Their Names Are Written in Concrete

I've been fascinated by this Top Ten Movies That Influenced You meme, with images only and no explanations--but I had to go for a Top Twenty for myself, which are all the movies that have influenced my b-movie life, listed 1-20.  How many can you recognize?  Enjoy!

Some Velvet Morning

This blog post first appeared in I WAS BIGFOOT'S SHEMP, an e-newsletter you can subscribe to from the sidebar.

Last time, I listed all the books that appeared in or around THE GIRL IN THE CRAWLSPACE, and this time I thought I would provide a list of all the movies and TV shows mentioned, many of which were influential in the movie as well.  Many of them appear in the scene I wrote about last time, the one that seems to be a lot of people's favorite (curiously enough) where the D&D group talk about all of their secret crushes.  I remember Erin Ryan telling me she watched all the trailers on YouTube to try to understand it, and Jeff Rapkin telling me he would wake up in the middle of the night, trying to recite his.  Here they are, in order:

DOLEMITE
THE FIVE DEADLY VENOMS
DJANGO THE BASTARD
WONDER WOMAN (TV SHOW)
THE KROFFT SUPERSHOW (TV SHOW)
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (TV SHOW)
THE AVENGERS (TV SHOW)
WONDER WOMAN (MOVIE)
THE AVENGERS (MOVIE)
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON
THE BIRDS
ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP
SUPERMAN II
ROSEMARY'S BABY
THE BIONIC WOMAN
HERCULES UNCHAINED
HERCULES VS MOLOCH
HERCULES AGAINST THE MOON MEN
HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD
HERCULES AND THE TYRANTS OF BABYLON
HERCULES VS THE HYDRA
MANNAJA: A MAN CALLED BLADE
GOD FORGIVES, I DON'T
SARTANA THE GRAVEDIGGER
KEOMA
RETURN OF RINGO
A SKY FULL OF STARS FOR A ROOF
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
THE LAST OF THE RENEGADES
I AM SARTANA YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH
THE GREAT SILENCE
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE--ROGUE NATION

If you ever needed a horror movie to give you a spaghetti western primer, this is it. My love for Italian films in general has only increased by multiple trips to Italy chaperoning my wife's college class trips over the years as well.  But there are a lot of personal references here too.  I caught HERCULES AGAINST THE MOON MEN on Saturday afternoon television one day and was scared badly as a child.  I saw FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE playing in Italian on television in Rome a few years back.  THE FIVE DEADLY VENOMS shocking my sensibilities on Kung Fu Theatre as a teen.  A friend showing me DOLEMITE on VHS at work in the early 90s and having my eyes opened. I hope one or two of these ring out for you.

I am incredibly late to the podcast game, but the radio quit in my 2007 Honda and I just limped along without one for a while, listening to podcasts on my phone.  I would have to recommend the creepy-crawly podcast ALICE ISN'T DEAD, about a long-haul trucker traveling the lonely highways looking for her missing wife.  This is a three-season story from the people who made the breakthrough hit WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE which is over a hundred episodes and going strong, so I wasn't sure where to drop in.  I started listening to another standaloone one they did, WITHIN THE WIRES, but it has creeped me out so badly I am listening to it in very small doses.  The premise is exceedingly clever; the first season is presented as "relaxation tapes" that actually have a hidden message.  The second season is supposedly a recorded museum tour, and the third just underway is based on office dictation into a machine.  Pretty dang clever.

I am trying #inktober again this year to flex my creative muscles, even my flabby cartooning ones, and on the brink of doing more than I have in past attempts.  At the end of the month, I'll post the most popular ones here.

Until then, thanks for reading.

You'll Escape in the Final Reel

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

On Palm Sunday we kept our family tradition and watched JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. This is probably our most re-watched movie as a family, with WHEN HARRY MET SALLY as a couple, and THE WITCHES and WILLOW with the kids.  I love this one so much that at one point when directing THE GIRL IN THE CRAWLSPACE I told Tom Cherry, who plays Sheriff Woody, to "run like Carl Anderson does in Jesus Christ Superstar."  So if the movie turns out weird, it's because I gave actors directions like that.

The movie is easing into post.  A winter that won't quit has stalled a few pickup shots, then it is on to editing.  But we are all chatting and hoping to keep moving it along.

Beforehand some of the family sat around talking about our funerals, which I didn't participate in, because I am going to die first, and my urn will sit next to my wife's bedside table at the nunnery, where my dogs will also be sleeping.  My wife suggested she would donate my papers to my alma mater because of my modest success in b-movies, which was seriously very moving for me to hear, even as I pictured them being received, and then promptly dumped into a recycling bin to make room for the papers of Doug Jones, David Letterman, Jim Davis, Cynda Williams, and Joyce DeWitt.

