The Screengrab : troma

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD (2006)

A while back, I started blogging about the summer I spent working for Troma Films as a production assistant (and eventual second assistant director, co-screenwriter and co-star) of the company’s terrible, terrible superhero spoof, Sgt. Kabumikman, NYPD. One of these days, I’ll eventually continue that tale, but in a nutshell, Troma (which allegedly stands for Tits R Our Main Attraction) was founded in 1974 by Yale grads Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz to produce and distribute softcore sex romps and, eventually, their own unique brand of gross-out message movies, chock full of gratuitous monsters, violence, nudity and critiques of corporate malfeasance. The fact that Troma’s stayed in business for so many years as one of the only truly independent production companies in America would probably be more inspiring if their exploitation films weren’t so consistently godawful (despite the cult popularity of “hits” like The Toxic Avenger, Tales From The Crapper, Surf Nazis Must Die, etc.). Having watched (and even helped to create) hours and hours of the company’s poorly acted, juvenile and just plain ugly swill, I must say I was pleasantly shocked by the uncharacteristically high quality of the poopy jokes in Poultrygeist, the company’s most recent major release. Not only is the cast star-studded (well...there’s a cameo by Ron Jeremy and a hall-of-fame gross-out performance by Troma regular Joe Fleishaker), but the romantic leads (Jason Yachanin and especially the radiant Kate Graham) seem like honest-to-god actors...y'know, with actual careers ahead of them. The script and direction are noticeably smarter and tighter than most past efforts, and best of all: it’s a musical, with song and dance numbers at least ten times better than Baz Luhrmann’s recent Oscar monstrosity. And why not? After all, there’s no rule that says exploitation movies have to be terrible...just as long as they’re shocking, bloody and gloriously naked.

MANIAC COP (1988)

It has an awesomely blunt, cheesy title. It was directed by Maniac’s William Lustig. And it was written by It’s Alive’s Larry Cohen. Toss in Bruce Campbell, and what you have is potential B-movie heaven. Unfortunately, Maniac Cop didn’t turn out to be the ne plus ultra of slasher flicks, but it is the type of rough-around-the-edges horror film that delivers splatter imbued with some mildly potent undercurrents. Offering up a classic return-of-the-repressed scenario, Lustig’s story concerns a detective’s (genre legend Tom Atkins) search for a homicidal cop, whose crimes have been pinned on an innocent officer (Campbell). The real culprit is a resurrected boy-in-blue who’s hell-bent on exacting revenge against the bureaucrats responsible for his death, a group of government cretins whom Cohen’s script gleefully skewers before sending to grisly deaths. Politically charged as it is, however, Maniac Cop’s critique of the powers-that-be never interferes with its low-budget thrills and kills, including a great one involving a man’s face and some wet cement.

GATOR BAIT (1974)

As the internationally renowned author of Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, it would hardly be appropriate for me to participate in an exploitation movie roundup without including a little something from the wild world of hixploitation. Since the poster for Gator Bait happens to be hanging on my living room wall mere inches from where I now sit – hick chick supreme Claudia Jennings giving me a come-hither look (or maybe that’s an I’ll-rip-your-tongue-out look) as I blog in my boxer shorts – it seems like as good a choice as any. In this “redneck romper-stomper” from Louisiana mom-and-pop team Ferd and Beverly Sebastian, Jennings and her form-fitting Daisy Dukes star as Desiree Thibodeau, a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. Desiree uses her sexual wiles and her swampy know-how, employing such tried-and-true tactics as the ol’ sack of snakes trick to pick off her toothless, inbred foes one by one. The sleaze-meter runs into the red zone early and often (Desiree’s little sister avoids being gang-raped only because the nutless hillbilly freaks out and blasts her between the legs with a shotgun), and Jennings’ Cajun accent is shaky at best, but her confident embodiment of the sexy action hero is indisputable.

