It Won't Stay Dead -- Screenwriter Lon Huber on THE CURSE OF THE SCREAMING DEAD (1982)!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The internet's a funny thing. For years I've been a casual acquaintance of a fellow named Lon Huber, mostly on movie-themed messageboards like the Mobius Home Video Forum and The Eurotrash Paradise Yahoo group. A nice enough guy, he runs the UHF Nocturne website and his contributions to a discussion are always worthwhile reading. However, it wasn't until plowing through some old tapes for my ongoing VHS Archives series that I found my history with Lon goes back even further...

"Ah, Bruce, Bruce, Bruce...

I knew it would come to this, sooner or later.

I confess. I wrote Curse of the Screaming Dead.

Tony "Skip" Malanowski's accounts of it [as remembered in Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA] pretty much tell the tale, but here are a few details from my perspective.

I grew up in Marin County, California, and Skip was part of the Baltimore horror community. We met in 1974 when I went East for the Famous Monsters Convention, and we stayed in touch through letters, fanzines, and drunk/stoned cassette recordings.

In 1977 I got the urge to travel. Skip flew out to California and we drove cross country to Baltimore together in a Ford Galaxy 500 I'd bought for $600, which lost its transmission just as we were parking it in his parents' yard. I spent '77 - '78 in Baltimore, but had been back in Marin County a couple of years when Skip decided to make a movie.

Skip had just cut his regional indie teeth crewing on Don Dohler's The Alien Factor and Fiend, after which he wanted to have the full auteur experience for himself. Being a jump-in-with-both-feet kinda guy, he decided to learn how to make a feature film by just making a feature film.

That was the whole point for everyone concerned: make a feature film with whatever resources we had. Good or bad, no matter what, it would be a feature film!

Skip was working at a local film lab, which gave him access to roll ends of 16mm stock. Total budget, if memory serves, reached a whopping $7000. (Some of the $7000 may or may not have been for the roll ends, or maybe the processing, I was never clear on that.)

I had written two porn novels for Greenleaf Classics, and I liked zombies. So, naturally, I was at the top of the "A" list of potential screenwriters for the production.

Skip told me what settings he could probably get, what kinds of effects he thought he might be able to do, and the number and genders of the performers he'd rounded up. I thought up characters to fit the cast, and situations to fit the locations and available effects. I knocked it out eight or ten pages at a time, mailing xeroxes to Skip as I went. It was all first draft. No revisions, aside from cuts when my imagination exceeded the effects budget.

At one point Skip thought he'd figured out a way to blow up a car without a permit. That plan was abandoned, but the scene was left in... hence the burning plastic Revell (or Aurora or AMC) model car! That is my favorite scene in the film!

My extended lesbian sex scene was never shot.

I was not present for any of the shooting. I had no sense of how to write for actors, and never heard my dialogue read until I saw the movie on VHS several years later. Also, I had no idea at all how to time or pace a story for narrative film. Which was terrific, because Skip had no idea how to block a shot or shoot for continuity! Also, he was shooting on stray weekends over MONTHS, one or two days at a time, sometimes shooting one actor's dialogue and another actor's response weeks or months apart, sometimes on different film stocks, with different lighting, in a different location, and then hoping he could cut it all together months later into one seamless scene! Ah, the enthusiasm of youth!

Curse of the Screaming Dead was like the films most kids made in their backyards on two rolls of Super 8 when they were 13, but we were absent from self-taught film class that decade, and so made ours when we were 25 on feature length amounts of scrounged 16mm film.

Curse of the Screaming Dead would never have been seen by anyone but we makers and our friends, but for the fact that little home video companies were springing up all over who would buy anything with a marketable title that could be transferred to VHS. The Alien Factor had actually turned a tidy if not monumental profit with video, TV, and foreign rights sales. I'm pretty sure Skip used the Dohler example when he pitched Screaming Dead to various startup VHS outfits.

Skip and the rest of the crew had been burned by Don Dohler on points for The Alien Factor - it actually went to court. Skip was therefore incredibly meticulous about the budget. Honestly, whatever else can be said about Curse of the Screaming Dead, every last nickel was accounted for. It may have been the most honest and above-board feature film accounting in film history. There was simply no creative accounting. The end result was that when Mogul bought Screaming Dead, not only was the entire $7000 returned to the friends-and-family investors, but there was a miniscule but real profit for everyone. I got $400 out of the deal, which is exactly what Greenleaf Classics was paying at the time for a 30,000 word strokebook.

