Trailer of the Week: Twisted Illusions (1985)

This very early direct-to-video horror anthology from Tim Ritter and Co. led to Ritter's most infamous project, Truth or Dare? And there's a sequel!

Trailer of the Week: Super Soul Brother (1979)

Delighted to see that the next round of Vinegar Syndrome releases includes this oddball sci-fi superhero blaxploitation comedy from Miami, Wildman Steve's Super Soul Brother, direct from the Austin American Genre Film Archive (AGFA). No trailer online, but plenty of not-safe-for-work clips.

Feeling a Little Crabby

I'll be reviewing the Blu-ray release of Island Claws for an upcoming issue of SCREEM magazine, a piece that will include comments from two of the film's stars. In advance of that, I thought I'd share a few images from the film's various marketing campaigns that I stumbled across.

First up is the VHS cover art, which was re-used for the new Scorpion Blu-ray.

Then there's this poster image, which appears to be for the overseas, Spanish-language video release.

And finally, this mysterious image that I found in a chat room that may have been from some pre-release promotional material, sporting a completely different title.

My Island Claws coverage will be in the spring issue of SCREEM.

Trailer of the Week: Where Evil Lives (1991)

To answer the question, "Did Claude Akins ever appear in a regional horror film?" we present this Florida obscurity that was finally released on DVD in 2012 by Troma. Shot in Stuart, Fla., on 16mm as Trilogy of Fear, this horror anthology failed to find a distributor during the dark days of the early 1990s when the fright film market bottomed out.

You can read more about it here and here. Watch the original promo below, along with Troma's revamped trailer.

Trailer of the Week: Scarecrows (1988)

I was happy to hear that one of my favorite Florida films, William Wesley's Scarecrows, will be getting the special edition blu-ray treatment from Scream Factory later this year. Unlike the bare-bones MGM disc, there should be a number of extras (effects guy Norman Cabrera is involved, at least), and a new transfer. Originally announced as one half of a double feature, Scarecrows will now be released as a two-disc set in March.

I still can't find an English-language trailer, but here's one in Spanish.

Satan's Children Cast Reunion This Week

With all of the other peculiar things that happen regularly in Florida, you might have missed this: The cast and crew of the obscure Tampa-lensed shocker Satan's Children will reunite for a 40th anniversary screening this Saturday (Nov. 15) at the Tampa Theatre.

Appearing for a Q&A after the screening are Stephen White (Bobby), Rosemary Orlando (Monica), John Edwards (Joshua), John Mocsary (make-up effects artist), and Bill Dudley (sound recordist).

According to the promo below, Florida-based actor/director/Tim Ritter collaborator Joel D. Wynkoop will host the proceedings. You can read more about the film's director, the late Joel Wiezycki, here.

Trailer of the Week: In Search of Bigfoot (1975)

Before he made the insane faux-bigfoot horror film Blood Stalkers (1978), Robert W. Morgan had already established himself as a well-known (and a bit eccentric) bigfoot expert. This documentary follows Morgan and his team as they hunt for the Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest. Portions of the film were later re-purposed in the very similar Bigfoot: Man or Beast film released by director Lawrence Crowley which includes additional, un-related footage.

Vinegar Syndrome has released the film on a double-bill with Cry Wilderness (1986), a family-friendly bigfoot flick.

Trailer of the Week: Island Claws (1980)

In honor of the upcoming Blu-ray release... No trailer, but plenty of clips!

Island Claws Comes to Blu-ray

With all of the new titles either returning on Blu-ray or debuting on DVD in the next few months, does it reflect poorly on me that the one I'm most excited about is a limited pressing of the loopy giant crab flick Island Claws?

According to the Scorpion Releasing Facebook page, 1,000 copies of the film will be released on the Code Red catalog site later in August.

You can see the cover here. The only extra on the disc will be an on-camera interview with Ricou Browning, the Creature From the Black Lagoon stuntman who worked on the film. As we previously posted, Island Claws may have been an elaborate money laundering project for associates of the Medellin drug cartel. It was once a staple on cable TV, but has been unavailable on legit home media since it was released on VHS in the 1980s.

Scorpion and Kino Lorber also re-released the Georgia-lensed William Girdler film Grizzly, which is now on sale at Amazon (it's cheap, too).