B. J. LANG PRESENTS (1971)

One function of low-budget movies is to give employment to new actors on the rise or veteran performers who are down on their luck. When a good actor is practically the only thing a filmmaker has in his arsenal, you may get to see just what he can do when forced to single-handedly keep a movie on life support. But it's hard to think of another one-man show quite like this one. Also known under the title The Manipulator, it is the only film directed by one Yabo Yablinsky, and stars Mickey Rooney as a theatrical lunatic who has kidnapped a woman (Luana Anders) and spirited her to his backstage lair. Anders has practically nothing to do but whimper and stare at Rooney in disbelief, and the only other real member of the cast is Keenan Wynn, who turns up out of nowhere for no particular reason at the very end, leading the viewer to speculate that Yablinsky must have found an extra fifty dollars under the couch cushions on the last day of shooting. There's a story that Klaus Kinski was once working on a movie on which filming was stalled while the director grappled with a problem in the script, and Kinski announced, "There is no problem. I have the solution: Put the camera on me!" B. J. Lang Presents is Mickey Rooney's Klaus Kinski close-up. For an hour and a half you get to watch him race about the set, throw props around, babble endlessly to himself, babble endlessly to mannequins, talk to himself in funny voices that he thinks are the voices of the mannequins talking back, laugh maniacally, just stand there maniacally, dance and twirl a broomstick in comically speeded-up motion, dress up as Cyrano de Bergerac, and give a suspiciously convincing impersonation of a man who didn't know until this very scene that Keenan Wynn was also in this movie. At times you may wonder if Yablinsky paid Rooney for his work in this film or if Rooney paid him, but I confess to finding his go-for-broke turn fascinating, even mesmerizing, recalling in equal parts Laurence Olivier's Archie Rice in The Entertainer and Jerry Lewis at the point around 4 A.M. Sunday during the Labor Day telethon when his latest infusion of caffeine kicks in just as his meds are wearing off. Every actor worth his salt ought to have one of these on his IMDB page. They'd probably sleep better for it.

DANCE HALL RACKET (1953)

This sixty-minute ball of sleaze is notable for being the closest that Lenny Bruce ever got to his lifelong dream of breaking into movies. The big studios thought the controversial comic was too hot to handle, and though he himself initiated this project and wrote the script, he apparently didn't see it as an opportunity to allay their fears by showing his warm and fuzzy side. Directed by Phil Tucker -- it was his first film, made the same year that he threw a diving helmet on a guy in a gorilla suit and called the result Robot Monster -- it's almost entirely set in and around the titular establishment, where dime-a-dance girls (one of whom is played by Lenny's stripper wife, Honey Harlowe) tend to the customers up front while all kinds of shady doings are going on in the back. (The plot involves a smuggler who's brought precious jewels into the country sewn into the ear of a puppy.) Lenny plays Vinnie, the cretinous, switchblade-flipping assistant to Timothy Farrell, a dead-faced actor with a mustache who looks like Wayne Newton gone horribly, horribly wrong. (Farrell appeared in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda? and Jail Bait and the Wood-scripted The Sinister Urge, and it would be an understatement to say that he always played the same kind of character; in fact, Dance Hall Racket was the third picture, after The Devil's Sleep and Racket Girls, in which his character was named "Umberto Scalli." Maybe he had trouble remembering that the other actors in a scene were addressing him unless they called him by a name that he had gotten used to.) In the end, Lenny is killed while the audience is still trying to digest the energetic cameo appearance by his mother, Sally Marr, and the reporter who is being told the story of the Dance Hall Racket case in the framing sequence closes his notebook with an impressed whistle. Bruce died in 1966, five years before he finally got to be associated with a good movie, when director John Magnuson used one of his greatest standup routines as the soundtrack and basis for the 1971 animated short Thank You Mask Man.

Beware Of Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Reviews By Request: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006, Lloyd Kaufman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

For all of my supposed affection for good trashy movies, I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen a film made by Troma, one of the names to know in cinematic junk food. I’m not sure what took me so long. It’s not like I was unfamiliar with the work of Troma and its founder and chief spokesperson, Lloyd Kaufman, having seen boxes for his movies lining the shelves in the Cult section at the local video store. Hell, I’ve enjoyed the hell out of the Troma trailers that have becomes staples of Columbus’ Horror and Sci-Fi Marathons, such as Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD and Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy (“filmed on location in the Republic of Hungary!”).

But whatever it was, I was no longer able to overlook Troma following the release of Kaufman’s latest opus, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, which didn’t take the usual direct-to-DVD path of most of Troma’s recent movies but got an honest-to-goodness, 35mm theatrical release, complete with a positive review (B+!) in Entertainment Weekly. This newfound media presence, coupled with a handful of positive recommendations from friends, finally motivated me to start remedying my Troma blind spot. Thankfully, the movie didn’t disappoint. While I wouldn’t call it one of 2008’s best by any stretch, it’s got a lot of spirit and energy, and I’m not likely to forget it anytime soon.