But it reminded me of when I went to see Nicolas Winding Refn at the Indiana University Cinema, and instead of talking about himself he talked all about his preservation efforts for the work of Andy Milligan, who I had not heard of at that point.  I promptly went out and watched THE BODY BENEATH, and then a bunch of others, and really fell in love with his work, even as he has been decried up and down the internet and beyond.  He really was a threadbare auteur, trying to make something out of nothing, and that is something I really appreciate.

Phoef Sutton wrote a horror novel called THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL about a haunted grindhouse movie, a novel I liked, and he and talked quite a bit about Jean Rollin in it, so I watched REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE and THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES and found another filmmaker I think was a no-budget genius who a lot of other people think was a hack.  His movies have an austere, dreamlike quality that is fascinating to me.

If I am honest, what inspired me the most to get started on THE GIRL IN THE CRAWLSPACE were the two movies by Frederick Friedel, AXE and KIDNAPPED COED, who made this double feature back to back in the 70s and crashed right out of the industry subsequently.  AXE is especially artistic, and COED is pretty cool, but pointing out that they were made on a shoestring doesn't account for the real price of shoestrings.

In the week between the two weekend shoots for CRAWLSPACE I watched a movie called THE HANG UP by John Hayes, and I thought it was fantastic, and suddenly I was introduced to another fascinating director with an offbeat filmography.

Thankfully there are companies like Vinegar Syndrome and Severin Films and Something Weird trying to preserve these films, and people like Refn and Sutton and my friend film reviewer Jason Coffman to talk about them in some other fashion than the braying ridicule they are sometimes treated to.

I think that's what I want more than anything, because I have come to learn from watching others that fame is a monkey's paw; that somebody find something I did in a dusty dollar bin somewhere, or in some other throwaway place, and watch it, and understand what I was trying to say, in the way I try to understand Milligan and Rollin and Friedel and Hayes.  It's a lot to ask, but as I am sitting at a little kneehole desk in a corner of a house with farm acreage spread out all around me, it's what I hope.

Bookends

I always ask for books for my birthday, and also got an Amazon gift card, so I am stocked up for the first winter in my new house.  Turning 50 was slightly philosophical but I felt buoyed by these two discoveries in a book I was given and one I bought--a mention of a movie I worked on in Brian Albright's REGIONAL HORROR FILMS 1958-1990 and reviews of two movies I wrote in Jason Coffman's THE UNREPENTANT CINEPHILE.  Makes half a century go down easier.

Everything Is Closed, It's Like A Ruin

I was 100 percent convinced direct to DVD was over, and I was waiting for streaming to materialize/monetize for people like me; but I was mistaken.  DVD is still around, and even more crazily, just when I thought I was born too late, I wrote a western for the direct to DVD market last year.

Slowly, strangely, everything old is new again.  For one, CDs and podcasts.  Really that's two, I guess.  But one thing I am hooked on is reading a lot of e-newsletters.  Somehow, it's so throwback, it's cool again.  Just google, and find people like Warren Ellis and Lena Dunham writing them, if you don't believe it's true.

So I'm going to give it a go.  Frankly more than anything I want a change to talk about some of my projects in a way that I can't post publicly on my blog or on Facebook.  Also I'll include some capsule reviews of things I'm watching and reading and include some content you can't find on any of my public platforms.  If you are interested, you can subscribe at https://tinyletter.com/johnoakdalton.  It is titled "I Was Bigfoot's Shemp."

I'm going to start by writing one a week and see how long it takes for that to dwindle down.  But it's the dead of winter, and a time to try things to keep the machine running, so we shall see.

Everything I Tell You Has Been Spoken

Like a lot of people on the magical interwebs I decided to try the "31 Days of Horror" horror movie challenge and watch 31 horror movies in October.  I knew I probably wasn't going to make it, because 1. I had to finish writing my own (secret) horror movie by October 30 and 2. I accidentally got addicted to Fargo and binged on the whole first season.

But I ended up watching 15, 14 of them that I had never seen (and I'm only counting Hocus Pocus once even though we watched it at the work Halloween party and I had it running at home on Halloween night), and that ain't bad.  I won't list them all, but my top five are:

1.  THE BABADOOK.  One of only a few movies to ever give me a nightmare the night after watching it.  It is especially unsettling if you are a parent, with an interestingly enigmatic ending.

