Ed’s vicious death sequence. Originally, a full-sized dummy was used in certain angles but in the final editing stages, the sequences were deemed too unrealistic for inclusion in the film. Hughes Winborne, who worked on sound effects and edited segments of the film, managed to fit some of that discarded footage into the answer print. Winborne tells me, “The problem with that scene and the way it was shot was if you never saw the dummy footage, you never really knew what was going on. We started experimenting. There were master shots of the dummy latched onto a platform that was attached to the rear bumper of the car going into the wall. It just didn’t look right. As it turned out, we cut the scene so that the action switches from Pam (Ruth Martinez) with Big Ed on the back pleading not to be crushed into the wall. But from that perspective, you really couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on. We finally decided to cut away from that action to six frames of the dumny being rammed into the wall and then right to Big Ed after impact.” Since the scene depicts lack Chatham being split in two, it required him to be buried waist-deep into the ground. “Chatham went through hell being buried, “Winbome continues. He stayed in there a long time. He was losing the circulation in his legs and had to be dug out of there a few times! There were several takes of that scene.”

When the character Ralph sets stabbed through the neck with a pitchfork, Buddy Cooper used an unusual technique. He says, “There is a shot from the side where the pitchfork is coming out from behind a door at Ralph’s neck and him falling back trying to get away from it. The pitchfork goes rapidly right up to his neck and then there’s a cut. That shot was filmed upside down! It started with the pitchfork here, indicating his neck, then it was pulled away, and he went forward. So it’s in the movie backwards and upside down!”

Ferrell further explains a problem that turned out to have an advantageous result. During the horrific climax, the character Sue (Connie Rogerslis gruesomely impaled with a fishing gaff. “Mark used a body cast and it was filled with blood bladders. We cut a hole for Jack to aim for and a happy coincidence was when a blood-filled prophylactic was nicked by the gaff and pops out. But it appears as if it’s intestines or something!”

A neck-to-knees alginate cast of Frances Raines

Many of the Mutilator sound effects were post-dubbed by Winborne, Ferrell and Buddy Cooper at the Film Center in New York City. An interesting array of foodstuffs were sacrificed to accommodate the on-screen butchery, Cooper describes the mayhem: “A whole raw chicken got a fist in its chest cavity for the wall scene. We used a bag of black-eyed peas to simulate blood and walking in the sand, Most of the knife plunges were done with a meat cleaver into a head of cabbage. For a leg getting chopped off we used a 10 dollar watermelon! Bone crunches were done by making appropriate noises into a microphone and I know somewhere along the line we used a pound of chicken livers. By time we were done, the studio looked like a slaughterhouse. It was a lot of fun!”

The Mutilator was shot entirely on location in Morehead City and Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. Since location shoots rely heavily on cooperation with town officials and residents, Cooper found total support in his native home. We were shooting the outside of a college-dorm scene in Morehead and a block away they were digging a foundation for a condominium. Apparently they had struck water and were pumping it out of the hole. We called the supervisor and asked if he could shut the loud pump off. Well, each time we filmed he would shut his pump off and in between takes he’d turn it back on! Morehead also had a railroad track running right through the middle of town and while we filmed, the police were stopping car traffic. But we forgot about the train! And each afternoon at about three o’clock the train came through carrying jet fuel from the port to a Marine air station. It would be blowing its air horn and caused us to stop filming. The chief of police came over and said, ‘Look, we can’t stop the train but we sure can speed it up!’ and that’s what they did! They had someone wave the train on through. This is the kind of cooperation we got. The local people were just great.”

On location in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina

Cooper never produced a second film, because “The Mutilator,” had a rocky run in theaters.

“I didn’t get my money back,” Cooper said, and he credits much of the film’s commercial demise to a kerfuffle with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) over an appropriate rating. Cooper opted for an unrated release of “The Mutilator” in New York, Los Angeles and other big movie towns. He said it did well, bringing in $400,000 (the final budget was $450,000) on opening weekend. In order to secure a wider release, though, the movie would need to get an MPAA rating.

“When it hit the hinterlands without a rating, it was considered to be X-rated, and at that time, an X rating meant pornography,” Cooper said. “The MPAA had [originally] offered an X rating, which I turned down for that reason.”

Cooper said he had a difficult time securing bookings because of this rating. “Imagine a theater showing porn in the 1980s Bible Belt,” he said. The few bookings he did get, Cooper added, did not amount to much, because newspapers, radio and television stations refused to run advertisements for an X-rated film. He said he knew he had to recut the film so it could receive an R rating from the MPAA.

“That meant cutting out all the good parts,” Cooper said. “It’s not very interesting in the R-rated version.”

    Interview with Director Buddy Cooper

Was the decision to make a slasher horror movie as your first (and only) feature film strictly based on the possibility of a monetary return, or were you a fan of horror films going into it?

I was a fan of the horror genre. I had been reviewing movies for the local paper for a few years. I was friends with the manager of the local theaters. The new pictures were first run on Fridays. The new films were set up on platters after the last show on Thursday nights. The manager would let me come in late Thursday, give me a box of popcorn and a Pepsi and run the new pictures for me. I’d often watch horror movies alone in those dark theaters until 2:00 or so in the morning. It was great. However, the decision to make a horror picture was influenced by economics. At the time Weekly Variety was reporting that 30% of the tickets sold in the U.S. were being sold for horror films. I had read that horror films could be made for not too much money—they were referred to as low-budget horror films. I thought that I would have the best chance of getting my money back if I made a low-budget horror film. So both. I liked the genre and it seemed like a good financial idea at the time.

  For the audience, the transition between the two time periods is pretty quick. Ed accidentally kills his mother, but we next see him as a college student and his father is about to snap and become “The Mutilator.” Was there any story lost, either by editing or the filming schedule, between those two points?

 No. That was the way it was written, shot and edited. I thought that the audience would be able to keep up with that time transition without wasting any screen time explaining it.

  One of the things that sets The Mutilator apart from other horror movies of its era is the absolute brutality of the gaffe-through-the-crotch scene. There’s a lot of academic writings about slasher films being an allegory for male sexual frustration, with knife penetrations being replacement for the desire of sexual penetration. I’m not sure that I buy that, but if there’s anything to that line of thought, the gaffe scene kind of just goes right to it. When you came up with this scene, was there any fear that you had “gone too far”?

I wasn’t thinking that seriously about it. I thought it would be a good, evil, horrific event of the sort that would make the audience cringe. Nothing more. Some on the crew thought it was too much. Especially some of the women. Lisa Schnall, little sister of Peter Schnall the DP, was our boom operator.  Lisa said she wasn’t going to work on that scene. Peter explained professional responsibility or something to her and she agreed, but during the first take it got to be too much for her and she ran out. She came back and we got it on take two.

Overall, the various death scenes are not too surprising to someone who watches lots of movies, including slasher films. However, Sue’s was the exception. It is the only one that really seems cruel (in the context of horror movie deaths). The killer actually impales her with the gaff in a very uncomfortable place, and her reaction immediately prior to the piercing is really understated. Compared to the other deaths, this one stands out as being the “odd duck.” Is there any reason why Sue’s demise was so brutal?

No, in keeping with the motif of doing these young people in using nautical implements, the huge gaff seemed like a natural. Now why I chose to gaff Sue where I did, I can’t explain – it was just a horrible thing to think about. Certainly in retrospect, I should have chosen differently.

  How well did the film do theatrically and on video back then? And did you see any of that money? I ask because it’s always struck me as odd that there wasn’t a follow-up Buddy Cooper production.

When The Mutilator was first released, it “broke” in New York City and did well. It grossed about $400,000 in its opening weekend and made it to #13 on Variety‘s weekly chart of top grossing films. It stayed on the chart for six weeks.  After that it did well in LA and in one or two pockets of understanding around.  But it was unrated, and because it was unrated when we could get bookings, the theaters couldn’t get advertising—the papers wouldn’t run ads for an unrated picture, radio and TV stations wouldn’t run the spots. At that time an unrated film was considered to be a pornographic film. Ultimately, It was necessary to decimate the gore scenes in order to garner an “R” from the MPAA and, as I had suspected, the fans lost interest. I lost money because of that. Vestron offered a nice $250,000 advance, but went into bankruptcy still owing me a third of that.

I lost enough money so that it was a few years before I recovered and then I was supporting a family and paying bills and I was gun shy of putting it all into another movie at that time. Later, I went to AFI and spent a few years in LA chasing a career as a producer. I put together a few projects, but never was able to make a movie and ultimately my hopes for a Hollywood career got away from me.

  The theme song is insanely catchy. If you see the movie once, you’ll have the song stuck in your head for a week. It’s unusual for a horror film to have a theme song that isn’t “scary.” You even released it on a 45. What was the idea behind using a song like this to open the film, and were the 45s produced simply as a promotional item, or was there a thought that the song might have some “hit” potential?

The picture is set at the beach. There is a type of music around here and in South Carolina as well known as “beach music.” It’s music that’s good to shag to. For your UK fans, “the shag” is a dance. So I wanted beach music in the movie. Michael Minard wrote the music and he and Arthur Resnick wrote the lyrics. Arthur wrote one of the all-time great beach music songs, “Under the Boardwalk,” so he was a good choice for Michael as a collaborator.

     Looking back on it now, is there something you would have changed about the movie?

In hindsight, I believe that the script is the weakest part of the movie. If I were to do it over again I would spend a lot more time rewriting and polishing the screenplay. The screen values produced by the cast and crew and the edit and sound edit are all of very superior quality. While I’m not particularly proud of the screenplay, I am proud to have been part of a collaborative effort which produced such high screen value. Also, I would have begun editing the picture on the set. I didn’t know that you were supposed to start editing before the shoot was finished. We could have saved a lot of time. This is an example of how ignorant I was going into this project. On the other hand, I learned an awful lot about making movies.

  If you could go back and remake it, what changes would you make to the screenplay? Would they be sweeping rewrites, or limited (such as changing some of the spoken dialog)?

 I would rewrite the screenplay. It was designed to begin slow and build to a high level, which I think it does. Now, I think the first part of the picture is a little too slow. If I had a chance to do it over I would make act one much more exciting. I would start at a higher level and try to maintain a high level of intensity throughout.

  Cast Matt Mitler as Ed Jr. Ruth Martinez as Pam Bill Hitchcock as Ralph Connie Rogers as Sue Frances Raines as Linda Morey Lampley as Mike Jack Chatham as Ed Sr. Bennie Moore as Cop Trace Cooper as Young Ed Jr. Pamela Weddle Cooper as Mother

Directed by Buddy Cooper John S. Douglass Produced by Buddy Cooper Written by Buddy Cooper

Music by Michael Minard Cinematography Peter Schnall Edited by Stephen Mack Production Company OK Productions Distributed by Ocean King Releasing

  SOURCE MATERIAL

http://www.syracuse.com

dangerousminds.net

FANGORIA 37

FANGORIA 38

                  The Mutilator (1984) Retrospective STORY LINE While cleaning one of his father's rifles as a birthday surprise, young Ed Jr. accidentally shoots his mother.

[themastercylinder]

PLOT

A Roman Catholic priest, Father Damon, murders a man outside a castle-like estate on an island in upstate New York. The man he kills claims to be Lucifer himself, and promises to return. Decades later, in 1963, Andrew Williams is born. After his mother is paralyzed under mysterious circumstances, Andrew’s father realizes something is peculiar about his son, eventually coming to the realization that Andrew is the son of Lucifer. As a senior in high school, Andrew is withdrawn and socially awkward, and as a result is often bullied by his peers. Andrew feels drawn to the estate where Father Damon committed the murder, which is due for demolition for an impending golf course.

At school one day, one of Andrew’s tormentors, Tony, attempts to harass him in the gym shower. Overcome by strange powers, Tony kisses him in front of their peers. The event leaves Tony hysterical, and he leaves, terrified of Andrew. Later, Andrew is notified that he has received scholarships to several Ivy League colleges, including Yale and Harvard, but is insouciant to the news. Meanwhile, a local elderly woman, Margaret, visits Father Daly at his parish, and discusses Damon, whom she knew personally; Father Daly insists Damon wrongly murdered the man, though Margaret believes he was in fact Lucifer, and Father Damon, a manifestation of the archangel Raphael.

During a gym class, one of Andrew’s classmates, Mark, inexplicably suffers ruptured organs during a dodgeball game and dies. Mark’s girlfriend, Julie, is distraught, and shortly after begins having bizarre visions of Andrew raping her. She later hears voices calling her Gabrielle (a feminization of archangel Gabriel), and is directed to Margaret’s home by the disembodied voice of Father Damon. Margaret appoints Julie her protégé to battle Andrew.

On the night of a school dance, Andrew arrives at the castle estate and invokes Leviathan and Beelzebub, and summons the undead from grave sites on the property. At a local bar, Andrew’s father drunkenly raves about his son being the devil before returning home and shooting his wife in the head. Simultaneously, a group from the school is showing an outdoor play retelling the life of Jesus. During the scene of the crucifixion, the actor onstage begins exhibiting real stigmata, causing the audience to flee in horror.

On the island, a group of teenagers arrive to party after the dance, including Tony, his girlfriend Marie, Brenda, and others. After arriving at the castle, they are accosted by the undead. Marie is killed, and Tony and Brenda flee to an upstairs room, where Tony finds he has inexplicably developed breasts. Andrew enters the room and kisses him, after which Tony stabs himself to death. Andrew carries Brenda outside and lays her on an altar, where he stabs her to death.

Margaret and Julie arrive on the scene, brandishing Father Damon’s processional cross, which causes Andrew to recoil. Margaret forces Andrew to recite the Lord’s Prayer, and he transforms into Mark, tricking Julie. Margaret intervenes, and he kills her by breaking her neck. Julie watches as Andrew transforms into Lucifer, but is able to defeat him with the power of Father Damon’s crucifix. The spirits of Julie, Father Damon, and Margaret—the three archangels—coalesce, as Andrew is engulfed and destroyed in a beam of a light.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

BACKSTORY

Drawn loosely from the Book of Revelations, Fear No Evil deals with the incarnation on Earth of Lucifer, and his battle for supremacy over God’s faithful, a battle which ends with a confrontation with God Himself in a spectacular scene of Devine Intervention. La Loggia, who directed the film from his original screenplay and plans to score it as well, is fully aware of the similarities between his film and Hollywood’s big-budget Anti Christ extravaganzas, THE OMEN and OMEN II but he bristles at the suggestion that BEAST is a rip-off of previously-explored conventions.

Said La Loggia, ” Fear No Evil” is unique. We’ve gone ahead and actually personified the devil as a character and as a human being who is at odds with himself about who he is. Lucifer is a young man who is reborn in a little fishing village in upstate New York. He’s 18 years old and a brilliant student. He’s very much at odds with who he is, so he’s doing battle within himself at first, denying the evil that lurks within him, but then gradually giving way to it. He’s an extremely sympathetic character, one that I think the audience will want to hug and push away at the same time.

“While THE OMEN and THE EXORCIST were extremely slick and technically commanding,” he said, “they still missed the real point of the dilemma of what it must be like to actually be the devil.”

“The local newspapers were very intrigued by the whole idea,” he said, “and we gathered a lot of publicity. We had an open casting call at the local PBS station in Rochester and more than 2,000 people showed up in two days. I cast six lesser roles and the rest of them had an opportunity to work as extras. There’s a mass panic that takes place during the staging of a passion play in this little village. We had close to 2,000 people there for seven nights.”