From its opening scene, Poultrygeist makes no bones about the sort of movie it is. In the film’s first shot, we see the requisite “Indian Burial Ground” (a plot point straight out of Poltergeist, which of course inspired this movie’s title). However, the sign at its entrance deflates any potential eeriness that the shot might have, saying, “desecrators will be cursed to the fullest extent of ancient tribal law.” From there, we get a couple of hornball teenagers dry-humping behind a headstone, some comedic fumbling with the girl’s bra, a faux-sincere conversation about the pair being separated by the girl’s leaving for college, a mid-hump attack by a half-dozen decaying arms reaching out of the Earth, and finally, a sneak attack by a creepy-looking man, axe in one hand, erection in the other.

All of the hallmarks of Troma are there- low-rent homages/parodies of well-known blockbusters, quirky humor, an arrested-development view of sexuality, and plenty of gonzo violence. For Troma, these aspects have proven to be a winning combination, and Kaufman puts them to good use in Poultrygeist. But while plenty of awful movies have tried a similar cocktail of ingredients, what distinguishes Poultrygeist is Kaufman’s go-for-broke spirit, in which pretty much anything could happen at any time. It’s the kind of movie in which a grossly obese man will suffer a prolonged bout of explosive diarrhea before quasi-birthing a giant zombie chicken, another character gets a mop handle shoved through his rectum and out his crotch, or a romantic ballad will include a chorus line of naked lesbians pawing each other. And if you can’t predict that a burqa-clad character will eventually cast off her clothes to reveal a bikini-clad hottie, this probably isn’t your cup of tea.

I realize that many of you might not enjoy a movie like Poultrygeist, and if the subject matter and style don't appeal to you, there really isn't much in the way of cinematic values- high-caliber acting, first-rate filmmaking- to make it go down easier. Yet like all good trashy movies, this one scratches a moviegoing itch in me that most other movies cannot. In recommending Poultrygeist to me, loyal Screengrab reader Steve C. said, “watch this and tell me this isn’t, in essence, Lloyd Kaufman’s suicide note.” While I’m not familiar enough with Kaufman’s other films to say for sure, I certainly see a go-for-broke spirit in Poultrygeist that’s only possible from a director who’s got nothing to lose. In his own way, Kaufman spews a lot of bile in the film, and in many directions as well- at the fast food establishment, at the pseudo-activists who pretend to fight the establishment only to roll over once they’ve been catered to, and at those people who settle into low-pay jobs rather than fulfilling their potential. Granted, these themes have been tackled by other movies, but how many of those movies have included a subplot in which a gay illegal immigrant worker gets run through a meat grinder only to return as a talking, lisping sandwich? Troma’s films may not be for everyone, but if Poultrygeist is any indication, they’re right up my alley. So readers, I ask you: what other Tromas would you recommend?

What’s next for Reviews By Request? I’m still catching up on some 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include a crowd-pleasing British comedy, a typically bizarre Takashi Miike film, the latest starring vehicle for the inimitable Ana Faris, and a pair of acclaimed documentaries, one about a counterculture icon, the other about a famous trial and media circus. Which will it be?

What should I review next? | BuzzDash polls

Feel free to stump for your favorite in the comments section, or even recommend possible future titles for this feature. Remember, voting closes on Monday night. See you in two weeks!

My Troma Summer: Part Four

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Previously on My Troma Summer:
Part One, Part Two & Part Three

After consolidating all of Lloyd’s bizarre Kabukiman tangents into a more or less comprehensible outline, I delivered the document to Andy and began work on a new phase of my P.A. duties: setting up a production office for the movie.

The Troma building on 9th Avenue was far too cramped to house all the staff and activity of the upcoming shoot, so Andy, the intense, hyper-caffeinated first A.D., had secured two floors of a small brownstone overlooking a debris-strewn vacant lot several blocks away, and I’d been tasked with much of the grunt work involved in getting the satellite location up and running. I was happy with the shift from the constant squawking and ballbusting of the Hell's Kitchen hive to the quiet solitude of the empty production office, alone with my thoughts and the junkies shooting up in the lot next door.

Eventually, another P.A. showed up: an insanely hot, baby-voiced 19-year old girl with short-shorts and perky, untethered breasts poking out from a tight white Cocteau Twins concert T. “Hi,” she called out, stepping through the door with an uncertain expression. “Andy said you’d tell me what to do.”