I have a Mogul VHS of the film, and a color tear sheet which was probably a handout at whatever film market event Mogul hawked it at. (A cat I used to have chewed on the tear sheet, so it's somewhat mangled.) I also have a binder somewhere with my original manuscript of the screenplay, pounded out on a manual typewriter which has long since become landfill.

Now, something I've never seen Skip mention online is that we planned a followup. In a cardboard box in my hall closet resides a finished screenplay entitled Zombies for Dollars which I wrote in 1981 while Skip was editing Curse of the Screaming Dead and shopping it around to video companies.  Zombies for Dollars was a comedy in which a post-Dawn of the Dead America addresses its zombie problem with a Death Race 2000-style zombie hunting game show in which the entire city of Baltimore is the playing field. In my mind it was SCTV's production of Last Man on Earth. We had visions of shooting guerilla-style in downtown Baltimore on Sunday afternoons.

The screenplay to Zombies for Dollars is a full 5% better than Curse of the Screaming Dead. If we had made it, it almost certainly would have ended up on video, and we would almost certainly have made another, and my writing and Skip's directing may have improved bit by bit and who knows...?

Zombies for Dollars never happened. Skip moved to L.A. to work for Dave DeCoteau and Fred Olen Ray. He's still an editor and producing value added content for DVDs, and doing really well last time we spoke. I freelance doing IT for small businesses who use Macintosh computers. Neither of us expected Curse of the Screaming Dead to do anything more than rot on video store shelves, but it won't stay dead!"

****************

Thanks a million, Lon!  For more on Curse of the Screaming Dead, be sure to check out our VHS Archives entry, complete with memories from actor / make-up artist / 2nd-unit director Mark Redfield, the trailer, various video scans, and additional photos I couldn't fit on this page!  Extra special thanks to Chris MacGibbon of Creep Show Radio for providing all the behind-the-scenes photos.

© 2012 -- Lon Huber / Bruce Holecheck. All Rights Reserved.

Cannibalism Hinted! The Americanization of Rene Cardona's SURVIVE! (1975)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In 1972 a plane full of passengers, including a college rugby team from Uruguay, crashes into the snowy mountains of the Andes. Many passengers are dead, others are bloody and wounded. One player steps out onto the soft snow and sinks into oblivion. Another guy’s guts are spilling out, so med student Raul (Pablo Ferrel) pushes them back in. The survivors line up the many dead bodies in the snow. They frequently pray the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary,” and make the “sign of the cross.” There’s very little food. They burn their cash for warmth. The injured moan constantly and keep the others awake. After a few weeks, Raul says, "We each must decide if we live or die.  The bodies in the snow can provide us with enough protein for a month."  Another player: "We must do what we must do."  Raul goes out to the bodies and tearfully slices off some fatty flesh from a dead guy. The survivors say the Rosary and line up to eat the gooey strips. One guy gags. Some gobble it. A guy forces it down his reluctant wife’s throat. One player refuses. ("I'd rather die!") Morale and strength pick up until an avalanche floods the plane and kills more people. The married guy makes the others promise that they won’t eat his now-dead wife. Some guy’s leg is black and infected so he slices into it with a razor and drains grey pus. Finally, the coach (Tintorera's Hugo Stiglitz) and two of the players stuff bags with shredded flesh and set out with makeshift goggles and boots to find help.

During Christmastime of 1975, the ambitious marketing genius Allan Carr was in Mexico promoting the movie Tommy for film producer/rock mogul Robert Stigwood. At a theater next to Carr’s hotel was a long line of people waiting to see something called Supervivientes de los Andes. Carr didn’t speak Spanish, but he was able to figure out that the crowd was buying tickets for a movie about a notorious 1972 plane crash that resulted in the snowbound survivors being forced to eat their dead fellow passengers.

Supervivientes de los Andes was a then-new epic directed by the tireless, 69-year-old Mexican exploitation legend Rene Cardona -- creator of bizarre worldwide hits like Santa Claus, Night of the Bloody Apes, and the “Santo” masked-wrestler movies. Rene Cardona, Jr. had produced the picture (entirely indoors) at the Churubusco studio in South America in early 1975. Second-unit long shots were filmed in the Colorado mountains. Despite the cheap production values and the laughably-fake snow, Supervivientes de los Andes turned out to be an efficient programmer with grisly images of spilling intestines, pus-oozing legs, and gooey human flesh getting sliced and gobbled.  (A shaved pig was used for some scenes.)