It’s still a little early to tell if La Loggia’s claims for the film are based on hope or hype. There are lengthy editing chores ahead and the crucial search for a distributor. But La Loggia is confident the film will be in theaters this summer. “Two of the majors have already contacted us,” he said, “and unless I’m grossly mistaken, I’m sure the picture will win major distribution.”

To stretch the budget as far as possible, La Loggia tried to The accommodate many of the necessary special effects on camera. One of the most difficult effects scenes, in which the young Lucifer (Stefan Arngrin) uses his powers for the first time, took four days to get on film. The scene takes place during a high school game of battleball, in which opposing players try to hit each other with soft rubber balls. The coach, under Lucifer’s demonic influence, releases a ball at such terrifying speed that it kills one of the players. La Loggia and cinematographer Fred Goodich used a special rigging of wires (invisible because of the lighting and fast film speed) to make the sequence work.

John Eggett, our man in charge of live action special effects (as opposed to the optical, done in post production) rigged a harness in preparation for the death scene of Mark (actor Paul Habor), which takes place in the gym. The script called for Mark to be hit by a rubber ball that is under demonic control-hit so hard that he flies ten feet before dashing his brains out on a wall. It took ten grips to yank the harness rope with sufficient force for the effect; Haber was protected from real injury by a special rubber pad insulating the harness and a piece of sponge rubber attached to a wiglet that was crocheted into his real hair.

Special effects were also important. for the film’s finale. “We have a spectacular ending,” La Loggia said. “It involves Divine Intervention. A Godly light makes its way from the heavens and decides Lucifer’s fate. We secured as many of the elements as we could on camera through lighting. Those elements will be reinforced later in an optical house.”

Originally, Rob Blalack (who handled optical work on STAR WARS) was hired to handle post production effects. But Avco has shifted the responsibility to Peter Kuran’s new company, Visual Concept’s Productions. Kuran was in charge of rotoscope and cel animation on THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

The film’s ending is suggestive of Ray Bradbury’s published version of how ROSEMARY’S BABY should have ended-with Rosemary scooping up her demon child, running to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where she begs God to at last reclaim his cast out child. “Our picture ends with a plea from Lucifer for forgiveness.” La Loggia said. “But his plea doesn’t work. It’s a very compelling moment in the picture.”

The film’s opening and closing sequences were shot at Boldt Castle, a tourist attraction located on an island in the Thousand Island area of the St. Lawrence River. Built by a fella named Boldt” between 1900 and 1904 in homage to his ailing wife, it was abandoned after her death and allowed to fall into ruins. “We’re used to seeing a castle in a horror picture that’s opulently dressed,” said La Loggia. “But this place is abandoned, you could walk around in the daytime and get shivers.”

Richard Jay Silverthorn as Bonnomo, the earlier 1961 incarnation of Lucifer

BEHIND THE SCENES with Richard Jay Silverthorn Make Up Artist

“Here’s what I need,” La Loggia told me, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm for his first feature production. “Can you do an army of walking dead? Design me a frightening face and body for Lucifer’s final revelation, something unique, something we’ve never seen before. Can you make a stomach wound that will pop open and squirt blood as if cut by an invisible knife? Or grow female breasts on a man?”

He showed me some paintings by Frank Frazetta that he felt conveyed the same “feel” he wanted for his presentation of Lucifer. His first draft at the time carried the title The Antichrist and concerned the Prince of Hell, incarnated as a high school student in a small town in New York state. The emphasis was to be on Lucifer as a fallen angel, who once had a place in heaven among the other archangels. To punch home his concept of the Antichrist, the lead character, Andrew, was originally conceived as a soulful young man with long hair and a beard-a Christ like countenance. This concept was changed later, when clean-shaven, boyish Stefan Arngrim made an electric impression at his audition and snared the lead role.

In turn, I showed La Loggia two of my USC graduate films which involved aging make ups, a mummy and rubber prosthetics. We shook hands, and I was told I had the job. While I waited for the end of the summer and the start of principal photograph, La Loggia firmed up the use of locations in Rochester, N.Y. interviewed others for various crew positions, and began auditions. Smaller parts were cast through “open call” auditions in Rochester, while the leads were chosen in Hollywood.

When Frank gave me a draft of the script to begin makeup budgeting, I was excited over the idea of playing the role of Bonnomo, the earlier 1961 incarnation of Lucifer, who has a spectacular death scene early in the film. I had always wanted to be a monster in a horror movie since I was a little kid, so I did a test makeup of myself as I saw the character When La Loggia saw the stills I had taken while he was in Rochester, he agreed that I should play the role. I was beside myself!

La Loggia showed me stills of the locations he had secured, including Lucifer’s unholy temple, the Boldt Castle: a real, crumbling, ruined and unoccupied castle on a little island near the town of Alexandria Bay, New York, the Thousand Islands. Alexandria Bay and Rochester were combined to make up our mythical fishing village of St. Lawrence, New York. For the next few weeks I fantasized being the Devil, and running through the shadowy clammy corridors of the Boldt Castle.

Boldt Castle

On July 19th I officially signed my contract with La Loggia Productions as actor and makeup artist, and began pre-production. Frank’s second draft changed Bonnomo’s scene, dropped other scenes and revised and tightened the whole. I had only $1,000 for makeup for the entire cast, so the effects and supplies had to be geared to necessity. Through early August my time was occupied with taking plaster casts of actors hands, chests and faces, assisted by Claire Ohlmiller, a professional hospital technician who does molds for artificial limbs. La Loggia Productions flew Stefan and me to San Francisco for fitting of the special yellow “cat’s eye” contact lenses made at a clinic there. At last, with all plaster molds wrapped in blankets and loaded on a truck bound for New York, moved out of the apartment I’d lived in for ? five years, and ended my lingering ties with the USC neighborhood.

We arrived in Rochester, New York on August 22, to be joined by our Rochester cast and crew, covered by TV cameras as celebrities. A real Hollywood horror film on location. Already the excitement was in the air. The crew was young, many between 19 and 25 years old, naive and eager to dig in. Since we all lived together in one motel (except for crew members who were Rochester natives) the atmosphere of camaraderie and mutual support happened easily. The La Loggia cousins, Frank and Charlie, held meetings with the heads of the departments regularly, to air questions, problems and insure that schedules were coordinated., Carl Zollo was head of the art department, Fred Goodich, Cinematography, (they were among our older crew members) and Dennis Carr, Sound Recording. There were various assistants in each department, as well as several assistant directors whose responsibilities were scheduling, transportation, crowd control, equipment handling and any other troubleshooting that might come up along the way. The assistant directors often stood between success and disaster in seeing that people and equipment were at the right place at the right time.

That first night in Rochester we had a crew banquet at which I met my assistants: Richie Bennett, who had done the impossible task of finding me a 5′ x 12′ walk-in oven to bake the huge plaster molds, Chip Leiberman, who followed me like a shadow on the set and had all my supplies ready for touch-ups like a nurse assisting in surgery, and Cheri Montesanto, daughter of Frank Montesanto, our hair stylist of Monty’s Unisex, a Rochester area salon. Hair styling and makeup were closely coordinated for the finished effect. Since there was an 18 year time span, this was skillfully indicated by Monty’s changing hairstyles and gray tones, (or dark rinses) as well as by my painted wrinkles.

Since a motion picture must be filmed according to the weather or availability of locations, or actor’s availability, rather than script order, we had to shoot all the high school scenes first, before the school year began. Spry High School in Webster, NY became St. Lawrence High. Because the semester hadn’t begun and the school’s boilers weren’t turned on, our actors had to take freezing cold showers for one of the first sequences put on film, where the class bully makes the mistake of picking on Lucifer in the gym shower. Professional troopers in spirit, the scene was shot without a complaint and stands out as a showcase of acting ability for Stefan Arngrim and Daniel Eden.

https://dailymotion.com/video/x2oqm38

A Rochester family with a lovely little house on the shore of Lake Ontario consented to the use of their house as a location. According to the script, the house degenerates as the marriage of Lucifer’s terrified parents, Mr. & Mrs. Williams, degenerates. The effect was accomplished by the art crew progressively messing up the house-shingles were torn, screens twisted, weeds and vines arranged all over the sidewalk and front porch for the most extreme result of 18 years of neglect. Then the entire house was cleaned and repainted, the front lawn edged and trimmed to neat perfection for the house’s original look before the birth of the little “bundle from Heaven.” Thus we left our hosts with their house in better condition than when our crew arrived. The shots were spliced into script order later, in the editing room. Since sequences here had to be shot according to ease of lugging cameras up and down stairs, as well as in reference to daylight, it was necessary to age Mrs. Williams (Alice Sachs), make her young again, and age her again for the final shot of the day. Once characters were made up, I was free to continue sculpting prosthetics which I started bringing to the set, in order to cut down night hours and still be available for touch-ups when actors got sweaty under the lights.

The opening title shot of the film runs over a very long camera dolly shot from Lake Ontario, around the House and to the front porch. Plywood was laid down in a track over which the dolly was pushed. Actors were cued into action as the camera approached and then passed them as they enacted guests at the baby Lucifer’s baptism party. Director La Loggia walked behind the moving camera, coaching the actors verbally since the scene was shot MOS (a term meaning “Mit Out Sound” which comes from the German immigrant directors who worked in Hollywood during the earliest days of sound filming.) Sound effects were added later.

Rain or shine, the filming schedule was adhered to whenever humanly possible. Certain night scenes were actually filmed during a light rain, which did not show up on film, but gave the actors an extra challenge-not to shiver. After filming at the house was completed, the crew moved equipment to Charlotte Beach, where the “Passion Play” scene was photographed. A panicking crowd scene was a plot element here, so ads were placed in the newspapers and radio for anyone wishing to appear in a horror film to show up at the public beach. A thousand eager people stayed on the beach for three nights starting from about 7 PM to 3 or 4 AM. Megaphone in hand, Frank La Loggia instructed the crowd in actions as they portrayed an audience coming to view an annual church play on the final days of Christ, only to be involved in an unbelievable horror-the actor on the stage actually bleeds and dies on the cross, and the audience experiences stigmatism.

Screaming and bleeding, the freaked-out audience runs in every direction for their lives. Some fall into the lake as lightning bolts (added in post production) strike all around. “All Hell breaks loose” with stage lights exploding from charges (called “squibs”) pre-set by John Eggett and his crew. These were later matched with hand-drawn lightning bolts. One of my best rubber prosthetics in the picture was the tissue-thin rubber stomach appliance so that “Christ’s” stomach could seem to be pierced by an invisible lance and run blood. A rubber piece of surgical tubing was run under the actor’s loincloth and glued to his stomach. A preslit rubber “skin” was applied over the surgical tubing with a “ripcord” of transparent fishing line attached. The other end of the surgical tubing was fastened by Eggert to a massive insecticide sprayer to pump blood through the stomach, to tubing run under the wig and behind the wrists. The effect was gruesome and realistic.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

With all but one scene in the Rochester area shot, the cast and crew packed up for a day of driving to our next location, the Boldt Castle. All of the crew, that is, except for me and my high school assistants, who stayed behind to bake the foam rubber prosthetics in the large kilns at the Rochester Institute of Technology Ceramics Department. Richie Bennett was by then trained enough to take over makeup for Mrs. Buchanan’s head wound, and Chip and Cheri handled other characters’ basic make ups.

Working with plaster molds which in some cases weighed over 100 pounds and carried over a gallon of foamed rubber was a new experience for me. Fortunately one of my assistants was a little guy who could climb into the kiln, holding one end of the mold, and then position it and climb over it to get out. A special problem was temperature.

The foam rubber had to be cured for at least 3 hours at a temperature not more than 250 degrees or less than 200 degrees. However, the kilns were made to fire ceramics at temperatures over 1500 degrees, so that we couldn’t leave the kilns on, for very long. The gas had to be turned on and off and the kiln door opened and closed as the only means of keeping temperature constant. The first trial prosthetics came out either under-done or overdone until the method was perfected. Varying thickness of plaster in the mold was part of the problem, but we ended up with at least two acceptable prosthetics from each mold as a backup in case the rubber tore or a scene had to be re-shot. Every trace of plaster had to be cleaned before we left, since plaster is incompatible with ceramic and could have ruined any pottery or sculptures being created by the students.

Before leaving Rochester, I brought dental casting stone casts of teeth to a dental technician who instructed me in the making of our prosthetic “fangs.” A soft pink wax was sculpted over the mouth casts with metal instruments heated in a gas flame. Then a plaster matrix was laid over the wax until it hardened. The pink wax was boiled away, and dental acrylic resin used for making false teeth was applied into the space formerly occupied by the wax. This quickly set and was then drilled and finely-polished by a high speed drill with various precision attachments. Finally the teeth were painted with acrylic to match our gum color and define cracks and spaces between the fangs. They snapped over our own teeth and required no pastes or powders to hold them.

Rejoining the cast and crew who were now split between two motels in Alexandria Bay, I “youthened” Mr. and Mrs. Williams and Father Daly for the 1963 scene of baby Lucifer’s baptism. Here John Eggett had rigged up a baptismal font which would boil as a mysterious wind blew through the church, a Divine protest against the baptism of infant Lucifer.

Richard Jay Silverthorn’s novelization of the 1981 horror film Fear No Evil. The director sold him the rights for $1. Silverthorn’s novelization was published in 1981 as Satan’s Child

Starting Saturday, October 6, the most hectic on-the-set makeup work began: the Army of the Dead rising from their graves. Derek and Collin, my high school assistants took off the week from school to join us on makeup crew, as well as appearing in some background scenes as extras. For thirty ghouls, we needed every makeup hand we could muster. Corn flakes, Quaker oats and liquid rubber were applied to texture the skin for the “rotten” effect. Certain “key ghouls” wore prosthetics sculpted by Collin Pingleton one with an eyeball hanging out, another with the cheek ripped away and teeth exposed. These were combined with rubber bald caps and patchy applications of crepe hair and painted over with custom-blended rubber mask paint for the finished effect. Eggett rigged up a false wall for one ghoul to crash out of, buried another alive so that he could crawl up from a grave, and make two others break out of stone work. This army of the dead was supposed to be the construction workers who had built the castle and then been buried alive, only to be possessed by “stay-behind” spirits subservient with hot coco and coffee. It was strange to see rotten ghouls huddled up in blankets and parkas, looking out for the first snowflakes of the year and shivering together. They had to shed the protective clothing for tattered rags while before the cameras. Most of our ghouls were recruited by a production assistant from neighborhood bars, though some had auditioned in Rochester and were chosen for large, bulky bodies. One of our larger grips also doubled as a ghoul, and had to wade through near freezing water to drown two nude swimmers. Needless to say, this scene was strictly one-take. A special room in the castle was kept warm with a roaring fire as a refuge for the near-frozen.

