NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1981)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story… In “HorrorVision”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a Foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theatrical Distribution

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

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

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

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

Life After BoardingHouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Masters of the Grind roundtable

By Greg Goodsell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What film or scene will you be best remembered for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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