2.  BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO.  Weird shocker about a sound technician working on an Italian horror movie, and maybe going crazy at the same time.  Best for fans of Italian horror of the 70s, but you probably already saw it.

3.  PONTYPOOL.  A burnt-out morning DJ at a remote Canadian radio station begins to realize that something terrible is happening in a snowstorm outside.  A claustrophobic, slow-burn mind game.

4.  HOUSE OF THE DEVIL:  Throwback-style horror about a young woman hired to babysit an unseen client at the start of an eclipse, and what could go wrong with that?

5.  GRABBERS:  Brisk horror-comedy is sort of a remake of "The War of the Worlds," only the aliens turn out to be allergic to alcohol, prompting the residents of an Irish village to get hammered and fight back.

Special Honorable Mention to HAUSU (HOUSE), a 70s Japanese horror movie that is not to be entered into lightly; a group of schoolgirls visit a reclusive aunt in a creepy old house, which makes it sounds like a normal movie, but is really only for those fans seeking the truly odd and unsettling.

Enjoy!

And I've Seen London, And I've Played Japan

There are two things I love about Bloomington Indiana; my brother lives there and the IU Cinema is there (not in that order).  On Friday I got to see filmmaker John Waters there, first giving a talk, then screening “Cecil B. DeMented”, then doing a Q&A.  I went away liking him even more than before.  (I think) we both feel there are enough people in the world waiting for a new Transformers movie or new Fast and Furious movie and we would in general prefer something different.  I for sure have always been attracted to the grassroots DV projects, backyard VHS epics, photocopied comic books, stapled zines, homemade mix tapes with bands nobody has heard of, the great homemade world most people don’t care about.

I found out when I jumped down that rabbit hole, decades after John Waters did, that there are a lot of people that feel the same way.  And those people can become your fans and when they do they are very loyal.  For instance I was more than shocked when, after several years of self-imposed exile from screenwriting, I learned people noticed I was gone and cared that I was coming back.

But it’s a double-edge sword because you also have to suffer the slings and arrows of those who don’t understand why you feel that way.  I listened to John Waters field questions about making “kitschy” and “bad” things and his love for such things.  When people ask me in interviews or casual conversation, “what’s the worst movie ever made?” I always think, I wonder if somebody has ever asked my hero Michael Tolkin that (he replaced William Goldman because he once wrote me an email after reading this blog, and William Goldman has never done that)?  But now I will be all like, well, if John Waters has to listen to it, I guess I will too  (for the record, I always say “Triumph of the Will”).  Because John Waters seemed a little taken aback and ended up kind of defending himself and saying, well I like foreign movies too (as seen in “Cecil B. DeMented” when everybody from Castle to Fassbinder to Anger to Peckinpah to Lean is name-checked).

But there is something worse than this, and that is nobody caring.  There are literally tens of thousands of movies that dropped like a rock in a pond and did not leave a ripple (and I have written some of them).  So when a movie I worked on more than ten years ago, “Peter Rottentail,” bubbled to the surface recently, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. 

First, I learned that the British website Nerdly rated it one of the Ten Worst Horror Movies Of All Time .

And more recently, Fangoria did an hour-long podcast with the movie as its subject.  Of course they thought it sucked, and it sucked so bad that one host had to listen to my audio commentary track to try to internalize why it sucked so bad.

And I was happy.  Just think, I have been reading Fangoria since I was a kid (though admittedly I always liked Starlog better).  And some Fangoria guys talked about a movie I worked on a decade ago for a solid hour.  Okay, I wasn’t thrilled that the one guy gave me that “duh duh duh” voice that mad girlfriends give their boyfriends the world over, but as far as the movie review, I was happy. 

Because getting your movie labeled the worst actually attracts, like a moth to flame, people like me.  Which is who I wrote it for.

You have to sniff past what I call the Joe Bob Briggs phenomena—reviewers drinking and half watching, or working up quips and half watching—and sometimes that is frustrating because they come in with preconceived notions, and often the biggest one is mixing up “stupid” and “cheap.”   I feel the burn right now on “Jurassic Prey,” which I am very proud of the script for, but a lot of people dismiss as inherently stupid.   In fact I wrote a whole blog post about this idea, upon the release of “Sharknado 2”, so I won’t go over it all now   But apples to apples, I would challenge anyone to read my script for “Jurassic Prey” and say it is worse than some thunderously stupid, but very attractive, blockbuster movies out there.  One has the resources of Skywalker Ranch, the other Dollar General.  And apples to apples, that’s not on the screenwriter.  But it is the reality.