Jack Holland, a fine old actor who portrays Father Damon, incarnation of the angel Rafael, arrived from Los Angeles for his two weeks of shooting. We hustled him off the plane and into a rowboat for the opening shot of the film, then put him into a burlap robe with a scruffy beard growth glued on and filmed his death scene in the insane asylum. The unfinished rooms in the basement of the castle doubled for the asylum. Some viewers may be quite disturbed by the many dead animals appearing in the first scene as the aftermath of a “black mass” my character of Bonnomo is supposed to have committed. May I assure the reader that the animals were purchased quite dead and frozen from a lab. It was difficult to eat our 3 AM dinner break after shooting that scene, but the convincing effect of the “suffering to all God’s creatures” that Lucifer vowed was powerfully conveyed by the arrangement of hanging bodies before the huge inverted cross. At last my scenes in the film were scheduled for shooting. On our house boat dressing room, Monty shaved my hair back into a severe widow’s peak; mortician’s wax was applied to make my ears pointed, and subtle shadings changed the lines of my face to Satanic, angular planes. With the yellow contact lenses in place, I had to be led to the set and rehearsed in my movements slowly, since I was nearly blind. Once the cameras were rolling, I thought only of the audience experiencing the presence of the Devil on the screen. I wanted to scare the hell out of them! Stretching my mouth wide open to show my fangs, I ran toward various markers which were light-colored so I could see them through the lenses. In one shot three grips had to catch me as I passed camera range and nearly knocked an expensive light over. The bright light was all that was discernible.

Since the final chase scene of the film is supposed to harken back to the beginning with the feeling of a predestined repetition, Stefan Arngrim was also in makeup and costume as the second incarnation of Lucifer. His chase scene with Julie and Mrs. Buchanan is shot for shot identical with Bonnomo’s chase by Father Damon before the opening titles. He ran through the corridor, chased by the ladies, and then I ran through chased by the priest, from the same camera angles.

Because of problems moving the generator and camera equipment around on the island, my second makeup had to be shot in sequence, although the hairline had previously been shaved back. Therefore I had to glue crepe hair in to match my own, as my character is revealed as Rossario Bonnamo, whom nobody in town suspected of being Lucifer except Father Damon and his sister Margaret (the incarnation of St. Michael). I command the golden staff of St. Michael to fly out of Damon’s hand, saying, “I will be re-born. Aiwasz!” (Aiwasz is a Satanic word calling on the powers of the Unholy Trinity). In this way, Lucifer defeats Rafael by outliving him through his next incarnation. Damon (Rafael) is accused of murdering Bonnamo and dies in the insane asylum, leaving Margaret (Michael) to hunt out Lucifer’s next incarnation (Andrew Williams) and join with the yet unborn angel Gabriel (Julie) to defeat him in the film’s final confrontation. John Egget rigged up a two-part duplicate cross which appeared to enter my heart and come out my back into the tree. We used Hershey’s syrup for my black blood. Fortunately for the cast and crew, the weather suddenly warmed up and shooting continued in a comfortable climate.

The shot of the three angels ascending into Heaven was shot during this warm snap. Here lights were hoisted high into the treetops, and in order to make the beam of light distinct to the camera lens, the smoke machine was used liberally. Cheri dusted a gold glitter into all the make ups as the actors are transformed by “The Rapture” promised in the Bible. Spectacular optical effects were added later to complete the images, shot on separate strips of film for each angel, to be composited as the three bodies become one in a whirling vortex of twinkles.

Then we were ready for the final revelation of “star student” Andrew, a pale and beautiful high school lad, into the inhuman and repulsive Lucifer, the Beast who was chased from Heaven by the Archangel Michael. The pre-made foam rubber face and ear prosthetics were only part of the full-body work that took 5 hours to apply, in Stefan’s motel room. Open sores, purple and yellow patches, and hair travelling from the inverted cross in the palm of the hand to the armpit, and from the ankles up the legs to join with the pubic hair revealed by the Black Mass robes were glued in place. All of the crepe hair had to be sprayed with Krylon acrylic to keep the wind from blowing it loose. False black fingernails were glued on, and then we were ferried over in a motor boat to the castle. It wasn’t hard for Kathleen Rowe McAllen as Julie to act repulsed by this being with three points on each ear, glowing eyes and fangs. Yet through all this makeup, the human part of Andrew still loves pretty Julie, and, hesitating to destroy her as he had destroyed Mrs. Buchanan, (portrayed by Elizabeth Hoffman) he gives her a few seconds in which to find the strength to take the golden staff and defy his power, shouting, “He is the Light!”

After a few pick-up shots left over from previous scenes, the crew packed up the equipment and left the castle in a pouring rain. We returned to Rochester for one last scene at the home of one of our investors, which was used as Julie’s house for the “seduction” scene and the scene where Julie’s boyfriend Mark (Paul Haber) proposes. Exhausted but fulfilled this crew of people from all parts of the country hugged their goodbyes and returned home to await the release of the picture. Frank La Loggia and the editors placed the newly developed film together in New York City.

After several months of negotiations, Frank and Charles La Loggia signed the distribution agreement with Avco Embassy Pictures. At this point only a “rough cut” of the picture existed, with gaps in sound effects and no music, titles or special effects. Working with executives from Avco, Frank finalized the order of the scenes and got the picture into its final number of seconds for music timing. Gifted with music as well as producing, writing and directing skills, La Loggia “scored his own film with a 33 piece orchestra under Avco’s post-production budget. The melodies are lovely and yet haunting, perfectly conveying the moods of the characters.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

   Fear No Evil’s soundtrack featured many punk and new wave bands from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“Hey Joe” performed by Patti Smith

“Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight” performed by The Rezillos

“Blitzkrieg Bop” performed by the Ramones

“Psycho Killer” performed by Talking Heads

“Love Goes to a Building on Fire” performed by Talking Heads

“Delicious Gone Wrong” performed by Bim

“I Don’t Like Mondays” performed by The Boomtown Rats

“Lava” performed by The B-52’s

“Blank Generation” performed by Richard Hell

“Anarchy in the UK” performed by the Sex Pistols

  Source Material

Cinefantastique v10 n03 Fangoria 11

Fear No Evil (1981) Retrospective PLOT A Roman Catholic priest, Father Damon, murders a man outside a castle-like estate on an island in upstate New York.

[themastercylinder]

United Home Video (VCI Entertainment)

Bill Blair started in the business as United Films, supplier of 16mm prints for schools and civic organizations, but was quick to see the potential of a new market when the Sony Corporation introduced its first Betamax VCRs to American consumers. Gradually Blair began to shift his interest from film rentals to video tape distribution, adopting the corporate name of Video Communications, Inc. With the cable television industry just beginning to stir national interest and the home video recorder still a toy for rich kids, VCI was able to secure the nontheatrical rights (including video release) to many films at a moderate cost.

By the time the early ’80s rolled around, Blair had also gotten in on the burgeoning cable television market, using his movies to provide all the programming for a local cable channel. Working with him on the production end was Linda Lewis, promotions director for Tulsa radio station KRAV. Because her position involved getting publicity for new features coming to Tulsa theaters, she was doing a lot of face-to-face interviews with movie stars, and videotaped versions of those sit-downs were the perfect thing to play between Blair’s pictures on the cable station.

“When I started being invited on the interview junkets, I went to Bill Blair and said, ‘I have this footage. Would it be something we could work with?’” remembered Lewis recently. “He said, ‘If you can learn to edit, you can do whatever you want with it.’ So I was working in his back room on his old three-fourth-inch editing machine, putting together these fifteen-minute Intermission with Linda Lewis shows.”

Blair knew this, of course. And when his pipeline for new video releases began to shut down, thanks to more and more companies— including major studios—getting into the home video act, it was probably only natural for him to start thinking about making his own picture.

Lewis’s idea was to shoot a feature film like a TV soap opera. He’d gotten the idea from his sister, actress Judy Lewis, who had produced some episodes of the daytime drama Texas in the early ’80s. “I knew they taped an hour long show every day, and I thought if we used videotape instead of film, and edited it ourselves, we could do it,” remembered Lewis. “Then, if we used the crew from [the KOTV show] PM Magazine, and we all took our week-off vacation at the same time, with the weekend we’d have nine days to shoot.”

Although the film ended up costing a couple thousand dollars more than Lewis estimated, and a few pickup shots had to be done after the nine days were over, director Christopher and producer Linda were right in the ballpark with both their estimates. “We had to be right about the shooting schedule,” said Christopher. “We all had to be back at our jobs on Monday.”

Although Blood Cult—as the movie was ultimately titled—was a local production in every sense of the word, its cast featured one actor who had a handful of theatrical-feature credits—Julie Andelman was her name. A former Tulsan, her resume included the 1980 horror picture The Silent Scream. In Andelman was top-billed as Tina, the daughter of the local sheriff who gets involved in a series of killings on campus that point to a dog-worshiping cult.

Blood Cult (1985)

The plot of BLOOD CULT is centered on a series of co-ed murders that suddenly disturb the back-to-school routine of a small Midwestern university town. The victims are horribly mutilated … an arm gone here, a head gone there, but the killer evidences a strong sense of fair play by leaving a gold amulet, bearing the likeness of a hound, in exchange. The investigation by Sheriff Ron Wilbois is complicated by the political pressures of an upcoming election. With the help of his perky daughter and her dorky boyfriend, Wilbois finds the amulet’s design was once used by a group of New World witches who worshipped a devil-dog called Caninus. They performed ceremonies of power using a mannequin pieced together from the body parts of people who offended the cult in some way.

BLOOD CULT, estimated to have cost as much as $30,000, may not be a classic, but it is slick and well-produced. UEP put all their money up on the screen and learned a lot in the process. BLOOD CULT was written by Dr. Stuart Rosenthal and producer Bill Blair several years ago with the late Buster Crabb in mind for the pivotal role of Sheriff Wilbois. Crabb and Blair had met and become friends as a result of United Films’ re-release of some early serials in which Crabb had starred. Though the project was never realized, Blair was left with a script handy when he and partners Christopher and Linda Lewis (a Tulsa-based husband wife media team) began to think seriously about mounting a production of their own.

Charles Ellis, retired manager of the Tulsa Civic Ballet, was cast as Sheriff Wilbois. Oklahoma playwright James Vance plays the boyfriend of Tina, the sheriff’s daughter, portrayed by former Tulsan Julie Andleman, who has appeared in character roles on film and television. Andelman was featured in the low-budget thriller SILENT SCREAM, done-in amongst a load of dirty laundry. Other roles were filled by local stage and broadcasting talent.

Paul MacFarlane was hired to photograph BLOOD CULT using a Beta news camera (jokingly referred to as the “shaky cam” because of the great care they had to exercise to create fluid camera movements). Christopher Lewis, who studied filmmaking at USC and is the son of producer Tom Lewis and actress Loretta Young, directed. And Rod Slane of Star Track Recording Studios provided the original score.

Normally, of course, a feature is shot on 35mm for 16mm film and transferred to videotape later for television and home-video release. Many pictures, especially horror movies, end up getting only video distribution, but that’s not intentional. They just fail to land the theatrical deal they are looking for. The producers of Blood Cult, however, have no designs on the theatrical market. They shot their feature (on a nine-day shooting schedule) using Sony Beta Cam high-speed half-inch video recorders, for release directly to video. Cast and crew were all local, except for star Julie Andelman, a Los Angeles-based actress who graduated from a Tulsa high school and post-production work was also done in Tulsa.

“What we’d like to do,” says Bill Blair, president of United Entertainment, “is start a whole new breed of movies made strictly for videocassette. We did horror first because you can always expect to make money on a horror film-horror always sells. We’ll do more horror, and some of our others down the line will probably be science-fiction, since we can do a lot of computer special effects now, and we’ve got lots of stock footage in our library to work with.”

United Entertainment may be an unfamiliar name to home video fans, but Video Communications Inc. (VCI) isn’t. United Entertainment grew out of VCI, a videotape company with over 300 titles in release to the home market and other 100 packaged for television. Among VCI’s films are such sleazoid favorites as Twisted Brain, Scream Bloody Murder, Blood of Dracula’s Castle and the Herschell Gordon Lewis epic, Monster A Go-Go (the latter one of a dozen pictures in VCI’s “Le Bad Cinema” series). The company also co-financed Don Dohler’s The Galaxy Invader (“It came from a galaxy far, far away, an alien explorer-its mission… TO KILL.”), which Blair says went directly to home video via VCI.

For years, Blair had been talking about making a movie with Christopher and Linda Lewis, two local media personalities. He dusted off a script he and a Tulsa neurologist had written several years before called The Sorority House Murders and took it to the Lewis’s. They agreed it could be done on a very low budget and had a chance of turning a profit in the home-video market, so they threw in with Blair. They brought in the feature, with the new title of Blood Cult, for what Lewis calls “a real low budget,” but Blair insists that the quality is high.

United Entertainment’s next film, which should be in the can by the time you read this, is also a horror feature and also takes place on a campus. Lewis calls it a “modern-day Jack the Ripper story with a twist. Once they get rolling, Blair and the Lewis’s expect to be getting out a movie a month, all headed straight for United Entertainment could become the video equivalent of PRC, the legendary 40’s B studio that cranked them out as fast as it took to stand George Zucco before a camera.

Blood Cult and the new idea it represents have already attracted national attention from other video distributors and filmmakers. Los Angeles’ Joe Wolf, a former vice-chairman of Media Home Entertainment (when Mediaco financed Nightmare on Elm Street, Wolf was the Co-producer) says, “We’re all aware out here of what Bill Blair’s doing. The way I see it, though, is that there’s a problem with publicity. You’ve got to have publicity to put the movies out, the sort of publicity that comes with a theatrical release. The way it is now, you can make money, but you won’t get your big pictures, your Halloweens. He could break even on what? Eight thousand copies?”

Wolf, who also co-produced the Halloween films and Hell Night, believes, however, that made-for-video movies could be the wave of the not-too-distant future. I think it’ll definitely work in the future,” he says. “Maybe two or three years from now, you’ll have the video market that’s big enough to support a Halloween.”

One filmmaker who thinks that that future is here now-at least for independent producers-is Jeff Hogue, whose Majestic International Pictures, based in Jonesboro, Arkansas, has given the world Invasion of the Girl Snatchers, Curse of the Alpha Stone and Doctor Gore’s Body Shop, to name a few of the dozen or more Majestic releases. VCI has home rights to his films. “An independent producer doesn’t have the kind of capital base you need to make a major theatrical release,” he says. “To really compete with the Nightmare on Elm Streets out there, $350,000 is about as cheap as you can go. But you can make a quality video for about $30,000. At one time, people would’ve said you were crazy to do a movie just for the video market, because that theatrical revenue was so crucial. Now, the way things have progressed, it’s the smartest way for an independent producer to go. I’d sure do it.”

Jeff Hogue, whose pictures get theatrical play dates, still calls the home video market his “life blood.” “I’ve found the video market to have taken over the drive-in market,” he says. “Your low-budget material, your exploitation material, was seen at the drive-in because the walk-ins didn’t want to deal with it. With exploitation films, you don’t really sell the steak anyway, you sell the sizzle, so the ads for the movies were always great-just like the ads for the videos are now. Also, people didn’t know what they were going to see until they got in. They just wanted to sit back with their girlfriend or their wife and drink a beer and watch a couple of exploitation movies, and they can do that at home now. The clientele the drive-ins catered to are home, watching the same kinds of films on home video.”

Whether or not Blood Cult kicks off a new wave of low-budget horror and exploitation movies aimed solely for the home market remains to be seen. The odds, though, look good, especially to independent filmmakers with limited resources who realize how much the home-video market-and the television market-has grown. As Bill Blair said, “There are three markets left for filmmakers that command big, big dollars: home video, theatrical and television. When you can hit two out of three, you’re doing pretty well.”

