Talking in Our Bed for a Week

This post first appeared in my e-newsletter I WAS BIGFOOT'S SHEMP.

I was as surprised as anyone when my new film SCARECROW COUNTY hung on for four straight weeks in the Amazon Hot New Releases in Horror.  Thanks to everyone who picked up a copy or has seen it on some other platform.

And I was extremely flattered by this interview and review of a film I wrote, SHARK ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, by the British website The Schlock Pit.  I am appreciative that the people there give thoughtful attention to the b-movie world, and are good writers to boot.

They used just a few snippets of an interview about the writing of SHARK ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, so I thought I'd share the whole of what I wrote back when they asked a few questions via email, probably more than they wanted to know.

Mark had asked me to write all the scripts for a three-movie deal with Wild Eye that all already came with titles and basic descriptions; the caveat being is that he needed all three in six weeks. I'm to the point in my career where if I write something for somebody, there has to be a reason; and I have always been interested in director Thomas Carr, who once shot 6 b-westerns in 30 days (I wrote about it here), which I think not enough has been made of. So I thought this might be a neat challenge.

I had NEVER written this fast in my life; typically I can write a full script in three weeks, if I'm pushing it. I think I worked on these an average of 10 days each. They were written at a fever pitch and honestly I didn't remember a lot of detail until I saw the final product, and even then wasn't sure what I thought up and what Mark added.

Rewind to when I wrote my first movie for Mark, AMONG US, and he had a three-picture deal afterwards and asked me to write all three in a year, and I wasn't sure I could write three movies in one year! In that case I rewrote two and then wrote a third from scratch.

The first was PSYCHO CLOWN, which was turned into PETER ROTTENTAIL. I took John Polonia's handwritten script and rewrote it as I was typing it into a screenwriting program. Next I did a rewrite of RAZORTEETH, then my original script was DEMONS ON A DEAD END STREET which remains one of my favorite scripts but didn't get made.

PETER ROTTENTAIL has been rated one of the worst horror films of all time by Nerdly, and Fangoria did a whole podcast dedicated to it; as well as all the people who watch it on Easter every year. RAZORTEETH disappeared almost without notice; and frankly, which is worse? To me, at least, it's the latter.

So for this new trilogy of scripts: AMITYVILLE ISLAND was the easiest of the three for Wild Eye; I had written a movie for Mark a few years before called DOCTOR ZOMBIE that had not been made, but I noticed had a lot of similar beats as the Amityville premise. It was heavily influenced by Mark's love for ZOMBI 2 and TOMB OF THE BLIND DEAD with my own interest in LUST FOR FREEDOM thrown in. So I knocked that together quickly and it has been noted by reviewers that it has a little of everything, and all of it crazy, as I intended. I wrote another one whose title I will hold back as it hasn't come out yet, but it was full of time travel and dinosaurs and alternate timelines and I had a blast with it. My favorite script of the three. I hope it streets yet this year.

ALIENS VS SHARKS (the original title) was the hardest to get my mind around for some reason so I saved this to write last. But once I got going it started cooking, and again I don't exactly remember writing it. In fact I went back and read the outline before responding to this email. It came with a four-page outline with a lot of the beats, mostly the effects that were going to be made or on hand, and a little bit of story. I made the Jenni Russo character a therapist when she was a photographer in the original, because I wanted to include an alien abduction storyline; I think the other characters were pretty much as presented in the outline. I thought the treasure hunters were a neat touch in the original. I thought the movie was very ambitious, but especially the third act, which I thought was going to be too much to get on screen in a workable way, so I toned it down quite a bit. My ending, which featured a group of teens on the beach Frankie Avalon-style inadvertently re-starting the whole mess, was not used, and I think the whole part with Dave Fife was created so that Mark could work with Dave before he moved. I think I had somebody quoting a lot of Shakespeare which was cut out, understandably enough. Otherwise, by and large what I wrote is up there, for better or worse.