I Don't Feel So Terrible About What I've Done: An Interview With Herschell Gordon Lewis

Things have been so busy around here the past few months, I never got around to posting what should have been the final portion of my "Summer of Blood" coverage of the 50th anniversary of Blood Feast. I spoke to director/producer Herschell Gordon Lewis late last year to discuss the momentous occasion, and portions of that interview appeared in the Winter 2014 edition of VideoScope magazine. Below is a longer version of that interview.

How did you and Dave Friedman get involved with the other Box Office Spectaculars partners, Stan Kohlberg and Sid Reich?

A nasty turn of fortune. Stan Kohlberg owned a bunch of theaters in the Chicago area, some of which were hardtops and some of which were drive-ins. He became much interested in becoming a partner in a production company, because that would give him an opportunity, he felt, to exhibit motion pictures for which he wouldn't have to pay typical film rentals.

That was simply Kohlberg's manner. Sid Reich? I guess you'd call him an industrialist. He owned a company in Rochester, New York, called BernzOmatic that made blowtorches and tools, and he was Kohlberg's partner in the theater business. Sid was a very decent fellow, I felt, and ultimately when [Box Office Spectaculars] ran into a situation which I'll describe to you in a moment, the other three partners sued Stan Kohlberg, and that was the end of Box Office Spectaculars. 

How was Blood Feast financed?

There was almost no financing necessary because Dave Friedman and myself simply put up some money from previous winnings. We'd had, for example, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, which was a big winner. So we weren't really concerned too much about going in another direction, other than—because it was totally experimental; nobody had ever made a movie of that type before—we wanted to hedge our bets as best we could in case the move was total flop. I will say, on Kohlberg's behalf, he was willing to take a chance, so he came into the deal based on equal partnership. I've got to hand it to everybody involved here, because as you can imagine, if you want to project yourself back in time to that year, the notion of making a movie with the kind of content Blood Feast had could have been suicidal. We could have sat there with that movie, never getting a single play date out of it, except we knew Kohlberg would play it in one of his theaters.

That also was somewhat experimental, because Kohlberg already had a reputation for making it very difficult for a film company to collect film rentals. That was worth the risk, we felt.

What was the appeal of shooting in Florida?

Weather was a major factor if you're from Chicago. Florida is also a right-to-work state. That may not mean much to the typical major film company, but to an independent that doesn't want the IA or Teamsters involved, it's a benefit. There are lots of out-of-work actors in Florida. People want to work here. I came to the conclusion long before I moved to Florida that this was a very good place to make movies. 

What can you tell me about Alison Louise Downe, who is credited as the screenwriter on a number of your films, including Blood Feast?

She was part of our team. We just named her as the screenwriter. When someone asks, "Who wrote the script for Blood Feast?", my standard answer has been, "What script?" We literally made that up as we went along. Later on, she became very difficult to work with and we parted company, but she always claimed she wrote the script for that and for She Devils on Wheels. She was simply part of the group. We assigned credits, sometimes we made up names. 

Beyond Kohlberg's theaters, what was the plan to get the film distributed?

One benefit we brought to this mix was we had already established a minor reputation of making movies that the theaters could make money on. That came from our lowered demand for film rentals from a play date. 

Let me explain that. A major film company would come into a theater and say, "Here's our deal. We get 80 percent the first two weeks, 60 percent the next two weeks, and from then on it's 50/50." We'd come in with our piece of crap, and we'd say, "Guarantee us one week at 35 percent. If you want to hold it over a second week, same deal, 35 percent." A theater owner could say to himself, "I can play to a half-empty house and make more money," which is of course what the nature of the business is. It's the film business. It's not a fundraiser. They could make more money with us, and they would take a chance because we knew how to put a campaign together.

I've always felt, even up to today, the campaign is just as important as what's on the screen. We weren't too concerned since the investment was so minimal in Blood Feast. What could we lose? I grant you, when I was cutting that thing in my little cutting room in Chicago, people would see this beat-up work print with grease pencil marks all over it and ask me, "Is this a medical film?" So I did have second thoughts about it. 

We opened that movie, as you know, in one of Kohlberg's theaters, the Bellevue Drive-In in Peoria, figuring if we died in Peoria, who would know or care?

I found an article that indicated Scum of the Earth played at that theater as well.