Carr watched the film and thought it was terrible but he felt that a dubbed version would work in America. He convinced Stigwood to put up $500,000 to license worldwide, non-Spanish rights. Stigwood invested another $350,000 in Carr’s post-production. An English adaptation was written by acclaimed playwright Martin Sherman (Bent). Marshall M. Borden cut the new version. Many scenes (mostly those involving a search party) were dropped, others were tightened. The entire soundtrack was recreated from scratch. Veteran TV character actor Rudy Solari directed the new voices. Carr liked that the actors often had scarves over their mouths, which made the lip-syncing easier. Monotone narration was added. The sparse original score by Raul Lavista was replaced with one by Gerald Fried and recorded with a 50-piece orchestra. Footage from Disney’s In Search of the Castaways was licensed to enhance the lame avalanche sequence. Optical “haze” and “fog” were superimposed over the studio-shot sequences in an attempt to make the snow look more believable. Montages of black & white stills were placed at the film’s beginning and end. The new version ran 90 minutes. (The original was 112.) To mask the film’s pedigree, most of the Mexican cast and crew members’ names were buried at the end of the new closing crawl. (Only five of the over two-dozen actors were billed in this version.)

Stigwood saw the final result, now called Survive!, and hated it but he shared Carr’s box office enthusiasm until the film was turned down by every studio and distributor except American-International Pictures, who offered a weak deal. Executives from Paramount Pictures were the last to look at the film. They thought it was an embarrassment but they were desperate for something for their August 1976 slot. They offered Stigwood forty-percent of the profits and agreed to spend $850,000 on prints and ads.

Carr personally supervised the aggressive, in-your-face marketing campaign. Stigwood and Carr took a prominent “presentation” billing on the credits and ads. Some flesh-slicing and pus-draining was trimmed for an R rating. The lobby cards and promo stills included shots of the survivors drying the meat and eating it. The trailer ended with a freeze-frame of a knife cutting into flesh. All print and TV ads ended with: “CAUTION: The re-creation of the 1972 Andes plane crash and THE SURVIVAL SCENES may be too intense for young teenagers.” Carr told the press: “It’s the ultimate disaster picture. I hate to make a pun but the cannibalism is tastefully handled, almost as though it were a Catholic ritual…The audience for Survive! is the boys who want to have the girls grab them because they‘re so revolted by it all…The only thing that most people know about Mexican movies is Bunuel and Tijuana porno. This is something in between.”

Paramount opened Survive! on August 4 in 26 theaters. (The studio had originally planned to open Drum on that date until they dropped that Mandingo sequel.) Variety: “To say that Survive! is a disaster movie is not to categorize it but to describe it.” Roger Ebert: “Survive! is a fairly awful movie, but the essential heroism of its subject matter somehow emerges intact. That makes it a difficult movie to review you can’t just dismiss it with cheap shots, you have to deal with the fact that it does have an emotional impact. It’s not a good movie or even a very professional one, but it does respect its subject matter and so we have to also.” Frank Rich, New York Post: “a patently false snuff film that simulated the disembowelment of a woman for the audience’s erotic pleasure…The experience of sitting through it is so degrading it makes you want to rush home and take a shower.” (Carr sent roses to Rich after reading that review.)

Survive! grossed $250,000 the first week and was #13 on Variety’s chart. By the end of the month, it had grossed $3.5 million and was #2 on the chart. Paramount ultimately had 400 prints in circulation and the film was #1 for one week in September and in the top 10 throughout that month.

United Artists wasn’t happy about the attention that Survive! was getting. Carr: “They’re very upset with me, they’re real mad.” In 1974 UA had paid a hefty sum for the rights to the bestseller Alive, which told the same story (with the participation of the survivors), and had planned a big-budget movie. William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) wrote a treatment and fellow Oscar-winner John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) was attached to direct, but the studio put their version on hold. (Paramount later teamed with Disney to finally make an Alive movie in 1993.)

Stigwood alone invested the entire capital needed to license and revamp Survive! but Carr was his 50% partner for discovering the movie and for supervising the re-editing and promotion. Carr’s final cut came to over $1 million. He used part of his new-found cash to purchase the movie rights to Grease and used his new-found clout with Paramount to set that musical up at the studio.

Although it was a major studio summer hit, Survive! almost immediately sank into obscurity. Today, it’s a mostly forgotten curio and probably not fondly remembered by most who were duped into seeing it in the summer of ‘76.