It's funny now, but I can see the seeds of my own later movie, THE GIRL IN THE CRAWLSPACE, in this script, including the therapist and the character obsessed with westerns. I always try to hang my stories on things I was interested in, and one in this case is a lawman who is basically on his last day on the job and isn't going to be a lawman any more, and what that means. Honestly, I had also buried a family cat in my back pasture and thought it might be a good set piece for a movie, and that's in there, too. Just all the flotsam and jetsam you pick up through life, interest in culture, interest in other people. Whether people see it or not, I try to put in elements that might resonate with someone besides aliens shooting rayguns or whatever. I think Jennie Russo and Titus Himmelberger are both enjoyable in this. I thought Titus gave his lines an especially eccentric read and it turned out like I hoped. Jeff Kirkendall is good as always. I try to write for the people I know Mark is going to use, but sometimes he changes it up or introduces somebody new, so it's always a nice surprise.

I think when you have a movie titled ALIENS VS SHARKS you are either in or out when you hear the title, and the rest doesn't matter. You are going in it to have a good time. So for this kind of movie, or all three of these movies, I like to try to make them funny, with a lot of nods to horror fandom, lots of energy and outlandish situations and characters. I'm not sure every viewer is in on the joke, but that's what I hope. I think the biggest thing to note is that I have never been involved with a movie that comes from cynicism; these kinds of movies are made by people that love the genre for people that love the genre. Horror fans, by and large, are the most loyal and devoted and will follow you where you want to go, whether you have the money to make the trip or not.

I badly want to see THE SUICIDE SQUAD for my upcoming birthday but I think I'm not going back to the movies quite yet.  I will, however, watch the Mooreland Fair Parade, which leaves tomorrow from my large side yard (as agreed to when we bought this place) and shoots straight down the road a mile to the fairgrounds.  It's always fun to tailgate with the grandkids and check out the fire trucks, floats, and horses from up close.

It seems like we took one step forward and two steps back; hope all is well with you and yours, and thanks for reading.

Blackbird in the Barn

This post first appeared in my e-newsletter I WAS BIGFOOT'S SHEMP.

My second film SCARECROW COUNTY hit DVD on Tuesday, and as I have always done when something I wrote or directed comes out, drove around looking for it.  I am still working from home in a pretty rural area, so I didn't have any luck at local stores, but pictures from all around of my movie in WalMart started showing up, which was flattering to see. 

 And thank you to everyone who has purchased it from Amazon.  It has cracked the Top 50 New Releases in Horror, which is great since some Godzilla movie and some movie about being quiet are perched at the very top.

My movie's producer Henrique Couto has a fun podcast called WEEKLY SPOOKY, and he hit me up last week to write about that long-ago ancient world before air conditioning called the 1980s, during which time I was alive and a teenager, so I knocked out a quick one in that grand old style of a bunch of counselors under siege by a nutcase at a ramshackle old summer camp.  You can listen to it here.

I'm going to leave you with this curiosity; a custom action figure by MCWF Customs based on a movie I wrote called SHARK ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, which had the more introspective title SHARKS VS ALIENS when I wrote it.  If you missed the trailer, check it out here.

Until next time, thanks for following along and let me know if you see my movie SCARECROW COUNTY in the wild. 

But Instead It Just Kept On Raining

This post first appeared in my eNewsletter I WAS BIGFOOT'S SHEMP.

I hope my e-newsletter finds you all well.  It's been a long while, but that goes without saying.  I don't have anything to add to the discourse, as I don't know how to make a dumpster fire into a risen phoenix.

It seems quaint now, but when I sent my last newsletter in March, I had just canceled the first weekend of shooting for HIS WIFE MY KILLER at the last second, and I mean the last second, as I had already bought the lunch meat for the first day's sandwiches.  I thought, as it turned out correctly, that I could have gotten the first weekend of shooting in, but would have been under restrictions for the second.  And I would have been sitting here today with half a movie, which I honestly think is worse than no movie at all.

It seems a long-ass time ago, but around then my first movie, THE GIRL IN THE CRAWLSPACE, had just dropped in Walmart and Family Video and a ton of other stores nationwide, and I had been tooling around finding it places.  Back then Family Video stores seemed to be closing faster than they could stock my movie, but I talked to a lot of store managers around my neck of the woods about it, which was fun.

If you haven't seen it yet, it is still free on Amazon Prime, and also free on Tubi.

Speaking of Tubi, my second movie SCARECROW COUNTY also landed there ahead of the physical media release, so dare I say 2020 wasn't all bad, as both my movies came out this year.

Strange but true, but two movies I wrote, AMITYVILLE ISLAND and SHARK ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, also came out this year.  Both are available streaming, although only the former is free.