I think that's true. I think Scum of the Earth was  transitional picture. Scum of the Earth was the last black-and-white picture I ever made. I'll call it a transitional picture, because it wasn't in line with what we had been making. I didn't want to make any  more of the pictures we'd been making. I felt that particular industry was going in a rather strange direction and I didn't want to be a part of it.

There was a lot of controversy around Blood Feast's release. Some newspapers refused to run the ads. How did you work around these issues while you were trying to market the film?

We reveled in it! As I remember, the Louisville Courier-Journal decided not to run any ads for a motion picture with the word "blood" in the title. There was a major company movie, I've forgotten the title, that was caught like a dolphin in a tuna net because the policy was aimed at us, but everybody else paid the penalty. It was truly beneficial, and the more attacks we had, the better off we were. 

The movie was chopped to bits. We never knew what we were going to get back when a print came back to us, having shown at a place where the public outrage had led to somebody taking a scene out. It was inevitable, and we anticipated that. We knew that we were plowing new soil there. 

There was an injunction taken out against the film in Sarasota, Fla.—by Dave Friedman himself, in an effort to drum up publicity.

Yes, that was Dave. There was only one of him. He was the ultimate showman. I recall, we were shooting somewhere in a very posh neighborhood in Miami, and they sent a policeman out, and Dave got the policeman to take a bit part in the movie. That little anecdote is true. We initiated much of the controversy surrounding the movie. What are you going to do with a movie that cost nothing to make, had a cast of nobodies, and primitive effects? You go for showmanship. That's what we did. History has justified it, I think. That may be too liberal a verb. We literally initiated a new genre of motion pictures. That's not easy to do when you have no budget.

Trailer of the Week: Day of the Reaper (1984)

Early work from Florida director Tim Ritter, complete with bikinis, blood, and awkwardly staged action sequences.

Bloody Parting of the Ways

By the summer of 1964, with both Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs still in theaters, the partnership between H.G. Lewis, David Friedman and exhibitor Stanford Kohlberg had soured. Box Office Spectaculars dissolved amid acrimony and lawsuits. By the end of that year, Friedman had cut ties with Lewis and headed to California and Lewis was distributing Moonshine Mountain.

This Aug. 4, 1964, Variety article covered the split:

Gore Film Trio Bust Own Guts On Cut of Coin

A Chicago court suit filed against his partners in a production company by producer Herschell Lewis has broken up what is probably the most successful team making low-budget nudie, gore and action films.

Lewis is suing his former partners, David F. Friedman and Stanford Kohlberg for an accounting and distribution of profits on films already made and for $300,000 for a contract he alleges was made to make 30 more actioners over the next five years.

The trio had jointly produced "B-o-i-n-n-g!", a nudie, and four gore pix -- "Scum of the Earth," "Blood Feast," "2,000 Maniacs" (see separate stories) and "Color Me Blood Red," the latter completely filmed but not yet edited. Lewis and Friedman had previously produced several highly successful nudies.

Friedman is currently working for Kohlberg in the distribution of the films already  made, and Lewis has nearly finished shooting his own comedy-action picture.

Blood Feast Ad-O-Rama Part II

Blood Feast continued playing drive-ins and specialty theaters throughout the 1970s (and beyond). Below is a sampling of advertisements for the film's latter-day bookings.



We start things off with this phenomenal quadruple bill from the Elyria Chronicle Telegram, April 16, 1971, where two H.G. Lewis flicks follow George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (Pennsylvania), and what is likely a slightly misspelled listing for Lewis' former partner David Friedman's She Freak (1967). Plus, free gas (likely for your in-car heater)!

Next up, from the October 2, 1973, edition of the Albuquerque Journal, an even bigger Halloween-themed event with three Lewis films, the West Virginia-lensed Teenage Strangler, a bonus Al Adamson biker film, and whoever the heck Nightmare Alice is. Free pass if you stay for the entire show? I'll take that challenge.

This February 2, 1974, advertisement from the Coshocton Tribune (Ohio) is a tad more serious, and opts for some new artwork (probably to keep patrons from realizing they were about to see two ten-year-old films).

Next, Doctor Kiss over at the Classic Horror Film Board posted this ad from the Elgin Cinema in New York from December 1971, which touts Blood Feast as "the worst film ever made," quite a few years before Plan 9 From Outer Space took the title. The Elgin was founded by producer/distributor Ben Barenholtz in 1968, and is credited as the birthplace of the "Midnight Movie" format -- so Blood Feast graced its screens not too long after the theater's sold-out run of El Topo.