The ABC network broadcast a heavily-censored version in primetime in 1977. Thorn-EMI released the uncut Survive! on North American home video in 1982 and those tapes are now extremely scarce. Urban Vision released the uncut, original, Spanish-language Supervivientes de los Andes on region 1 DVD in 2003. Carr and Stigwood’s license on Survive! expired in 1996 and worldwide rights reverted back to the Cardona family. Paramount still has the elements for the American version in its vault. On October 11, 2011, VCI Entertainment will be releasing a DVD containing both the original Mexican version and the Allan Carr cut.

*****************

Paul Talbot is the author of the books Bronson’s Loose!: The Making of the “Death Wish” Films and Mondo Mandingo: The “Falconhurst” Books and Films.

© 2011 -- Paul Talbot / Bruce Holecheck. All Rights Reserved.

Coney Island Carnage -- Unseen Sex & Gore from Leonard Kirtman's CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (1970)!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A little hyperbolic, for sure, but hopefully you'll dig what we've turned up!

Leonard Kirtman's Carnival of Blood (1970) is an odd duck of a movie -- a pre-slasher slasher heavily influenced by the gore trade of H.G. Lewis. The "plot," as it is, ostensibly follows an assistant D.A. and his girlfriend as they attempt to solve a series of gruesome mutilations centered around a game booth at New York's Coney Island.  In reality, it's just scene after scene of annoying character after annoying character badly improvising their way through extended stretches of travelogue footage, bitching and complaining until they're relieved of a body part or two. Rinse. Repeat.  Its singular mindlessness is actually quite fascinating, and the vintage footage of the popular tourist trap is a great time capsule of an era long gone.  (Bonus points for a pre-Rocky Burt Young as Gimpy, the Hunchback!)

Submitted for a rating in 1970 by the director's Kirt Films International, the MPAA's website states Carnival of Blood was initially branded an R but edited down to a GP rating. I have no idea which version currently survives; I find it hard to believe the entrail-yanking sequence would've ever made it past the censors with anything less than an X!  Did the R cut ever play by itself?  Materials from its 1972 release with Curse of the Headless Horseman show a PG version definitely circulated.  There's currently no nudity, and the choppiness of the violence makes one wonder what exactly we're seeing. 

Gaining a small VHS release in the early '80s courtesy of Wizard Video, the film was rescued for the digital age by exploitation saviors Something Weird Video, who found and transferred a rare 16mm element.  In 2002 they issued a packed DVD replicating its original drive-in double-bill, supplementing it with tons of cool trailers (including a U.S. spot for Hunchback of the Morgue!) and some hilarious Super8 home horrors.

The below images are scanned from my personal collection; the Arcana Archives hold a varied assortment of fifteen 8x10 negatives and a separate caption strip.  Some are simply unused promotional shots, presenting a detailed look at a few of the gore effects that are practically subliminal in the film as it exists now.  The second still down actually has a surprising nipple appearance, indicating the love scene originally went longer than displayed in the final product.  The cop characters seen in the fourth still are only visible in the background of the film proper. Also mixed in are a some behind-the-scenes photos: you can see the make-up artist blacking out the actress' sockets for the eye-gouging segment, the photo of the drunken sailor reveals the crew and lighting stands in the background, and you have to love the actor holding the fake head in place for the funhouse decapitation!  Enjoy!

Poster image courtesy of Wrong Side of the Art.

© 2010 -- Bruce Holecheck. All Rights Reserved.

181 Frames of Gut-Crunching, Man-Eating Terror! Behind-the-Scenes of William Girdler's GRIZZLY

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The one that got away. [Insert sad face here.]

I've been hard at work procuring mountains of goodies for The Holecheck Archives lately (read: hemorrhaging money I don't have); some impressive, some not so much.  (Did I really need hundreds of sexploitation stills for movies I'm clueless about?  What the hell is Love Cave, anyway?)

Unfortunately, I missed out on one particularly awesome set:  not one, not two, but 181(!) 35mm still camera negatives taken behind-the-scenes of William Girdler's Grizzly.  I tried -- believe me, I tried -- but apparently my several hundred bucks wasn't good enough. Hopefully the current owner sees fit to do something worthwhile with them. 

Until then, I've presented a few low res examples below, for posterity's sake. I've tried to frame, sharpen and color correct them to get 'em as clean as possible, but there's only so much I could do.  Enjoy!

 

  

French poster courtesy of Devildead.com.

More rare photo displays coming soon, including some negatives I actually do own!

© 2010 -- Bruce Holecheck. All Rights Reserved.