I wrote these in a white heat some while ago, when I actually penned three movies in six weeks, and I can't recall much about writing either one of them.  As many reviewers have already noted, they are both deliriously crazy, and I can't argue the point.

My freelance output hasn't been much during this time.  I was sent to work from home for three weeks, nine months ago, from my day job in marketing and communications for a regional college campus.  Since then we have been the main window into the campus, though press releases, social media, live Facebook and Zoom events, and more; unlike a lot of people, I have been fortunate to actually be busier during this time than if I was back at the office.

So I haven't been able to make the sourdough starter and other things cooped up people have done.  I have cartooned a little, and started building Gundam models after a friend gifted me one.  We bought a camper in case we need to stave off of the Apocalypse and have enjoyed that, including an outdoor (cold but fun) camping Thanksgiving.  My wife has been teaching from home, at a different university, and it's been nice to have lunch together every day, after working at campuses 50 miles apart for the last 15 years.

I wrote two scripts; one a science fiction adventure and one a western.  The western had started shooting under the direction of my old friend Henrique Couto, but like everyone else in our industry the production had to take a time out when they struggled with COVID restrictions (and weather).  I'm not sure about the fate of the other.  But that's the nature of the beast right now, perhaps even more so.

I haven't been able to get the machine running for myself writing-wise, and I'm not sure when it will be safe to ramp up HIS WIFE MY KILLER again.  We shall see.

It is extremely weird to write this, as when I lay it all out and read it I think I had my best year as a screenwriter and filmmaker.  And yet. 

When we talk about the first thing we will do when it's all over, if it is truly over, I always say I am going to make my (regionally) famous beef brisket for my extended family, who I have seen only in small doses in exterior settings (so much so that my two-year-old grandson calls our camper 'Nana's House').  If I could George Bailey this noise, and have all my movie stuff never exist and instead be making that beef brisket today, I would take that deal.

But as I said when I got my emergency root canal and crown a month or so ago to end 2020 in style, it's not the crown I wanted, but it's the crown I was given.

I promise I won't be too long before I write again, because I always like to share my favorite reads of the year, and I have read some good ones, including one I'm half through now. 

Until then, thank you for reading and sticking with me and I truly wish you all well in this time.

You Dance with the Lady with the Hole in her Stocking

This blog post first appeared, in a slightly different form, in the e-newsletter I WAS BIGFOOT'S SHEMP which you can subscribe to in the sidebar of this blog.

I just got back from Italy sounds more glamorous than I just got back from chaperoning my wife's college class trip to Italy but I suppose both are true.  I don't think anything has influenced my writing more over the last few years than my six trips to Italy, jaunts to the Piazza della Repubblica for giallo and fumetti and the contemporary art shows at the Palazzo Strozzi and late-night cable screenings of The Forgotten Pistolero and Miami Supercops and Crime at the Chinese Restaurant, in Italian of course but feeling their pace and rhythms.  There is a heavy influence in my debut feature The Girl in the Crawlspace--the title character is Jill McBain, after Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon A Time in the West--but I think Italy is threaded through all of my work.

 

 

Speaking of which, now it can be told; the secret project I referred to as The Horrible Asp is actually Aliens vs Sharks, coming out this fall on DVD.  This is the first of three movies I wrote back to back over six weeks for director Mark Polonia to shoot as a package.  Aliens vs Sharks came with a pretty detailed outline--I suspect as this is the most effects-heavy of the projects, and certain beats needed to be hit--but it has plenty of my own touches.  With a movie called Aliens vs Sharks you pretty much know where you are going with the plot but I hope everyone enjoys the ride.

It is also out that the movie I code-named Sequence Six is actually called Amityville Island.  Although I code-named the first one from an REM song I happened to be listening to at that moment, I code-named this one from Fulci's Zombi 2 soundtrack.

Several years ago I wrote a movie called Doctor Zombie for Mark Polonia that ended up not being made, but was built as an homage to Zombi 2 and the Blind Dead movies.  Since I wrote Amityville Island incredibly, incredibly fast I was able to life some chunks from that unused script.  It helped that Doctor Zombie took place on an island.  It didn't help that Amityville isn't on an actual island, but if that's what holds you back from watching this movie I can't help you any further.

It has zombies, possessed people, women in prison, weird experiments, and some other stuff I probably forgot because I wrote it at a fever pitch, but it's crazy.  Trailers for both will be posted here when the interwebs have them.

More news soon, thanks for sticking with me.