Grassroots Makeup FX Here’s something to think about. Suppose you’re, oh, let’s say a 23-year-old horror movie fan, who idolizes Tom Savini, Rick Baker, Dick Smith and all the rest. You’d love to work on a film, to break into the business, but you live in the middle of the country where such things are about as likely as George Steinbrenner being satisfied with the New York Yankees. So you do makeup work wherever you can, winning some contests here and there-and then, all of a sudden someone from a new film production company calls up and says, “Hey, how’d you like to do the effects for this horror movie we’re making?”

Well, it happens. It happened not once but twice-to Dave Powell and Robert Brewer, roommates who work as graphic artists for Tulsa’s Newspaper Printing Corporation-when Blood Cult co-producer Linda Lewis put out a call at a local magic shop for “someone who could work with latex.” The store’s proprietor recommended Powell and Brewer, and before you can say Craig Reardon, the two were hooked up with United Entertainment.

“They came to us a week before they started shooting and said they needed a severed finger, a severed torso, a severed head and a severed hand,” says Powell. “It was the chance of a lifetime.”

The two continued working at their day jobs, going home in the evenings and building body parts and mixing blood. They ended up working a lot of 16-hour days, and doing a lot of improvisation. “The schedule was so tight that it was hard to get what we needed from out in California, so we had no foam latex,” said Brewer. “We did it all with liquid latex, slush molding, and the help of a lot of patient friends.” The film was a learning experience for everyone involved, especially when it came to some of the effects used in the picture.

“They had a store mannequin head, and they asked us, ‘Can you make this look real?” Powell recalls with a grin. “We took a death mask from a friend of mine instead. I redid that head about five times, and it just didn’t look right. On the day of the shoot, I came home from work and I was sitting there looking at it, and I felt like something still wasn’t right, so I finally cut the mouth open and cast the teeth, and it worked.”

The two also ran into trouble with a severed arm that looked too stiff and with their blood mixture, which Brewer describes as “your standard Dick Smith recipe, with Karo syrup and food coloring and all that.”

“The blood came out looking like strawberry syrup at first, Powell says.”Robert ran out and got a can of Coke and poured it in. Then it looked good, and it was delicious.” Working on a budget of only a couple of hundred dollars, Powell and Brewer created their effects with liquid latex, beeswax, cow bones, foam rubber (from pillow cushions bought at the local K-Mart) and mortician’s wax. For bladder devices, they used Baggies.

“The biggest complaint we got from our work on Blood Cult is that two people had to get up and walk out while they were looking at dailies,” says Powell. Adds Brewer, “We must be doing something right”

According to Christopher Lewis, “It cost $27,000 to make. VCI spent $100,000 promoting it. But on the opening day of its release, because cassettes were selling at that time for sixty bucks a shot, it made $400,000.” The direct-to-video feature ended up grossing well over a million dollars and is still available from VCI.

They did more than pretty well with Blood Cult. They changed the face of the industry forever. The release of Blood Cult in August 1985 represents nothing less than the line of demarcation between the old definition of a movie and the new one, which continues to evolve even as these words are being written.

The Ripper (1985)

Their follow-up production, THE RIPPER, indicates they have already come a long way in a short time. THE RIPPER’s shooting schedule and budget were almost twice that of BLOOD CULT, and it shows. The film features an appearance by makeup master Tom Savini and a script rife with horror movie references.

“Well,” explains Savini, “Chris Lewis called me and said, ‘Hey, you want to play Jack the Ripper?’ and I said, ‘Sure!”

Now, along comes The Ripper, described in advance publicity as a “modern-day Jack the Ripper story.” Once again the whole thing was shot on videotape for release directly to the home video market. Because of the larger budget for The Ripper, Lewis was given the comparative luxury of a 14-day shooting schedule (Blood Cult was shot in nine days) and was also able to get Savini.

When The Ripper was in pre-production, Blair and the Lewises decided they wanted someone to act in the feature who would be a recognizable name to their target audience-the horror homevideo fans. Savini, it seemed, fit the bill perfectly. His footage in The Ripper was shot in a 14-hour dusk-to-morning session at a downtown Tulsa warehouse.

“He was a real professional, “says makeup man Robert Brewer. “He brought his own costume, but he didn’t do very much in the way of makeup. I think all he brought were the contact lenses and a goatee.”

Brewer and Dave Powell did the special makeup effects for Blood Cult, and were allowed to write in their own effects scenes for The Ripper. Both of them were impressed with Savini, long an idol of theirs.

“He brought along the eyes he used for Fluffy and for Stephen King in Creepshow,” Brewer says. “He also showed us a better way to do squibs, where you don’t have to have a license for them. They work off an electrical charge, and they’re like match-heads dipped in wax. We called ’em Savinis. Put a little blood and chicken liver in there, and you’ve got it!

The lenses Savini uses in The Ripper may give his fans a little of the old deja vu. “They’re the same lenses I used in an episode of Tales from the Darkside called ‘Halloween Candy,” he says, “and also in the film I made in Hong Kong, Scared to Death. They were also used in my book (Grande Illusions, later reissued as Bizarro!) to illustrate what you could do with contact lenses.”

After completing his work on the Ripper, Savini returned home to ponder film offers, which are coming in with alarming regularity these days.

Could one of these offers advance the career of Savini the actor? Savini says that he presently has a chance to star in a film called Recoil, which he describes as a “Vietnam revenge” picture, but he also has several directing offers as well. According to local rumor, Tulsa may even draw him back to either act in or direct another United Entertainment horror film.

Actor/director/makeup man Savini says, “I’ve got lots of trouble juggling everything right now. There are five or six projects happening at about the same time, and I’ve got to make up my mind what to take on.”

Revenge (1986)

To get to the outdoor set where United Entertainment’s newest made-for video horror feature, Revenge, is being shot, one has to drive out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, toward a country road near the town of Okmulgee. On one side of a clearing is a large pond, and at its edge stands an ominous-looking altar, studded with dog’s heads, a location bustling with activity.

A young, attractive woman steps away from the group around the altar. “We’re getting all this ready to do the scene with the monks tonight,” she explains. “Actually, it’s the confrontation scene, leading up to the surprise ending.”

The young woman is Jill Clark, who, despite her tender years, has worked on several films shot in and around Tulsa, including Rumble Fish. She has been with United Entertainment from the beginning, working as associate producer on the company’s first two pictures, Blood Cult and The Ripper. On this, UE’s third movie, she is assistant director as well.

Clark’s involvement with all three films is by no means unique. Most of Revenge’s crew also worked on the first two movies, and five of the actors from Blood Cult reprise their roles in Revenge.

Revenge, however, isn’t a sequel to Blood Cult, according to director Christopher Lewis, who has helmed all three of UE’s releases. “Instead of calling it Blood Cult II in the title, we’ll probably call it something like ‘Part Two in the Blood Cult saga,’” says Lewis, taking a breather in one of the motor homes nestled under the trees. “The reason we’re not emphasizing Blood Cult is that we don’t believe Blood Cult is indicative of our work now, inasmuch as it was shot on video and the budget was real low. It was an experiment that worked-it got us into the home video market and showed that there was a market for made-for-video product-but the production values aren’t indicative of what we’re doing now. The budget is drastically different and the script was written to stand on its own.”

Revenge has a 14 day shooting schedule, two recognizable names in the cast-Patrick Wayne and John Carradine and a budget in excess of $150,000, still very low by East and West Coast standards but pretty good in Tulsa.

“We changed our concept a lot,” maintains Lewis. “On Blood Cult, we went in and shot it like a TV show, with videotape and two cameras. The second one, The Ripper, we did with tape and one camera. Now, we’re using 16mm film and, basically, one camera. We’ve gone for a more theatrical approach.

“The Ripper was very, very gory, while Revenge is more subtle, more of a murder mystery, although there are some good gore effects in it. It’s just not as gory as The Ripper. It’s different subject matter, so it doesn’t need to be.

“Besides,” Lewis adds with a smile, “Savini was in The Ripper, so we had to make it gory. But there are still gore effects here and a surprise ending. It’s about a country woman and a city man who try to find out why one’s husband and the other’s brother were killed. The trail leads to a dog-worshiping cult.”

The city man is played by Patrick Wayne (whose fantasy films include Beyond Atlantis, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and The People That Time Forgot), who won’t be on the set until early morning. The country woman is played by Tulsa actress Bennie Lee McGowan, re-creating her role from Blood Cult. McGowan was also in The Ripper.

Nearby, McGowan stands talking with James Vance, who wrote Revenge and who starred in and provided additional dialogue for Blood Cult. Originally, Vance was to play his own brother in Revenge, but the decision was made to instead fill that role with a name actor. So Vance, a local stage veteran, stepped aside in favor of Wayne.

Later, a man passes, his face smeared with dark makeup, his body clothed in a brown, hooded garment. He stops to visit a moment, and then excuses himself and goes on past, to an area where others garbed like him congregate, moving in the shadows. Later, in a climactic scene with John Carradine, they will be before the cameras as the monk-like members of the cult of Caninus.

Further down the path, Robert Brewer sits atop the slope leading down to the clearing, watching as the crew sets up a shot. Brewer, as many Fango readers will recall, was-with David Powell-a founding member of the special FX team that came together to work on Blood Cult last year. Then, it was only Powell and Brewer; three films later, the team has grown into a seven person studio called DFX, Inc.

“David Powell and Doug Edwards are handling the big effect tonight,” reveals Brewer. “I worked on the murders that lead up to it. We killed the girl in the hot tub Tuesday evening and the reporter in the alley Saturday night.”

Just what is the big effect? Its exact nature is tied into the film’s surprise ending, and is therefore being kept under wraps, but Powell, unloading makeup paraphernalia from his car, supplies some information. “What we’re doing tonight is a demon mask on Stephanie (actress Stephanie R. Knopke). It’s basically a one piece appliance. We’ll put that on her, plug it all in, Karo Syrup her hair down and make the mask gooey and drippy. Then, we’ll put a burn appliance on top of it. We planned to do two piece ripaway appliances, but we had to simplify that because we ran out of time.”

As the crew works, a dark Silverado truck appears, winding around the road at the pond’s far end and slowly driving across to the cluster of trucks and motor homes. The truck’s back door opens, and John Carradine-the man who was once known as “half a profile because of his thinness-is helped out and into a motor home, where makeup people wait. After a moment, the motor home door opens again, and Carradine’s manager carries in a stack of large white cardboard sheets to be used as cue cards.

After being made up, Carradine sits erectly at a table in the motor home, talking with visitors. He may be over 80 years old, his hands may be twisted cruelly by arthritis, and he may occasionally sound like someone’s grandfather when he talks, but John Carradine still projects the unmistakable aura of class and elegance, of a Hollywood gone by, a Hollywood when that name was, truly, magic. Among the other people in the motor home are his manager, a man who goes by the single name of Byron, and Bennie Lee McGowan. It turns out that McGowan’s college Shakespeare teacher, a man named B. Iden Payne, was a good friend of Carradine’s.

It also turns out that Revenge is a landmark for Carradine. “This is my 500th film,” Carradine insists. “My first picture was Tol’able David, a talkie remake of a picture Richard Barthelmess had done.” Five hundred features is a remarkable total, and there are those who maintain that Carradine’s total is actually a few films short of that number. Still, when one considers how long and often he has worked, 500 films doesn’t sound impossible. It’s widely known that Carradine considers his horror work only a small part of his career. He says he’s no fan of current horror films, but he talks a bit about some of his ’40s genre pictures, throwing out titles like Return of the Ape Man, House of Dracula and Bluebeard.

“John was offered the part of the monster in the original Frankenstein,” says Byron, as Carradine nods his agreement. “But he turned it down because it wasn’t a speaking part.”

Says Bennie Lee McGowan, “It would’ve been a shame for that wonderful voice to have been wasted.” At that statement, Carradine arches an eyebrow and a flicker of a smile plays across his face. “My dear,” he says, “it has been wasted a lot.”

Outside the motor home, Byron ticks off a list of Carradine’s accomplishments. He has recently been made a life member of the Players Club in New York, becoming one of only four people so honored. He has acted in 180 separate plays, which Byron believes is another record. He has been named celebrity spokesman for the “Save the Eagle” campaign. And he and Byron, along with a third partner named Susan Flahive, who has also come along to Tulsa, have started a production company. On their slate of projects is a remake of the film (and stage play) Tobacco Road, as well as a movie the three wrote called Captain Willoughby and several documentaries, including one concerning Bigfoot that Carradine intends to narrate. Byron and Carradine are also opening an antique store in Sans Diego, where they both live. Called Umbrella Jack’s, after the TV movie that won Carradine an Emmy, it will include “many of the things from his monster movies,” including the original scripts from his ’40s Monogram features, Byron says.

Back on the set, Tulsa actor Josef Hardt, who worked as a TV horror show host for a time in the 1960s, runs through his lines as the crew begins testing fog machines. Hardt is re-creating his role as the high priest of Caninus, the dog-god, and tonight he is ringed by hooded monks in pale blue makeup, some holding dobermans on leashes. A fire blazes and crackles in the background, bathing the scene in orange light that’s almost as bright as the white lights of the crew.

The Silverado drives down, as close as it can get to the clearing. Several people help Carradine out of the truck’s cab, leading him down to the set where Christopher Lewis and the film crew wait. As he passes, people fall silent, watching a man who is a link to the very beginning of the talkies, who once consorted with the likes of John Barrymore.

Carradine looks a bit unsteady and feeble as he is led to the set, but he grins, and his voice is strong. As two crew members drape a white robe over him, Lewis explains the scene and asks for a run-through. Carradine nods, and in a moment, he begins to speak the lines in that familiar, compelling voice, and it’s as if a sudden chill snaps through the crowd. All eyes are riveted on him as he speaks. No one stirs.

When he finishes, Byron, on the edge of the crowd, whispers, “I’ve managed Yvonne DeCarlo, Sterling Hayden, Steve McQueen … I’ve worked with many stars. But John has a quality in his voice not many have.”

Lewis calls for a take, and the camera rolls. Carradine draws himself up and looks directly into the camera. “I am time itself …” he begins, and, standing at rapt attention in the crowd, Jim Vance strains forward a little and then closes his eyes, listening to John Carradine say the words he wrote. Slowly, his face splits into a wide grin, which stays there even after Carradine is finished and the take is in the can.

SOURCE MATERIAL

Fangoria 48

Fangoria 50

Fangoria 59

Shot in Oklahoma: A Century Of Sooner State Cinema by John Wooley, courtesy University of Oklahoma Press.

United Home Video (VCI Entertainment) Terror in Tulsa United Home Video (VCI Entertainment) Bill Blair started in the business as United Films, supplier of 16mm prints for schools and civic organizations, but was quick to see the potential of a new market when the Sony Corporation introduced its first Betamax VCRs to American consumers. 5,212 more words

[themastercylinder]

How many of us started into filmmaking with crude, 8mm “mad scientist” horror epics, churned out on weekends in basements, garages, and living rooms? How many of us later progressed to more sophisticated Super or Single 8 (maybe even 16mm) films with sync-sound, elaborate special effects, and jazzy titles? And finally, how many of us through these first two stages of normal film-making development yearn for the big times that crack at doing a real, honest-to-goodness feature film? The answer to all three questions is most of us. And our group certainly wasn’t an exception. Ever since the beginning of this magazine back in 1972 I have become very aware of the abundance of true talent hiding itself in the shadow of the words “amateur filmmaker.” I think the articles and film profiles presented in Cinemagic testify to that fact. And though many of the films and filmmakers presented in these pages are truly amateurs (albeit creative, talented amateurs), a good many have the ability and experience to rub elbows with the best of professional film people. With this knowledge in mind, and the fact that I’ve come to personally know so many talented filmmakers through the sheer existence of this magazine, I figured that it was time to pool local (and some not-so-local) talent for the purpose of making a feature-length theatrical film.