“Peter Rottentail” was the second movie ever made from my writing, even though I had sold several screenplays by that time.  I was working on the set of the bigfoot movie I wrote for the Polonia Brothers, “Among Us,” which was my first movie and has had good legs on its own, when the distributor called and said he would need three more movies that year.  It was the go-go time of the direct-to-DVD boom, and I was in the right place at the right time.  However I told the brothers I could not write three more movies that year, which would be nothing to me now (I believe my record is seven in one year) so they agreed I would write one more and then rewrite two of their existing scripts.  So when I got back from the shoot a package came in the mail—it was the handwritten, on lined paper, version of a movie called “Psycho Clown” which I was to turn into “Peter Rottentail.”  I typed it in and rewrote it at the same time, and I believe I finished it in a long three-day weekend.  I had a lot of fun with it.  It was never meant to be taken seriously and I think I wrote it with some delirious intensity (I don’t believe I’ve ever done another one that fast).  I have not sat down to watch it with fresh eyes after so many years, but I am sure it does not help that DV technology has advanced quite a bit—I am certain the credits were done on a Video Toaster—and that even by the days’ standards it was made at a very threadbare cost.

But I’m proud of my part of it, and I know some people like it (and some people really like it ) and if I am going to give any small nugget of hard wisdom to aspiring screenwriters reading my blog it is this; that you should be proud of everything that leaves your keyboard.

So thanks to Nerdly and Fangoria for bringing new people to my old pal Peter Rottentail.

I'm Just Looking for Clues at the Scene of the Crime

Sharknado 2 is loose upon the world, and--I'll say it--the world is better for it.

I watched a shark movie marathon on SyFy leading up to it, and as a result found this interview with screenwriter Jose Prendes.  It did make me a bit melancholy how the AV Club spoke to Jose Prendes (in full disclosure, I don't know him).  It reminds me of the time an interviewer asked me what was the worst movie ever made.  Does my spiritual guide Michael Tolkin get asked this?  (Answer:  probably not.  Also, Michael Tolkin once wrote an email to me that I treasure.)(PS I answered Triumph of the Will.)

It makes me mad people say all the SyFy movies are automatically "bad."  There are some that are lazy, some that are cynical, some where people are cashing checks, but that is all movies.  The SyFy ones where the people behind the scenes are fans as well differentiate themselves.  And the fans can sniff out honesty vs cynicism, as I have said before.  Do you think Sharknado director Anthony Ferrante (disclosure:  we are FB friends) was serious when he had a guy get swallowed by a shark and chainsaw his way out?  He did it because he is a fan, and made it for fans.

I think people mix up "bad" and "cheap."  You know what movies are really bad?  All the Transformers movies, both GI Joe movies, both Thor movies, the first Hulk movie, Pacific Rim, Battleship, on and on and on.  They just look better.  If you put the screenplays side by side, with no money attached, they are no smarter than the cheaper SyFy movies.

I had somebody once tell me that if they couldn't get a "real" movie made, they would just whip out a few quick b-movies.  The truth is, people work just as hard making b-movies.  I challenge anyone who thinks it is easy to make a b-movie to try and produce one.  And then, if you can get that far, get somebody to distribute it.  I have sold (I think about) 25 scripts in the last 15 years, and my ninth movie is coming out in September.  I think that is a very high batting average for screenwriting, and I think many would agree.

Same with acting.  Is there anyone worse than Megan Fox in Transformers?  I think Sarah Lieving in Super Shark and Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus is much better, and probably got paid Transformer's coffee money.  I think Danielle Donahue in Meateaters and Joni Durian in Haunted House on Sorority Row are better than Sarah Lieving, and probably got paid Super Shark's coffee money (in full disclosure, I wrote but did not cast both of these).

This really isn't written to fans.  As I have said, fans can smell intent, and they are loyal if you are one of them.  Those are the people that keep me going.

Until later I am at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

One Morning From A Bogart Movie, In A Country Where They Turn Back Time

I am working on a new third act for URAMESHIYA for director Amit Tripuraneni, plus a few new scenes for NEW JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH for the Polonia Brothers. Both projects I'm excited about.

They tore down the Northwest Plaza Cinema in my hometown. It wasn't one of those fancy old theaters but it had a fair amount of history. Naturally, they are building a Ruby Tuesday's there. An old friend and local film history buff, Conrad Lane, talked about it in the local paper. When I was a scrawny high school kid and a scruffy college kid Conrad inexplicably regularly invited me onto his local film review show on the PBS affiliate and his show on an AM radio station, sending me on the path I am on today. When he retired he gave me a thick book of Oscar history which I still keep on my shelf. Conrad said that the old Plaza was known for debuting STAR WARS (and I was there), but its longest running feature was THE LONGEST YARD, of all things.