Finally, from Fred Adelman's scan collection, comes this New York ad from the 1980s, again touting Blood Feast's "worst film" bona fides, this time presented by Sleazoid Express publisher Bill Landis.

Trailer of the Week: Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971)

This one has been out of print since its VHS release, but it actually screened a few years ago at the University of Chicago! I haven't been able to find a trailer, but here are a few clips.

Blood Feast Ad-O-Rama

Blood Feast began its official theatrical in the fall of 1963, and continued playing double- and triple-bills (often with other H.G. Lewis films like Two Thousand Maniacs! and Color Me Blood Red) well into the early 1970s. Below is a small sampling of some of the 1960s advertisements heralding the goriest show on earth.

First, here's a November 29, 1963, ad from the Bridgeport Post in Connecticut, mentioning that Blood Feast would be coming the following Tuesday:

From Burlington, N.C., comes this September 17, 1963, ad from the Daily Times News, which indicates the film had already played there once. Blood Feast would continue to show in Burlington off and on for the next 10 years, and local theaters sometimes advertised other films by promoting them as being just as bloody or bloodier than Blood Feast.

Here's a nice ad from the Maryland-based Salisbury Times, from May of 1964, pairing Blood Feast with Bary Mahon's Louisiana zombie film The Dead One.

Here's a strange ad from the Kingsport Times in Tennessee, November 13, 1964, listing the film as Night of Blood Feast. I've found other ads where "feast" was actually a misspelling of the title for the film Night of the Blood Beast. This one appears to be the Lewis film, given that it's paired with Two Thousand Maniacs!.

August 15, 1965, from the Appleton, Wis., Post Crescent News, this time paired with two Del Tenney films from Connecticut.

November 4, 1966, The Elyria Chronicle Telegram in Ohio features the "blood trilogy" in all its gory glory.

Later that December, from the same paper, a less explicit ad for the same triple feature.

This ad from the Jan. 22, 1966 Syracuse Post Standard is more like it. Not sure what Guerilla Girl is, though...

From the Nov. 7, 1969, Zanesville Times Recorder. Here, Blood Feast has been tacked on a Crown-International double feature.

Film Gore Decried

After its initial 1963 run, Blood Feast continued playing double and triple bills throughout the 1960s (and early 1970s). It also continued to generate controversy. In the clip below, it's name-checked in a letter to the Walla Walla, Wash., Union Bulletin, decrying the depiction of screen violence at a time when there was so much of the real stuff going on. The letter is signed by two men claiming affiliation with the University of Washington, but the flowery language could be an indication that the letter was a "plant" from a distributor or a local exhibitor looking to drum up business.

H.G. Lewis on the Small Screen

The very first interview I ever read with H.G. Lewis was in the RE/Search book Incredibly Strange Films. The very first time I ever heard the man speak was on the British TV program "The Incredibly Strange Film Show," which was syndicated in the U.S. on the Discovery Channel cable network. The series served as a fantastic primer for the films of everyone from Fred Olen Ray and Ray Dennis Steckler, to Sam Raimi and Tsui Hark. The Lewis episode briefly covers his entire career (up to that point), and even includes a tour of Miami's Suez Motel, conducted by Blood Feast star William Kerwin.

I've included a clip from that episode below, but you can find the entire episode (in four parts) here.

Castle of Frankenstein vs. Blood Feast

 Most of the press coverage Blood Feast received during its initial run focused on its graphic content, dust-ups with local censor boards, and battles over its graphic advertising. There were very few actual reviews of the film that we've been able to turn up. One of the few contemporary reviews from the fan press came via Calvin Beck's erratically published Castle of Frankenstein (issue #6, published in 1964).


The brief review is quoted below, followed by a review of H.G. Lewis' 2,000 Maniacs (in release at the same time), and a related blurb from Joe Dante. (Special thanks to friend of the blog Terry Maher, for making his back issues of CoF available to us.)

Blood Feast -- (58m. -- BoxOffice Spectaculars -- 1964). Color. Thoroughly revolting, inept grade-Z horror garbage. Madman tries to restore life to Egyptian Love Goddess by synthesizing the organs and drippy entrails of pretty girls. You won't believe it until you see it; looks like amateur night at the butcher shop. Strong stomachs only - Yecchh. Connie Mason (of PLAYBOY fame), Thomas Wood, Scott Arnold.