The plan was simple enough: gather together a group of technicians and special effects artists get each individual to chip in an equal share of money, and let everyone “donate” his time and talents. With this concept, and a very rough idea for a story, I called together a varied group of filmmakers from the local Baltimore area. Most of us knew each other pretty well on a social level, but few of us had ever worked together on a creative film project. That first meeting, back in June of last year, went exceptionally well, and after three or four subsequent gatherings, we had kicked the story concept around and were setting our sights on a July 1 starting date. Our assembled group consisted of Dave Ellis, who would handle the sound recording; Britt McDonough as our chief cinematographer; Tony Malanowski as assistant director; John Cosentino on creature designs and special effects; George Stover playing a featured role in the film, as well as pulling in additional local acting talent; and yours truly, as script writer and director. Actually, such “titles” are nice and professional sounding, but when you get right down to it on just about any independent film, everybody does a little of everything. As mid-June rolled around and we had spent about two thousand hours in pre-production work (the tiny details are endless), I got a call from our only out-of-state partner, John Cosentino, who was handling the creation of two of our creature designs. “We’ll die inside these foam rubber suits in that heat,” John persuaded. And I listened, and finally. I agreed. So the July 1 commencement was pushed up until an October commencement. That worked out just as well, because typically, we hadn’t realized the tremendous amounts of time necessary to merely get ready for Day One of the shoot. October 1st came and went, and it wasn’t until October 16th that Day One actually happened. Now it is mid-January, and filming is just about completed. After working for five weekends in October and November, and knocking off for the holidays during December, filming was resumed a few weeks ago. We would be finished filming now, too, except for some terrible sound problems which cannot be ironed out. At the outside location for one of our major sequences we discovered that we were near a small suburban airport. Despite waiting endless hours for small planes to either land or get out of mike range, we still picked up enough of the buzzing airplane engines to be very noticeable. Our choice is to spend tons of money and time in a studio dubbing sound, or to find a new location and re-film that major sequence.

The Leemoid in the climactic battle scene in The Alien factor.

We’ve decided that in the long run, it’ll be much cheaper to re-film. The result is that we have only two small sequences which are usable from our October/ November shooting. Those sequences represent a lot of the total film, and our challenge now is to complete filming within a few weeks. We’ve already been out for two weeks in the worst winter weather in Baltimore history (average temperatures of about 10 degrees or lower) , and we have three more weeks to go. We’ve got most of the film in the can now, and we’re confident that we’ll have 100% by February 13th. Of course, by the time you read this it will probably be late March, and filming will have been finished, but I’ll let you know how it worked out in the next issue.

The Evolution Of The Story

My original idea was to make a ” film quickly and cheaply, a fast-buck vehicle that we could use as a springboard to bigger and better projects. The first title for our film was Lance Sterling Monster Killer, and it was to be a parody of every horror flick we’d ever seen. At first there was so much enthusiasm for this approach that we were coming up with more comedy and sight-gags than plot, and it seemed that the whole thing was turning into a sort of one-act satire. Finally, we came to our senses and said. nix.. From everything we had heard and read, the safest bet for a “first feature” was a straight-approach horror film. We continued on that premise, and I began writing the script. As the days rolled on, and script page after script page was completed, I started to notice that our ordinary horror film was turning more into a science fiction kind of thing, demanding a lot more special effects and good acting performances than we had previously calculated. A conflict then set in: should I continue writing this rather involved story, or scrap it and go back to a simple “monster-on-the-loose” concept? My decision was to compromise: three monsters on the loose with science fiction overtones. Thus our monsters became alien creatures, set loose on earth by an accident. Since we wanted our film to ring nostalgic of sci-fi films of the ’50’s, I set the whole story within the mythological small town of Perry Hill. If you change “Hill” to “Hall,” it should sound like a familiar place but “Perry Hall” somehow just doesn’t cut it as a small town.

The Zagatile attacks george Stover in this publicity still from Alien Factor.

So our imaginary small town took on all the characteristics of typical old sci-fi movies. Although there isn’t really any scene in the film taking place in the town’s exterior, we did find a suitable location for a few establishing shots. Just about all of the action “in town” was written to take place in the sheriff’s office, an interior we built on a super-modest budget in part of my basement. Our total office set budget came to about $50.00 and most of that was for lumber. I had several planks of sheet rock, which we used for the walls, and between us we all donated something to embellish the set: an old varnished door and table lamp from Dave Ellis, Venetian blinds from Tony Malanowski, a black dial phone from George Stover, and even an old wooden coat rack brought to us by our good friend Bruce Dods, who came down from New Jersey to watch us film one weekend. Our gun rack was purchased from a secondhand store for $5.00, and the guns placed on it were borrowed from a variety of people. The large bulletin board in the set is merely another piece of sheet-rock, framed and painted tan; and the local Post Office was eager to donate several old “wanted” posters. For a “call box” we set up a microphone and a wood-encased stereo speaker on top of a small particle board desk. The mike is a genuine tabletop one, picked up by one of our actors, Chris Gummer, for a dollar at a flea market. With all the ingredients put together, I’ve got to say that our sheriff’s office has charm, and a definite photogenic quality. Composition was generally easy when we shot on this set, and it’s visually enjoyable on the screen.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Having the set built early helped me tremendously to visualize camera set-ups while I wrote the script. I knew the limitations of camera angles, and I always knew which direction the characters would have to face for continuity’s sake. The basic story of The Alien Factor is fairly typical, but that’s the way we wanted it. Three alien creatures are loose in this small town, and they’re attacking the townspeople left and right. The sheriff is stumped (he at first attributes the deaths to a large animal), and the mayor is on the sheriff’s back to “get out and find the thing before it kills anybody else!” The town doctor (a woman) helps thicken the mystery by discovering strange, impossible symptoms in several of the bodies (“No animal I’ve heard of could do that”). Meanwhile, there is an overly ambitious girl reporter the small town girl who’s been to the big city to study journalism and has now returned home to become the assistant editor of the town paper. She’s pesky, and constantly risking her neck within the film. Finally we have the outsider who comes into town, befriends the mayor, and inevitably becomes the savior. With these characters it was easy to create emotion and turmoil and hence, conflict. You’ve got to have conflict to have any sympathy for your characters, and if the audience can’t sympathize the story loses credibility (and it’s tough enough trying to make horror and science fiction believable). So far, our actors have done a convincing job, and in the daily rushes they seem believable to me, so I’m confident that when all is cut together properly, our story will have believable characters with whom the audience can identify. I should point out that we did things a bit backwards in our preproduction scheme; that is, we held screen tests and chose our actors before the final script was written. I had roughed out a story, described the characters, and scouted most of the exterior locations before we held the screen tests. With our cast selected, I knew precisely what sort of personalities I was dealing with, and although I had preconceived notions as to the characters in the film, knowing what the actors were like really helped. This was my first crack at writing an entire feature-length script, and Baltimore is not Hollywood—so it wasn’t a matter of having hundreds of talented actors at our disposal. We had to take what we could get locally for the most part, but somehow, the people we cast fit beautifully into their respective roles. The only sort of difficulty we encountered with our performers ( who are all working on a deferred payment basis) was in scheduling. We wormed our way around this by giving available actors scenes which were written for other actors (who weren’t able to meet schedules on particular days). Luckily, this sort of character-switching had no ill effect on the story, and in one case it actually worked out better.

  The Special Effects

Although our original concept was to make a quickie, fast-buck monster film, we wanted to at least have the monsters look good. When the script metamorphosed to a more plausible story line, we at first still decided to let our special effects go at three different “monster” creations. However, as we got further into developing our story, we saw a definite need for additional and more sophisticated effects. The first decision here was to make one of our creatures a stop motion model, rather than a man in a suit, like the other two creatures.

The Leemoid

For this task I convinced our cameraman, Britt McDonough, to build a ball-and-socket, latex build-up model, based on my specs. Britt put the model together in one week, using a new, simplified ball-and-socket construction method recently developed by a young man in Virginia. (This new method does not require drilling or soldering, and uses ready-made parts. We will present an article on this in a future issue.) The only significant difference in our stop-motion sequence is that the model will be superimposed over live action of an actor. The reason is that we want the creature called a Leemoid in the film, to be a rather ghostly energy creature who is visible only at night. The sequence involving the Leemoid takes place near the end of the film, and will last about three minutes on the screen.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Ernest Farino ened up constructing the final version of the Leemoid.

    The Zagatile

For our other creatures, we called on John Cosentino and Larry Schlechter. John (who, as I mentioned earlier, is from Michigan) submitted several drawings of various creatures, and two designs were chosen. One of them, a 7-foot-tall beast with furry legs similar to Harryhausen’s 7th Voyage cyclops, became our Zagatile in The Alien Factor. The second design must remain secret for now, for it would reveal too much about our plot. In any case, both creatures were meticulously sculpted in clay, and huge full body casts were made in plaster. John decided that he would have to wear the Zagatile outfit, so he somehow managed to make his own body cast. He used 700 pounds of plaster for the cast, and described it as “Yucchh!” His process was so intriguing, though, that I asked him to write an article about it for a later issue of CM (he agreed to do so). The unique thing about the Zagatile is its feet: a foot and a half of welded steel, with claw-shaped toes, and ski-boots at the top into which John strapped his own feet. Together with his own six-foot frame, John stood 7 feet tall when suited up and standing on the steel Zagatile feet.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    The Inferbyce

Larry Schlechter chose a different approach to creature design. Since his Inferbyce was to be a man-like version of a cockroach, Larry decided that for it to look hard-shelled, it would have to be hard-shelled. He created the suit in hinged sections out of a cardboard base with papier-mache build-up. Several coats of liquid latex, paint, and varnish complete the effect of a shiny, slithery cockroach-thing. With our main three creatures out of the way,  we took to the task of additional special effects.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    The Crashed Ship

Many of these were simply in-camera optical effects, while others were miniatures combined with live action. One of the most convincing on-screen effects so far is a shot of a huge spaceship which is crashed into the earth. Two of our characters walk up to the large craft and inspect it. Here again, we called on the talents of John Cosentino and Britt McDonough. Together they constructed a beautiful miniature of the spaceship and surrounding “earth.” The earth was sculpted in Celluclay (a ready-made papier mache substance) and appropriately painted. To pull off the illusion of the live actors looking dwarfed against a giant craft we did a “deceptive perspective” shot. That is, the spacecraft model platform was arranged in such a way as to blend in with the live terrain, and the actors were placed several hundred feet away from the miniature. The camera, sporting a 10mm wide-angle lens, was placed a few inches from the model, and the effect became the illusion of a large spacecraft and tiny men. The important thing in such a shot is how well the tiny miniature actually blends in with the live terrain, and having both the close miniature and the distant actors in sharp focus. We were fortunate when we shot this sequence because it was an extremely bright day and we were able to close down the lens to f8. To further insure sharpness, we focused mid-way between the miniature and the actors. All-in-all, the effect is totally convincing, and people who have seen it think it’s some sort of precisely executed matte shot.

John Cosentino places twigs into the miniature papier mache platform that the spaceship model rests on. The miniature was coated with real snow.

After the miniature blends into the real, life-size landscape, the camera with a 10mm wide-angle lens is placed close to the miniature.

The miniature placed close to the lens creates the illusion of a huge spaceship. The actors are placed 200 feet in the background, lined up so that they appear to be next to the spaceship. It is important for the miniature to blend perfectly with the life-size background. It is usually best, therefore, to assemble the miniature set. up on location. The models and main ground pieces are built beforehand, but the final assembly needs to include dirt, sand (or in this case, snow), rocks and twigs from the location properly blended to merge with the background.

The foreground miniature is complete and ready for setting up with the actors. Note that the small twigs on the platform will blend in with real trees in the background adding depth to the perspective illusion.

Space ship miniature

  Bill Cosentino … special effects assistant John Cosentino … ‘Zagatile’ (tall creature) designed by / special effects Ernest Farino … ‘Leemoid’ animated by (as Ernie Farino) / ‘Leemoid’ designed by (as Ernie Farino) Britt McDonough … special effects Ted Rae … special effects assistant (as Ted Richard Rae) Larry Schlechter … ‘Inferbyce’ (incect) designed by / special effects Visual Effects by Ernest Farino … additional photographic effects (as Ernest D. Farino) Original Source Material Cinemagic v1 09 (1977) Cinemagic v1 10 (1977) Cinemagic v1 11 (1978) Cinemagic v2 06

The Alien Factor (1978) Retrospective How many of us started into filmmaking with crude, 8mm “mad scientist” horror epics, churned out on weekends in basements, garages, and living rooms?

[themastercylinder]

An Interview with John Dods

How did you come to be involved with The Deadly Spawn?

DODS: Well, it was a fairly simple turn of events. My friend Ted Bohus called me up one day and said, “Let’s make a monster movie!” That seemed like a good idea to me so we did it. I’ve known Ted for years and we worked on the (uncompleted) film Nightbeast together. Ted wanted me to be in charge of the special effects.

You are known primarily as the creator/animator of the Grog film series. Will there be any stop motion in The Deadly Spawn?

DODS: We had assumed from the beginning that some stop motion would be necessary to create Spawn locomotion. As it worked out I devised “live action mechanicals” that everyone seems very happy with. It looks real, and avoiding stop motion enabled us to use fluids. The baby “Spawns” are seen swimming around in the flooded basement of the house in the film. There’s also a lot of blood in Deadly Spawn. It’s hard to make fluids look convincing in the stop motion process.

What kind of special effects will we see in Spawn?

DODS: Most of the effects are on the set mechanicals. Simple puppetry was used for many of the shots-manual manipulation of the various sized models from beneath a specially prepared surface. For example, if a spawn is seen on the floor of the basement we had to build a false floor, flood it with water, and conceal the mechanism through a hole in the surface. Sometimes we had eight people lying flat on their backs making the spawn babies “act” their roles. If a spawn had to appear on a chair we would have to get a chair and wreck it-putting holes in it through which spawn controls could be concealed; that kind of thing. The mama spawn is just a big elaborate puppet that is mobilized by six crew members-one for each body part and another to propel it forward on a tracking system. We have some pyrotechnics in the film which Tim Hildebrandt helped us work out. There is a neat effect involving a miniature set that I’m not allowed to talk about. We have a lot of blood effects where we had to mechanically pump fluid through body parts. I’ve always had an ambition to create a monster that wasn’t an obvious “man in a rubber suit,” so from the very beginning designs for the spawns were far from human. I did a series of drawings and we all picked the one we liked the best.

Is it restricting to work within the confines of a low budget film?

DODS: I suppose so but I’ve never worked any other way! We’ve stretched every dollar to the limit and all of it is on the screen. I’m working with a very resourceful group of people. We could make an expensive looking film with the money that Dino DeLaurentiis spends on stationery. I know that our effects budget would be around $100,000 if we had done this film in any kind of conventional way—and I don’t think we’ve spent that much. On the entire picture.

Do you feel that the Deadly Spawn is different than the current crop of low budget thrillers?

DODS: I know that it’s different. We designed it to be different. The Deadly Spawn is presented in the manner of putting on a show, or like a tour through a chamber of horrors. We show the audience series of exhibits in a theatrical manner in the context of a story that resolves itself in a very satisfactory way.

What would you like to do after The Deadly Spawn is completed?