When I was a kid, going to see STAR WARS thirteen times was the magic number that entered you into that next realm of coolness. My kids never understood why we went to the movies so much. But they have never lived in a world where that movie was never coming to HBO because there wasn't one, or coming to a video store because there weren't any built, or going to pop up on VHS or DVD because they hadn't been invented yet. All we had was it might show up on one of three channels in the far future, all cut up with commercials. Such a strange world cannot be imagined by the youth of today.

Give me a shout at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

Unstuck in Time

Every blogger in the blogosphere talked about great Hoosier Kurt Vonnegut dying this week, so all I will add is that if you haven't read one of the great novels of the 20th Century, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, take it upon your ass to read it soon.

This guy may be my new hero.

A lot of people seem to be talking about GRINDHOUSE, which I want to see badly but will never get my wife in the theater for. Some are questioning whether Rodriguez and Tarantino could have actually gone to any real grindhouses. I know they were hard to come by in Indiana, though a nearby town actually had a drive-in porno theater. A lot of people don't believe me when I tell them this, but you could actually drive on an access road behind the drive-in and see carnal knowledge across a field, fifty feet high. It's a wonder me and more of my friends weren't more messed up than we were.

We had a theater called the Rivoli, an old broken-down downtown place, and one called the Delaware which was in an ill-used strip mall at the edge of town. The Rivoli was once a grand old theater, with crumbling balconies and a cherub-painted dome, but they carved a second theater out with corrugated tin, and you could actually sit in a seat next to the tin wall and the person the next seat over was watching another movie which you could also hear perfectly fine. This is where I saw the 3D movie METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN and NINE DEATHS OF THE NINJA and the like. The Delaware was where I saw the double-feature BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS and SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT 2. But mostly we relied on late-night horror hosts Sammy Terry and Son of Svenghouli and the "Kung Fu Theater" late night movie where I first fell in love with FIVE DEADLY VENOMS. Although I don't remember seeing Don Dohler's ALIEN FACTOR on TV I know it flavored a lot of people's childhoods with its ubiquitousness at one time (though I clearly remember HERCULES AGAINST THE MOON MEN and SAMSON VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN). So we didn't have the real grindhouses, but we had something, and certainly that influences some of my current views as I'm sure it does QT's and Rodriquez's.

Anyway, I actually shopped a script around 1999 about a cop who finds a porn star floating in his bathtub, and solving the crime leads him into the underbelly of porn and snuff films. This was called GRINDHOUSE, though later I was convinced to call it HANDS DOWN. Somebody asked me if this was just a coincidence. Of course it is. I have never been within one thousand miles of either QT or Rodriguez. There's only so many ideas under the sun, and they've all pretty much been thought of. Which is not what the aspiring screenwriter clutching his treasured script to his chest wants to hear. This title was probably more influenced by my visit to Times Square in the late 80s (see previous post) than the other type of grindhouse movie, but it is funny how the world goes 'round. We'll see if everything old becomes new again.

Give me a shout at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

Strawberry Letter 23

Longtime reader and fellow writer Peter emails:

Saw that photo of you in your snow suit shovelling snow and it immediately cleared up some writer's block I was experiencing. I was having absolutely no luck being able to visualize a serial killer from small town Indiana so I could create the character... Then, I saw that photo... :)

This month's Premiere magazine has an artice about "DTV," the cool new name for direct-to-video fare, and how it is performing extremely well for companies. One interesting note the article mentions is that a lot of writers and directors will take a chance on DTV because they would like to get the work, but many actors still won't touch it. I'll have to show the article to the next person who asks when I am going to make some "real" movies.

I was waiting in a bookstore down the way from where my daughter was getting her hair done for Winter Dance and happened to grab a Fangoria off the shelf and open right to the reviews of my pal Jon McBride's recently re-released cult classics Woodchipper Massacre and Cannibal Campout. These two SOV features are finally coming up from the underground and getting the recognition they deserve as products of their time. Cannibal is downright skin-crawling and Woodchipper is a surprisingly funny dark comedy; both shot on glorious SVHS, circulating among afficianados and hard to find for close to twenty years. Jon has given me great advice over the years, and as "Wayne Beaubier" stole some scenes in my bigfoot movie Among Us, so I wish him nothing but luck with this latest good fortune. Definitely look for these, new on DVD for the first time.

Give me a yell at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.