2000 Maniacs -- (84m. -- Box Office Spec. -- 1964). Color. Unbelievable, incredibly sadistic blood-&-guts shocker by producers of "Blood Feast." Modern Southern city, massacred by Northern troops during the Civil War, now takes revenge by mutilating visiting Northerners. Color cameras dwell lovingly on torn limbs, mashed torsos and gory entrails. Vigorously anti-Southern, ineptly made grade-C horror. All the more offensive because film has something to say and has chosen this way to say it. Connie Mason, Thomas Wood.

We'll forgive the reviewer for slightly garbling the plot of 2,000 Maniacs (it's not a modern Southern city; it's a literal ghost town that revives on the anniversary of the slaughter) since they rated it a "grade-C" horror film, an improvement over the "Z" grade handed to Blood Feast. Still, calling the film "anti-Southern" is a mis-reading of both Lewis' intentions and his audience's reaction; 2,000 Maniacs may be the most fully realized neo-Confederate revenge fantasy ever committed to film.

On the very same page where these reviews appeared, Joe Dante contributed a small blurb of text that provides some interesting information re: Blood Feast and the New York-lensed Flesh Eaters:

The National Association of Broadcasters has warned TV stations to beware of the following TV trailers:
BLOOD FEAST: "A tableau of carnage and badness ... brutally staged in Color" which heart patients should beware at all costs, says the NAB.
FLESH EATERS: An announcer says "If you can't stand the sight of flesh being stripped from a human body please leave the room." A scene from the picture follows: an actor whose flesh is burning screams "Something is inside me ... eating its way out!"
One of these films got the full cover-story treatment from one of our "competitors" ... 6 pages plus cover, in fact. Makes you wonder what standards of criticism they have over there.
-- Joe Dante --

Wow -- Blood Feast had a TV trailer? Dante is taking a swipe at issue 29 of Famous Monsters of Filmland, which included lengthy coverage of Flesh Eaters.

Finally, if anyone has come across any other reviews of Blood Feast published during its 1963/1964 run, please send links, copies, or any other material to us at regionalhorrorfilms@yahoo.com.

Blood Feast Comes to Peoria

In 2003, Brian Sieworiek of WCBU, the NPR affiliate in Peoria, Ill., put together this brief story about the film's debut at the local Bellevue Drive-In in July 1963. (The Bellevue was owned by Stanford Kohlberg, who helped bankroll several H.G. Lewis/David Friedman films.)

You can listen to the story on SoundCloud by following the link below:

02 Blood Feast Anniversary

For more on the film's anniversary, see this post over at Roger Ebert's website by Simon Abrams.

BoxOffice Tackles Blood Feast

Blood Feast finally began its journey into general release at the end of 1963. Here is what the BoxOffice reviewer thought of it:

Blood Feast
Boxoffice Spectaculars, 71 Minutes, Rel. Sept. 1963

With as much "built-in" selling factors as any imaginative showman would desire, this Friedman-Lewis production, listing David F. Friedman as producer and Herschell G. Lewis as both director and photographer, will be remembered for its gory content long after the run-of-the-mill horror efforts have played out their modest boxoffice billings. It may well set a new precedent, a new pace, for this particular genre, as popular as ever, the while serving to introduce playboy Magazine-famed Connie Mason as the gal on whom the eyes of evil -- Mal Arnold, a fanatic devil-cult worshipper -- cast an understandably appreciative glance. Significantly, the story-line -- credited to A. Louise Downe -- doesn't grunt and groan for mere effect; it relates circumstances with a ringing clarity and precision that should delight the most professed fanciers of horror entertainment, and since Friedman-Lewis forces have wisely incorporated color (Eastman) in their budget, the effect is even more memorable. Mal Arnold, as the chap not inclined to overlook killing nubile young girl victims in an orgy of brutal slaughter, is cold bloodedly efficient.

EXPLOITIPS:

Street gag -- complete with flowing cloak, sandwich sign -- is very much in order. Station "doctors" and "nurses" in the lobby opening day, dispensing free "nerve pills."

CATCHLINES:

An Admonition: If you are a parent or guardian of an impressionable adolescent, DOT NOT BRING HIM or PERMIT HIM to see this motion picture!