DODS: Work on another film with Filmline Communications, make another Grog puppet film, finish illustrating a children’s book I have been working on.

Dods’ title, as director of special effects, is one to be taken literally-virtually all of the scenes involving monsters and effects were directed by Dods, following his storyboards. In fact, Bohus’ first plan called for Dods and Bohus to collaboratively direct the film themselves. “I was reluctant, at the time,” he recalls. “Though I’ve directed stop-motion films, I’ve never worked with actors, and you see so many low-budget films that are hurt by bad acting, so I was insistent that we get someone who’d had experience working with actors.” The choice of McKeown, who has directed for the New York stage as part of the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater, did not exactly eliminate that problem, however. Dods now doubts that he would be so reluctant the second time around.

Dods does, however, work singularly well with the monsters of Deadly Spawn. One of his primary concerns was the manner of locomotion used by the various critters. “The mother spawn was herself relatively limited in movement,” Dodds says, “but that was okay-she’s supposed to be a huge, lumbering 3,000-pound thing. Her slow movements make sense, so we avoided a whole lot of technical problems right there.”

The film does open with a sequence that shows, in silhouette, the adult monster undergoing rapid growth, shortly after killing a pair of campers; simultaneously, various inhuman schlurping sounds are heard on the soundtrack, as it consumes its human meal (“‘Every sound you hear the monster make came from my mouth,” Dods reveals). The manner in which the illusion was accomplished is one of the simplest tricks we’ve ever come across Using shadow puppetry, monster shaped cardboard cutouts back-lit against a wall.

Yet another sequence shows one of the repulsive-yet-somehow cute baby spawn wiggling through bloody basement waters with the speed of a frightened lizard. “Every monster movie should have one long shot of the monster, showing its method of locomotion,” says Dods, “and so many don’t have that-they try to get by with fast cutting, or some other technique, to give you the impression of having seen an entire creature in motion. Since my background is in stop-motion, I was planning to use that in order to get such a shot. Using a jigsaw, I cut an S-shaped, repeating wave form, a sort of curved slot. I then mounted a flexible, foam rubber baby spawn on a piece of plastic, and was going to shoot that in stop motion, travelling in that S-shaped curve; but then we found that, if you simply pulled it along in that slot, it traveled in a very lifelike, wiggling fashion, so we wound up shooting it in live action. That way, we could also have it speeding through the water on the basement floor-water is just about impossible to animate.”

The swimming spawn, and many of the other effects of The Deadly Spawn, were entirely originated by the effects crew; few were specially called for by McKeown’s script. “Arnold Gargiulo was particularly good at coming up with things,” says Dods. “For instance, it was indicated that the monster would attack Ellisa Niel in the face, but it was figured we’d simply track in, through the monster’s point of view, and then pull back to reveal the damage. Arnold came up with much more than he was asked for in several cases; in that scene, he did something I hadn’t seen before-a two-layered makeup, with a normal-looking appliance, which the monster rips away to reveal some pretty gruesome work underneath it.”

More contributions above and beyond the call of etcetera came from Tim Hildebrandt-including the contribution of his own little spawn, son Charles, as the film’s youthful hero. Wife Rita Hildebrandt served in various capacities as well, including the provision of her own recipe for monster saliva-a concoction achieved by mixing water and corn starch and boiling it down to a syrupy goo. Hildebrandt’s contributions to the effects are seen in the very beginning and end of the film, in the depiction of the spawn’s arrival on earth, and of its final (unless there’s a sequel) appearance. The Hildebrandts even sacrificed the attic of their home, which was transformed into a blood and-debris-spattered mess after the filming of a crucial confrontation scene.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

BABY SPAWNS

When a deadly spawn reaches a certain growth stage it reproduces. Before the movie is half over we introduce several dozen new characters into the story: rapidly growing baby monsters.

In clay, I sculpted four small creatures each representing a baby spawn in a different stage of growth. These ranged from six inches to three feet in length. Molds were made of the sculptures using a mix of 50% Hydrocal and 50% Ultracal; these are plaster-like materials that yield molds much harder than ordinary casting plaster. This extra hardness was needed to insure mold durability during the repeated use the five molds were subjected to to produce over 50 constructions.

R&D brand oven-cured foamed latex was used to produce most of the smaller spawn babies. The plaster molds were greased with caster oil or rubber mask grease paint (which I like better because unlike caster oil you can make about three positives without regreasing). The liquid foam-frothed with an electric mixer-was poured into each mold cavity to the point of overflowing and the mold halves were closed tightly. The excess foam came out through a large hold in the mold’s underside. This method never resulted in the air pockets commonly associated with injection processes.

The largest mold was over three feet long and would not fit into my oven. So a (more expensive) Isofoam “cold foam” process was used for this. This is a two part system that begins to foam by chemical action after parts A and B are vigorously mixed together for about 20 seconds. Effects assistant Sharon Levine and I mixed a series of small batches and gradually filled the large mold cavities almost to the brim. Then a final large batch was mixed, poured quickly, and the mold closed just as the foam was beginning to expand to fill the remaining space. In this process, the mold is not only greased conventionally, but is also coated with a layer of liquid latex “skin” before any cold foam is poured. This provides a smooth surface to the model (the cold foam alone has a very coarse texture) and keeps the cold foam from adhering to the plaster.

After the foam babies were produced, the teeth and mechanics were inserted; certain areas were hollowed out of the foam using scissors and tweezers. Super glue proved to be a good adherent between the rubber lips and the plastic teeth.

SPAWN ANIMATION

From the beginning of the production the method for getting the baby spawns to move was undecided. Most of the effects shots required the spawns to remain in one spot-chewing on body parts usually; this action was accomplished through simple puppetry. But the problem of spawn locomotion remained unsolved for some time. Because of my previous experience with stop motion (the Grog series of film shorts) this animation technique seemed to be a real possibility-yet eventually I decided against it. Unexpectedly, found a better solution to the problem.

I constructed a plywood surface into which I cut a repeating “wiggle” pattern with a jigsaw. I slit open the underside of a small foam rubber spawn and sewed into it a flexible plastic insert; this protruded from the underside of the model and fit into the plywood track. I had intended to move the spawn bit by bit along the track and create the illusion of movement through the stop motion process. I soon realized, though, that this was not necessary. By lubricating the track with Vaseline and pulling the spawn with a nylon cord I had created the effect we needed. It looked real

Hiding the track then became easy. In The Deadly Spawn there is water in the basement where the spawns are breeding; leakage from the thunderstorm raging outside the house covers the floor. I simply made the water (opaque with dirt and “blood”) deep enough to submerge the numerous tracks and we had another set of successful constructions: mobile spawns.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

PLASTIC FLESH

During The Deadly Spawn some scientifically oriented teenagers find a dead baby spawn and decide to dissect it in an effort to figure out what it is. For this sequence a construction had to be made out of a fleshy/jelly-like material that could be cut with a razor blade. After some unsuccessful experiments with alginate material found a supplier of Plastisol—the same material used to make artificial bait and those wiggly spiders seen in novelty shops. Plastisol comes as a white liquid that turns clear when heated on a stove for a few minutes; pigments can be added at this stage to color the Plastisol as desired. I poured pigmented Plastisol into two greased plaster mold halves and quickly closed them together; more Plastisol was poured in through a hole in the mold’s bottom half. After cooling (about one hour in a freezer) the Plastisol had set and was removed from the mold. Permanent Magic Markers were the only form of colorant I have found that will adhere to Plastisol once it has cooled to a solid state, but these do work quite well.

Plastisol again proved invaluable when we needed a shot of a human head being eaten by baby spawns—chunks of flesh were to be pulled off the face by the greedy extraterrestrials. The Deadly Spawn makeup supervisor Arnold Garguilo prepared a mold from the face of the actress whose head was to appear to be consumed. I poured a one quarter inch thick layer of Plastisol into Arnold’s mold to produce a positive “face.” This was super glued onto an appropriately gory plastic skull and a realistic glass eye was inserted. The face was made up with rubber mask and conventional type grease paints.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

THE MOTHER SPAWN

Building the mother spawn began with the sculpture of hundreds of teeth using a material called Sculpey. Sculpey is a lot like clay but when you bake it in an oven (15 minutes at 250°) it hardens. The hardened teeth-ranging in size from 5 inches long to as tiny as a pencil point-were pressed into the gums of three clay spawn skulls.

I then had to duplicate the toothy creations in hard plastic so they would be more durable. Many layers of thick mold-making rubber were applied to the sculptures over a 10 day period. Before removal, the resulting molds were heat treated in a 300° oven for 20 minutes. Rubber that has not been heat-treated vulcanized) in this way can be stretched out of shape permanently; vulcanized rubber will always remember” its original form and return to it.

The molds were removed from the sculptures and scrubbed clean with acetone. Positives were made using Jet Dental Acrylic color #6 (the color most popular with dentists according to the salesman). This plastic material was applied to the insides of the molds in small sections—the fast hardening liquid being worked into the points of the deep mold cavities with a fine wire. I reinforced this thin covering with (cheaper) polyester resin—the kind available at auto body shops with chopped fiberglass mixed into it. Tooth polish and a scrub brush made the teeth shine.

The mother spawn was controlled like a puppet by as many as six people situated low to the ground in back of the construction. The operators were hidden by darkness, camera cut-off, and the bulk of the monster. One operator rode inside of the structure manipulating one or both of the side heads. Others worked the main head, arms, and body movement.

The substructure of the mother spawn looks like somebody had some fun with an erector set; it provides the needed support and control for the heads. The weight of the heads was counterbalanced with springs; gentle pressure would move the heads and necks forward and backward. The jointed mouths would open and close through manipulation of a hand control which also governed the head tilt.

In The Deadly Spawn the mother creature moves almost in slow motion (kind of like a giant slug), its speed held in check by inertia and its own massive weight. The entire structure moved on wheels that fit into a tracking system constructed from plumbers’ PVC tubing. This provided the very smooth movement we needed.

The monster’s skin was built up on top of the metal skeleton in layers. Half-inch foam sheeting was cut and stapled together to form the basic shape. Refinements were added using paper toweling soaked in thick latex mold-making rubber. Fans and hair dryers speeded the drying process. The spawn was painted with latex base wall paint with about 30-40% liquid latex added in order to keep the paint from cracking and peeling as the skin moved and flexed.

During the shooting the mother spawn had to be “made up” before every take. Spawns are very slimey. Initial experiments with children’s toy store variety slime gave way to a combination of mineral oil and rubber cement. This looked good but the oil rotted the rubber and the rubber cement was a nightmare to clean up. Executive producer Rita Hildebrandt suggested that we try thickening plain water with corn starch; this produced the best looking slime of all and at 65¢ per gallon it was super economical too (rubber cement costs about $20.00 per gallon).

THE FINALE

It was a real problem. How were we going to create the biggest effect of the entire production without any money, well hardly any money? It was near the end of the filming on The Deadly Spawn when Executive Producer Tim Hildebrandt and Producer Ted Bohus had their brainstorm. They wanted to cap the film with a shot showing just how big the ever growing deadly spawns really can get as big as a mountain.

Dino D’Laurentis might have spent a couple of million dollars on a mountain-sized construction, but with less than $500.00 to spend we had to think small. So, naturally. we built a miniature Tim Hildebrandt’s production drawing for the shot was our guide during construction as well as our inspiration to do the work necessary to make it happen on film. Tim’s teenage experience as a miniature landscape builder, as well as his more recent work on the 3M TV commercial (the one with the futuristic looking cityscapes), was instrumental in realizing the drawing, Tim in fact did all the landscape detailing himself. The rest of our effects crew for this shot included Glenn Takakjian who built the house, Frank Balsamo-cinematographer. Greg Ramundas-Deadly Spawn chief effects technician, and Robert R. Bohus. As usual, it was my job to build the monster.

BUILDING THE SET

Before doing any actual construction we cut shapes out of cardboard representing various proposed set elements. When viewed through the camera, these helped us to determine how big and how deep we would have to make the set in order to get the depth of field we wanted. This turned out to be about 10 feet wide by 15 feet deep, Plywood cutouts then replaced the cardboard so that the set would have a sturdy substructure Chicken wire covered the plywood and was shaped to Create the basic topography of the landscape. The chicken wire was covered with paper toweling and a low budget substitute for plaster cement. A V-inch thickness provided the strength needed.

Chunks of burnt coal from the Hildebrandt’s coal stove were pressed into the cement to form cliffsides and other rocky looking areas. Coal dust from the same source and flocking-applied with a flour sifter-created areas of texture and color. Lichen Spongy fungus growth was used to simulate areas of vegetation and the treetops. Lichen can be purchased where toy train accessories are sold, though it can be found growing naturally in places having good air quality imported a hefty bad full of it about $300.00 worth) on my way back from a trip to Ontario, Canada. Trees were made of real tree branch endings–sometimes bunched together and taped along the “trunk” section before being painted. A road was cut out of roofing paper and cemented into place. The gravel at the side of the road was kitty litter

Glenn Takakjian’s efforts in producing a scaled miniature house topped that of everyone else on the crew combined. Working 4 5 hours a day for 6 weeks. Glen produced a highly detailed accurate miniature version of the Deadly Spawns primary location; a house. Glen began by taking many photos of the house he was to copy: long shots and many close ups of detailing. The construction began with the assembly of a corrugated cardboard framework with holes being cut wherever windows were needed Proportions were determined by studying the photos. Floor by floor, the cardboard substructure was covered with balsawood “siding” using Elmer’s glue as an adhesive. The window frames were also made of balsa with molding detail being hand carved using an exacto knife. This was sanded with fine grade emory cloth. Clear plastic was placed behind the windows to simulate glass. The large vertical posts of the downstairs porch were purchased from a doll house supplier and modified using an electric Dremel tool. The “gingerbread ornamentation was reconstructed from parts of a doll house gate each “S shaped unit being made of 4 plastic pieces that had been cut glued, and sanded. The smaller posts as well as the rest of the porch construction were simply hand carved using an exacto knife and a great deal of care. The completed porch construction was coated with a plastic spray in order to smooth over and hide the grain texture of the balsa wood. The plastic surface also made it possible to use instant bonding Crazy Glue as an adhesive instead of the slow drying Elmer’s. The chimney was a balsa wood box covered with ordinary wall spackle Bricks were carved into the dry spackle using the end of small rattail file. Covering the cardboard tool with 1,200 shingles was the most time consuming part of the project. Each shingle was individually cut from thin cardboard and glued into place; the completed house was painted with acrylic paints.

THE MONSTER

In the shot we were planning the monster or monster head-had to first look like a distant mountain, and then to rise upwards, tilt up, and open its mouth Since we had determined that the head had to be a rather large construction 3 feet wide 3 feet high, and 4 feet long-it required a very substantial control mechanism to make these movements happen. This was constructed out of wood-2×4’s and plywood. A seesaw arrangement – the head being at one end of the seesaw-controlled the upward movement. A 10 feet long handle attached to what amounted to 2 oversized pairs of scissors caused the mouth to open. This handle also governed the tilt of the head.

The mountain monster’s gums and numerous teeth were cast in hydro hard plaster) using existing rubber molds produced earlier for other spawn constructions in the movie. These teeth-fragile but cheap to produce were wired to the substructure. Many of the smaller teeth were simply painted onto the gums. The bulk of the shape was made of chicken wire and sheets of foam rubber stapled together): the use of these materials helped minimize the weight of the construction. Finally, the monster’s skin was built up out of paper toweling and liquid latex rubber. The creature’s head was landscaped with burnt coal chunks.

Everything we built was backed up by an original Hildebrandt painting: Three panels of masonite were joined together and taped at the seams with gafers tape to provide a large canvas. The sky actually had to be painted three times. The oil based paint first used proved to be too reflective-it was impossible to light. Tim opted for redoing it rather than trying (expensive) experiments with large amounts of dulling spray. The second version painted in flat latex base wall paints-is the one seen in the film. Still another backdrop was painted when we decided to use the miniature-minus house and somewhat modified for the shot that opens Deadly Spawn: a meteorite crossing the sky and falling to earth. Ideas on how to produce stars in the night sky ranged from direct projection, to the use of bits of front projection material of sequins. The first thing we tried worked-almost unexpectedly-so we used it: Tim simply painted them on.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to film the shot in slow motion in order to suggest great size in the creature as an avalanche of dirt and rocks (burnt coal chips and coal dust mostly) fell away from its rising body at a speed right for its apparent size. We were able to shoot at 64 frames per second(only about half of what I we would have liked.) This rapid rate of frame exposure increased our lighting requirements as did stopping down the lens to increase the depth of field on the set. It ended up that of the money we spent on the shot was spent renting lights about 8000 watts and extension cords. The final bill for the shot was about $360.00.

A no-sound-look behind the work of “The Deadly Spawn” (1983) directed by Douglas McKeown.

Michael Perilstein ‎– The Deadly Spawn (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

  Source Material

Fangoria Magazine 28

Fangoria Magazine 310

Cinemagic Magazine 22

Cinemagic Magazine 18

The Deadly Spawn (1983) Retrospective Part Two An Interview with John Dods How did you come to be involved with The Deadly Spawn? …

[themastercylinder]

For those who grew up as horror fans in the 1980s, invasions of killer monsters intent on devouring nubile young flesh were a popular stock in trade. With an entire generation of young filmmakers raised on the Cold War thematics and situations of alien invasion films of the ’50s and ’60s on TV, balanced with a steady intake of harder-edged violence and gore from late-’60s and early ’70s genre revolutionaries, the combination of creepy, icky things from out of this world and Tom Savini-style grue was a natural progression. Aliens weren’t just out to take over our planet or shoot you with ray guns—they wanted to eat you too, and in as messy a way as the budget would allow.

Storyline

Two campers are nearby when a meteor falls to Earth. When they investigate, they are attacked and eaten by a bizarre life form that emerges from the crashed rock.

A house near the crash site is the home of Sam (James Brewster) and Barb (Elissa Neil), and their two children, college student and budding scientist Pete (Tom DeFranco) and his younger brother Charles (Charles George Hildebrandt), a monster movie fan. Visiting are Aunt Millie (Ethel Michelson) and Uncle Herb (John Schmerling). When a rainstorm sets in, Sam goes downstairs to check the basement for flooding and is eaten by the bizarre monstrosity. Barb suffers the same fate when she goes looking for him.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Pete sets up a study date with classmates Ellen (Jean Tafler), Frankie (Richard Lee Porter), and Kathy (Karen Tighe). Uncle Herb, a psychologist, wants to investigate Charles’s interest in the macabre, and he holds a brief interview with the boy before he falls asleep in the living room. Aunt Millie heads over to her mother Bunny’s (Judith Mayes) house for a luncheon with her retired friends. When an electrician arrives to investigate a circuit breaker malfunction in the basement, Charles dons a costume and goes down to scare him. There, he discovers the basement is infested with slug-like creatures feasting on the electrician’s and his mother’s remains, guarded by their huge mother, the monster from the meteor crash. After realizing that the eyeless creatures react to sound, he stands silently, escaping his parents’ fate.

Meanwhile, Ellen and Frankie have discovered one of the tadpole creatures dead on the way over to the house, and deem it unlike any animal on Earth when they dissect it. Science fiction fan Frankie hypothesizes that the creature could be from outer space, but hard-nosed scientist Pete dismisses that theory. At Bunny’s house, Millie arrives and they prepare the luncheon, unaware that the spawn have infested the house. When her guests arrive, the spawn creatures emerge and attack them. The women fight back and manage to escape in Millie’s car.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Back at the house, Pete, Ellen and Frankie seek out Uncle Herb to get his opinion on the creatures, only to find him being devoured by the spawn. As the adult creature emerges and charges them, they run upstairs to barricade themselves in Charles’s bedroom. Charles distracts the adult by turning on a radio, which it eats, causing an electrical fire which burns it. Pete and the others then see Kathy arriving and pull her into the bedroom just in time to save her from the beast. The teens decide to head for Pete’s bedroom, where there is a phone to call for help with, but as they emerge, the adult creature pounces on them. Pete flees to another room and from there onto the roof; Frankie and Kathy run up to the attic, while Ellen stays in Charles’ room. The creature easily breaks down the door, bites Ellen’s head off and devours her body. Peter returns through the attic window; but traumatized after seeing Ellen’s body, he becomes unhinged, fighting with Frankie to open the attic door, which attracts the creature.

Meanwhile, Charles has concocted a plan: he has filled a prop head with explosive flash powder, with a frayed electrical cord trailing behind to act as a fuse. He arrives in the attic before the creature can attack Peter and the others, spurring the creature into devouring the prop head. However, the cord proves too short to plug into an outlet. One of the spawn creatures appears and attacks Charles, but gets in the way of the adult when it lunges at Charles and ends up being eaten. Now that the monster is distracted and its mouth close enough, Charles manages to get to the outlet, igniting the powder and blowing up the adult.

With the threat revealed, a massive hunt is mobilized. Policemen and townspeople go around killing the alien spawn and burning the remains. Millie returns to the house to care for Pete and Charles as best she can, while Frankie and Kathy are taken away in an ambulance. That night, a lone patrolman stands guard outside the house. His contact on the CB radio is confident that the spawn has been wiped out, but then the patrolman hears a low rumbling, and sees the hill by the house lift up, revealing a fully-grown spawn of colossal size.

Back Story

In terms of this combination, 1983’s The Deadly Spawn was a pioneer. Filmed on a shoestring budget around $25,000, the film tells the story of a houseful of people under assault from alien creatures breeding in the basement, which are basically mobile, worm like stalks terminating in giant mouths full of rows of razor-sharp teeth.

John Dods, who co-wrote the film’s original story and served as director of special effects, recalls the origin of the Deadly Spawn. “Ted Bohus, our producer, called me up one day,” says Dods, “and said, ‘Hey, let’s make ourselves a monster movie.’ The only problem we had at that point was, we didn’t have any money. But our friend Don Dohler in Baltimore had managed to finance and make a film called The Alien Factor, and had managed to sell it to television, and even make a profit. So Ted figured, and I agreed, why couldn’t we do the same thing?”

Neither Bohus nor Dods were entirely without experience at the project’s outset; in fact, Dods is quite well-known (famous, almost) among semi-pro filmmakers as the producer-director-writer-animator-designer of a series of short films featuring Grog, a delightfully primitive critter who was briefly featured in the TV special The Making of The Empire Strikes Back as an example of the stop-motion animator’s art. Bohus, a genuine SF fan and former fanzine publisher, may not have had much producing experience, but he did achieve the goal of procuring financing for the project, and he assembled a crew that included some of the best young film making talent in the East: Dods; makeup artist Arnold Gargiulo musician Ken Walker to score the film, along with Paul Cornell and Michael Perilstein; and renowned fantasy artist Tim Hildebrandt, who served as executive producer and made several special contributions to the film’s effects and designs.

The Deadly Spawn design by John Dods

While the acting and the directing of The Deadly Spawn is only passable at best the work of these four gentlemen make the film watchable-and even highly enjoyable, for those of us who like the idea of face-eating mutant creatures from out of space. For, in the time-honored tradition of low-budget monster cinema, the play is not the thing; the “Thing’ is the play. It is Dods’ hell-raising title creatures, and the havoc they raise in a New Jersey suburb, that gives this film its singular charm.

Dod’s first order of business was his collaboration with Bohus on a story, which served as a key tool in obtaining investors; this story was later fleshed out into a somewhat flabby screenplay by director Doug McKeown. Dod’s second task-and one that turned out quite a bit better–was the design and construction of the film’s highly unpleasant stars. “We wanted something really frightening,” says Dods, “and since this was over two years ago, we were probably a little influenced by Alien. I decided to give it a lot of teeth, because, to me, that says that it’s going to bite you. So taking that to an extreme, we gave it a whole lot of teeth-three heads full of them. We did a number of toothy sketches, discussed them with the director and so forth; I did one more version, which I later sculpted in clay, and that seemed to strike everyone as pretty awful in the right way.” The adult creature was built, along with various other required bits and pieces, over a two month period, by Dods with technician Greg Ramoundas.

Interview with Ted Bohus

Ted, how and when did The Deadly Spawn get started?

BOHUS: In October of 1980 extrapolated an idea from a news story I’d read. I imagined a dormant microbe or spore inside a meteor, which crashes in an isolated area (it had to be an isolated area, because the budget would not let us put it down in New York City!), comes alive and starts eating everything in sight. Eventually it ends up in a family’s basement and starts producing, or should I say, reproducing various sized offspring. The “tooth-heads” eventually invade the house, and the surrounding area.

How are the spawn finally destroyed?

BOHUS: Wait a minute now…I can’t tell you that! But I will say that the young boy in the film (played by Tim Hildebrandt’s son), finds a way to destroy some of them.

Deadly Spawn is an independent production. How did you find backers to finance the film?

BOHUS: A friend of mine is studying to become a doctor. He and a few other friends put up the initial starting money. Since then Tim and Rita Hildebrandt and another friend have become involved.

How did you meet the Hildebrandts?

BOHUS: I met Tim and Greg Hildebrandt at a convention about four years ago. We started talking about painting, science fiction films, Disney and how we are all still 15 years old. Actually, after the first meeting, I only stayed in contact with Tim and Rita. Periodically we all got together to watch films or talk. When I mentioned the film to Tim and that we were scouting locations he said, “Hey I’ve got an idea! Why don’t you use our house?” So we did. And we used his son too! And Rita, and the neighbors.

How did Charles Hildebrandt get the part of the young boy?

BOHUS: Well he didn’t get the part just because he was Tim’s son. Charles is a natural actor. No fear in front of the camera whatsoever.

Back to the Hildebrandts. Is Greg also involved in this film project? I thought the Hildebrandt Brothers always did everything together.

BOHUS: No. Tim and Rita are the only Hildebrandts involved in this project. Tim and Greg have split up and gone their separate ways. I think that the Clash of the Titans poster was their last work together.

What about the new Atlantis calendar?

BOHUS: That was also done before the split.

Artistic differences?

BOHUS: I think Tim wants to get more heavily into filmmaking at this point.

Will Tim be doing the poster for The Deadly Spawn?

BOHUS: I think so. He’s already done up a few roughs-I’d like something with a 50’s look.

You mean Big Monster and Girl in Trouble?

BOHUS: Exactly! Tim’s also working on a miniature for the film.

How did you locate the actors?

BOHUS: All the actors and actresses are professionals- put ads in the New York trade papers asking for actors willing to work for a small percentage, and described the parts.

How many responses did you get?

BOHUS: Well, I expected about 60, but got over 400! Some from as far away as Miami! | Weeded them down to about 100. Then I took the resumes to our Director, Doug McKeown, and our Effects Director John Dods. We narrowed them down to 50. Gave 40 screen tests and picked 12 people.

You mentioned Director and Effects Director. Do these people also work on a percentage?

BOHUS: Everyone on this film is working on a percentage.

How did you find them?

BOHUS: John Dods, I’ve known for many years. He’s mainly known for animating the Grog cartoons, but I brought him in to work on all parts of the film, not just the effects.

Ted Bohus’ original concept art for the main creature.

Did he design the creatures in the film?

BOHUS: We both had ideas about what the “Spawn” should look like…possibly three or more snake-like heads, plenty of teeth, slimy. I was trying to design something with a man in a suit but John said no, it would be better just to have this enormous form with heads and teeth. A big mechanical creature. He went off and a few days later brought over some designs. We went through them and rejected some. He went off again and this time hit it right on the head.

Who is directing?

BOHUS: Doug McKeown is a filmmaker that John Dods knew for many years. He recommended him for the job.

What about the crew?

BOHUS: Lighting, sound, construction, all the crew except for our Director of Photography are local guys I’ve known for years. They’ve been making films since high school.

How long have you been in production?

BOHUS: About eight months.

You kept a crew and actors together for eight months?

BOHUS: We love making movies.

What do you hope to do with the film after it’s finished? Do you have any leads at this time?

BOHUS: A few. Most companies are waiting for the entire film to be rough cut. There’s a booming market out there these days, with HBO going 24 hours, overseas sales and a lot of new countries getting into the movie market. Plus video tapes and discs.

So the film has a pretty good chance of being sold quickly.

BOHUS: If it’s a good product, it’ll sell’ fast:

Do you sell a company all rights or can you sell it yourself overseas and to HBO?

BOHUS: That depends. I can sell the film outright for one sum and they can sell it to the other markets. Or if you have a lot of contacts you can sell it yourself.

Each market can be a different deal then?

BOHUS: Yes.

After this film is sold would you like to get right into another one?

BOHUS: Yes, of course. I’d like to show the film companies what we can do with a low budget and hope they would back us on the next project. Don’t forget, we have everything right here. We create the stories, write the screenplay, do storyboards, artwork, special effects, music, the whole thing! We can turn in a finished product completely on our own.

Do you think that the major companies will like that?

BOHUS: We want to make a good product, an entertaining film, for a decent budget and make a name for ourselves. If what we’re doing is good we’ll get lots of work.

What do you think of The Deadly Spawn? Is it a good film?

BOHÚS: I think it’s a good, fast paced, entertaining film. The science fiction, horror, thriller, whatever you want to call them, films of today (with few exceptions) are too slow. If you’re going to the movies to get scared or see monsters you have to wait through twenty minutes of baloney to get to see fifteen seconds of effects.

I know what you mean, some films drag on and on and center everything around one or two effects scenes, while the rest of the

film is totally boring.

BOHUS: Exactly!

Do you have any other projects in the works?

BOHUS: Yes, I’d like to work with John and Tim on a project called Bing’s Thing. It’s a science fiction musical comedy-horror film. (Chuckle) Also, I’m getting treatments ready for four other films. One’s a U.F.O. story with a twist. One’s a science-fantasy. Another is similar to Journey to the Center of the Earth, and explains Big Foot and U.F.O.’s.

When do you expect to have The Deadly Spawn finished?

BOHUS: I hope within two to three months.  

  Tim Hildebrandt paints the artwork for the Deadly Spawn poster.

An Interview with Tim Hildebrandt

The Hildebrandt name is one that is usually associated with the big Hollywood megabuck spectaculars such as Star Wars and Clash of the Titans. How did you come to be involved with The Deadly Spawn which is a modestly budgeted horror/thriller?

HILDEBRANDT: Well, I’m a personal friend of the producer Ted Bohus and the special effects director John Dods. When they began work on The Deadly Spawn I was caught up in their enthusiasm for the project and wanted to have something to do with it.

What is your function on The Deadly Spawn?

TH: Well right now I’m building a “mystery set” outside in my barn in conjunction with John Dods. It’s a miniature landscape but it involves something that the producer doesn’t want revealed as yet.

How is a low budget film able to afford building even a miniature set?

TH: We’re low budget by Holly-wood standards certainly but you can still get good results without spending a lot of money. I did a 3M Company TV commercial which involved building miniatures. To give you an idea of what Hollywood people want to do this kind of work, John Dykstra wanted, I believe, somewhere in the vicinity of a couple hundred thousand dollars to pull off an effect that actually could be pulled off for $5,000-$10,000 at the most.

It’s been said that when you have a lot of money, there is a tendency to do things in the least efficient way!

TH: Exactly! If you go back to the old Hollywood days and the old serials such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers some of those effects men were told the night before that they had to have certain effects or sets ready. They would look around and see what they had in the way of available materials: a football helmet would become a space helmet. To make something out of nothing that to me is more fun than having a lot of paraphernalia at your disposal.

So on The Deadly Spawn you rely more on ingenuity and resourcefulness than on mega-bucks?

TH: That’s it in a nutshell.

People associate the name Hildebrandt mostly with fantasy illustration, The Lord of the Rings calendars, for example, but your involvement with film goes way back.

TH: It began in my parent’s garage when I was a teenager, 1954 or thereabouts after having seen War of the Worlds by George Pall was slightly impressed by the special effects. My brother Greg and I took eight months to build a miniature city—like the one in the film. This was when we were in high school. We’d come home at night in the middle of winter and spend hours making detailed windows and carving bricks in the plaster walls. Then we blew it up using powdered magnesium, filming it in slow motion on an old Keystone regular 8 movie camera. A couple of scenes were used by the Jam Handy organization as part of a film on the San Francisco earthquake. Jam Handy is an industrial film producer and I worked for them primarily doing cell animation. I never actually wanted to be an illustrator. My prime objective was to be an animator for Walt Disney.

You sound as though you’re well known ventures into fantasy illustration have been a diversion from your main passion.

TH: Yes, actually, I look at it that way. You asked before why I got involved in The Deadly Spawn. I just wanted to get my hands into a film; I wanted to make something to hold onto a camera light, to be part of it, somehow.

You and your wife Rita are functioning as executive producers on the film.

TH: Which, simply put, means we put money into the film.

Your son Charles has a featured role in The Deadly Spawn.

TH: Let me tell you about my son Charles . . . he kills the monster! Charles plays a 12 year old horror film buff who likes to frighten people by appearing in a puff of smoke (powdered magnesium) as a monster. At the climax of the film Charles feeds the monster a “head” full of powdered magnesium and blows it to pieces.

You allowed your house to be used as a location for some sequences in The Deadly Spawn. What is it like to have a film crew marching in and out of your house carrying equipment—and monsters up and down stairs?

TH: I enjoyed it—being around all that activity. It was a very messy film. The monster is coated with thick slime before every take and there’s lots of blood in the film. One scene involved the Uncle who is discovered in a room infested with little spawns who are chewing him to pieces. I had a white carpet in that room, but needless to say, it had a lot of red in it by the end of the shoot. The company we took it to for cleaning did a double take when they saw it.

Did anything amusing happen during the shooting?

TH: Well, I saw the director pull his hair out a few times—I thought that only happened in the movies!

 I understand that you were approached to do design work on the Disney/Paramount production Dragonslayer.

TH: Years ago, yeah. But I was in the middle of trying to sell Urshuraka novel I wrote with my brother and Gerry Nichols—as a film. We came quite close, but the short side of the story is that it was just too expensive to do. Joseph E. Levine for example saw the Urshurak presentation. He applauded, turned to us, slapped the arm of his chair and said “Well, that’ll cost $145,000,000 to make!” We thought he was joking but he meant it literally.

Urshurak—like most of your previous work was a joint venture between you and your brother Greg—”The Brothers Hildebrandt.” Up until painting the Clash of the Titans poster you worked together, usually both of you contributing to each painting. There has been a split between you two and now you work alone. What happened?

TH: It was not a friendly parting of the ways. At the time it happened I was working on a very important piece of work with my brother—production design for the forth-coming motion picture The Beast of Krull to be directed by Peter Yates. I was on the job for a month. One day I was informed that I was off of the project and that Greg was to continue … let’s leave it at that.

So at this point we don’t know if any of the design work in The Beast of Krull will represent your efforts.

TH: Right, I won’t know until I see the film.

Is it true that members of The Deadly Spawn film crew have found their way into one of your current projects?

TH: Yes, I’m painting a 1983 fantasy calendar for the TSR people, who make Dungeons and Dragons and other role playing games. It’s called “Realms of Wonder.” Crew members posed for various characters; our cinematographer Frank Balsamo became a dwarf; John Dods posed for a monster and a wizard (in the same picture!); and our production coordinator Kathy Vent posed for a mermaid.

What are your other current projects?

TH:  Well, I consider The Deadly Spawn to be my prime project. But I’m also doing two books with my wife. One is the “Fantasy Cookbook” to be published by Bobs Merril Company. And we’re doing an adult picture book on Merlin the Magician. I’m also discussing other projects with the TSR people—they’re very good to work for.

Would you like to be involved with film in the future?

TH: Yes, in the area of production design, in creating the look of the film. I like to build miniature sets—and I’ve always wanted to do a matte painting.

  Douglas McKeown and Mother Spawn

Director/screenwriter Douglas McKeown

A bio of you says you started a theater in your house at age 9.

DOUGLAS McKEOWN: When I was in sixth grade, I did a makeup inspired by The Curse of Frankenstein. There were maybe 15 people sitting in the basement facing a table I was lying on with a sheet over me, and on cue I sat up, the sheet slipped off my face and a kid in the audience screamed, “Shit!” and fell off his stool. Well, that did it; I was hooked. I can still see the expression on his face. So I kept making plays about monsters, and shanghaied kids from the neighborhood to be in them even my mother had to step in once at the last minute and suit up as the Monster for my spin on Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Guess who played the Wolf Man! That show ended with a castle cave in that caused so much smoke and dust, the audience had to flee up the steps to keep from choking to death

My other extracurricular activities included showing off severed fingers in boxes or staging bloody stabbings and murders by the side of the road for the benefit of passing motorists. I was privately doing more and more realistic makeups and sneaking out after dark to make “appearances.” I know there are grown adults out there who still have nightmares about their childhood run-ins with a growling, hairy creature running past an open window or a maniac in a cape jumping off a roof, or some shapeless thing they couldn’t quite make out scratching at the back door. When I was 17, I filmed myself as the Phantom of the Opera on 8mm, and sort of turned quasi-professional. I got a makeup scholarship in college and started designing makeups for the theater department’s productions while majoring in English and studying film,

What, spawned The Deadly Spawn?

McKEOWN: In 1980, I was directing a play at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in New York when I got a call from John Dods, whom I had known for a long time. He said he’d met a guy at one of the horror conventions, Ted Bohus, and they were thinking of making a horror/sci-fi-type movie, and would I be interested in joining them? John and I had worked together in the 1970s; I’d enlisted him to create some effects for a house of horrors I designed at the Jersey Shore boardwalk, and before that he’d helped me create animated titling for a documentary film I made with students. We’d also worked together on successful stage productions for the high school I taught at. During our first meeting out in New Jersey, the two guys told me they were going to be co-directors of the film, but they needed someone to “direct the actors.” I said I’d never heard of a job directing only the actors, so I said no. However, I would be willing to take on the job of sole director of the film. So we agreed to that: Dods would direct the effects, Bohus would produce and I would direct.

Then, when I found out they had no script, treatment or storyline beyond “a monster comes from space and eats people.” I said I would also have to write the screenplay, or it was no deal. They also agreed to this-a little reluctantly, I thought. The three of us would collaborate on the story, but I would do the script.

Could you give us some primary inspirations behind the creature design?

McKEOWN: We talked about Alien and Jaws and used the term “eating machine” a lot-a creature that was mostly teeth. The “mother spawn,” as we started calling it—or her-gradually took shape in Dods’ basement studio in New Brunswick. The creature prop looked amazing even before it had any flesh on it. This was all Dods’ work, topped off later with a luridly detailed paint job by Tim Hildebrandt. In fact, you could say Dods was the mother spawn, he was so intensely into his creation. I even overheard him talking to it once when he thought no one was around.

The ’80s had a lot of independent, low- to middling-budget monster films, but The Deadly Spawn is pretty intensely gory for when it came out. Was that always the intent, or just a happy accident?

McKEOWN: Let’s call it happy intent. At one of our early production meetings, we discussed going for an R rating, because in the low-budget arena it would actually be a draw rather than a drawback, and we wanted to make as big a splash as possible. Nudity was suggested, but I nixed it. I think it’s always ridiculous and obvious that whenever characters are about to be carved up in a movie, they happen to strip down and get in the shower first. I thought, why not extreme violence? I actually said, “Let’s rip the mother’s face off.”

Now, I personally was not a big fan of bloody, gory movies—which is surprising, I know, given my predilections as a child. It’s just that I had come to appreciate mood, atmosphere, subtlety in movies suggested terrors more than overt ones. But this project definitely called for going as far as possible-taking the audience over the top beyond disgust, to actual laughter even. A big laugh in the theater can be as potent and as valid a release as a scream. I definitely -heard those kinds of laughs when The Deadly Spawn played in 1983. Especially in the vegetarian luncheon scene, which has been called “disturbing” and “hilarious” at the same time.

There’s an interesting contrast between the two lead brothers, in that one is a scientific rationalist and the other, much younger boy engages in imaginative escapism via horror films and nostalgia. Was this a planned-out element of the film?

McKEOWN: Planned. Charles is the brave and resourceful hero, the one who stands in for me as a kid with horror-movie obsessions. He just lives contentedly with horror all the time in his own little world. The hero idea came from one of those nights when I was 11 or 12, running through the woods done up as the Wolf Man, and had a revelation. Here I was in full makeup, hair glued on my face, fangs, the works, and I suddenly realized that I was completely unafraid of the dark, or of being alone or anything at all, really. And that was because I was the monster. I understood monsters from the inside. Of course, I knew I couldn’t invest the character of Charles with all the details from my life. I was hoping the audience would get the idea that this little imaginative world of his had actually prepared him for the challenges he was about to face.

I wanted the older brother, Pete, to be locked up in his own narrow paradigm, and his relationship with Charles-teasing his younger brother about the monsters-to find its equivalent in the more adult verbal sparring he was going to have later on with Ellen. She turns out to be open to the more imaginative possibilities of life; they inspire her scientific curiosity. Pete, on the other hand, is completely closed to the imagination, science to him being a cold, inflexible discipline. I figured their opposite outlooks would make the sparks fly between them. Too bad their kissing scene comes on so abruptly in the final film. It was supposed to be better set up by a scene we had shot first that had them sort of flirting with each other. Somebody made the decision later, when I wasn’t on board, to cut that out. I keep talking about how much was planned, and it’s true, but you can only plan so much. The biggest x factor is always the individual actors’ performances and personalities. They bring indefinable values that nobody can plan for, and I couldn’t have been happier.

A huge isolative element in the plot is the fact that, until the end, the house is basically stormbound. How hard was it to plan around the weather during shooting?

McKEOWN: I had the idea from the start that it would be raining all through the film for a couple of reasons. I thought the mama creature from the meteorite would thrive on Earth right away, growing quickly as soon as it rained, because, like all life, it flourished in water. And then its offspring would flourish and grow and proliferate like the brooms and buckets in [Fantasia’s] The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And plot wise, I figured a lot of rain could mean a flooded cellar, so there’d be a good reason to bring the doomed parents down there at the outset.

Douglas McKeown

But the main purpose for the rain was technical. I knew that with our low-to-no budget, it would be extremely hard to maintain a convincing continuity in clothing, settings, lighting, etc., especially if we would be shooting piecemeal over the weeks and months. So I thought that if we made it one long rainstorm, a real rainy day all through the film, we could have that steady drumbeat of ambient sound on the soundtrack, and that would help convince the audience subconsciously that everything was happening on the same day.” And if it shouldn’t happen to rain on a day we were scheduled to shoot, well, how hard would it be, I asked myself, to point a garden hose at the scene for exterior shots, or simply aim it against the outside of a window when we shot the interiors?

As it turned out, it was annoyingly hard to do. It so happened that in the winter of 1980-81, New Jersey experienced probably the worst drought on record. Here I was making a film with rain all through it, and it never rained. It actually became illegal to use garden hoses, so someone was always keeping a lookout for the cops during scenes like the one where Pete is up on the roof in the-fake-rain.

How did the Hildebrandts come to be involved in the movie’s production?

McKEOWN: Tim was already on board as an executive producer, I think. Once I came up with a story centering on a family, he offered his house as the main location-although I’m not sure his wife Rita knew what they were in for! And when I met his son Charles, I realized a major casting problem was solved. Not only was Charles the right age [for the character bearing his name) and very intelligent, he was psyched for it—and he would be no trouble getting to the set in the morning, since he actually lived there; he just had to wake up and get in costume. A very lucky break! Tim was incredibly easy to work alongside, understanding and patient and just all-around great to spend time with. Not to mention that his extraordinary artistry added immeasurably to the look of the creatures and the film as a whole.

What have you been up to since The Deadly Spawn?

McKEOWN: Oh, life after The Deadly Spawn has gone on just as before, with me collaborating on stage shows by directing or designing and making props, costumes and scenery, taping short documentary videos and writing scenes, sketches, the books to musicals, short stories, even a nightclub comedy act at one time. And then there’s acting, which I still do from time to time. First and foremost, though, I’m a filmmaker, and I would like nothing better than to direct another feature. Stranger things have happened.

After all these years, what’s your perspective on The Deadly Spawn?

McKEOWN: That’s exactly how it is, a perspective of many years. In some ways, the film is like one of NASA’s Mars rovers—supposed to do a limited job for a limited time, but then, amazingly, turned out to have this incredible staying power. Put another way, I sometimes feel like the parent of a wayward child who grew up. You know, when she was young she screwed up, disappointed me, got in with the wrong crowd, but then over time she proved her worth, was admired and loved by the outside world. I finally had to stop threatening to disown her. And now I really appreciate her best qualities instead of fixating on all her flaws, which is what I used to do. The flaws were really mine, anyway. And of course, I don’t forget that I wasn’t her only parent!

The Deadly Spawn (1983) Retrospective Part One For those who grew up as horror fans in the 1980s, invasions of killer monsters intent on devouring nubile young flesh were a popular stock in trade.

[themastercylinder]

Kalifornia (1993) by Duncan Fegredo & Chuck Dixon (Comic Book Adaptation)

Kalifornia (1993) by Duncan Fegredo & Chuck Dixon (Comic Book Adaptation)

Following the completion of the film, DC Comics commissioned a comic book adaptation from writer Chuck Dixon and artist Duncan Fegredo. Fegredo recalled the 32-page adaptation was planned to be released as a supplementary for the film’s video release. The adaptation was never completed beyond some coloring work done by Danny Vozzo. Fegredo has speculated this was due to the demise of Gramercy…

View On WordPress

#90SMOVIES #COMICBOOK

[themastercylinder]

Remarkable black and white photographs reveal the mysterious world of Victorian séances

Remarkable black and white photographs reveal the mysterious world of Victorian séances

Black and white images of Christmas time séances have lifted the lid on creepy Christmas traditions in Victorian Britain – when the most wonderful time of the year was used for calling back the dead.

The incredible photographs offer a remarkable insight into the world of the Victorian séance – where participants gathered to receive messages from ghosts.

Mediums – or those with psychic…

View On WordPress