Yet sadly, despite the juicy Penthouse Forum set-up, all we did together was clean and paint the office for the next couple of days. As far as I could tell, the new P.A. had no discernible interest in me, sexually or otherwise, but was friendly enough and didn’t seem to mind when she caught me sneaking the occasional glance at her ass.

Perhaps with a little more time (and a lot more booze) I could have weaseled my way into her affections, but my window of opportunity slammed quickly shut when three more conventionally handsome production assistants arrived on the scene in quick succession, bombarding Baby Voice with charm as I was recalled to the Troma mothership, where Lloyd informed me the screenwriters for the movie...the movie we'd be shooting in six weeks...had either quit or been fired (the details were hazy) and now I had until Friday to come up with a script based on the outline I’d concocted for Kabukiman. I also learned I was to receive $500 for my efforts, which translated as an increase in my P.A. salary from $50 to a princely $100 a week during pre-production and the first month of production.

“This is a huge opportunity,” Andy informed me after the meeting. “I totally went to bat for you, so don’t fuck me on this...now, be honest, can you really do the script by this weekend?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said, conveniently forgetting it had taken a month to finish the script I’d originally shown him as a sample of my writing.

“Okay,” Andy nodded. “And how’s it going with the production office? Think you can get the phone company in there to hook everything up before the art department arrives on Wednesday?”

“Uh...yeah, probably,” I stammered, checking the legal pad I’d started carrying around to keep myself organized. “I mean, I left a message with AT&T, but...”

“What?”

“Well, I mean...I’m going to be writing the script, right?”

“At night.” Andy gave me a look of annoyed surprise. “What, you thought you were just gonna sit around here and write all day?”

“Actually,” I replied, trying to be practical, “it’s a little noisy here...and, y’know, the production office doesn’t have any desks yet, so...”

Andy released a humorless chuckle, wise to my game. “Oooh, right, I get it...so you’re just gonna sit home and let all the other P.A.s do the heavy lifting, even though I put you, specifically, in charge of desks and chairs for the new place."

“What? No! Look, I'll write at night!” I said, feeling and sounding defensive. “I just don’t know if I can finish the whole script by this weekend if I don't...”

“No, no, no...” Andy smirked, like I was Little Lord Fauntleroy, patting my arm as he led me to the door. “You go home and write, and I’ll see you on Friday. I'm sure the other P.A.s won't mind picking up the slack.” Then, a final warning: "Just don’t fuck me on this.”

Four and a half days later, I delivered my first draft of the Kabukiman script, and Andy called soon after with congratulations:

“You fucked me.”

To be continued...

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 9-15, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

You’ve had the dream. You find yourself in a classroom you’ve never seen before, sitting at a desk in your underwear. The professor is passing out the final exam. Your heart freezes, your fingers go numb as you suddenly realize – you forgot to read the Screengrab this week! Don’t let this happen to you. Catch up on all the highlights now, including:

The Top 20 Movies About Movies, Parts One, Deux, Three, Four and Five. These will definitely be on the test.

A moment of silence please for Bernie Mac, Bernie Brillstein, Isaac Hayes, and Elvis Presley and his crappy movies.

You know you’ll be asked about new movies, like Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, The Clone Wars and A Girl Cut in Two. But you should also be prepared for more obscure questions about Mad Dog Time, The Driver, The Last Sign and Summer Rental.

Remaking Rocky Horror: Bad idea or terrible idea?

Is Angelina Jolie playing Catwoman a more enticing proposition than Angelina Jolie playing Tom Cruise?

Woody Allen: Is he a better filmmaker or bronze figurine?

When is a documentary not a documentary?

Study hard or you may find yourself working for Troma.

My Troma Summer, Part Three

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Previously on My Troma Summer: Part One, Part Two

My first few days as a barely-paid production assistant in Troma’s three-story walk-up Hell’s Kitchen “studio” were uneventful (and possibly carcinogenic) as my new drill sergeant, Andy, had me organize and inventory several piles of fake severed limbs and other junk in the building’s cramped, asbestos-y basement. After that was done, I was assigned to watch and transcribe every dreadful line of dialogue from one of the company’s recent releases, Fortress of Amerikka, for use by Troma’s overseas distributors (an exercise which at the very least taught me a valuable screenwriting lesson about NOT starting every other line of dialogue in a movie with “Listen,” as in: “Listen, we gotta get outta here.” “But those men will kill us!” “Listen, if we stay here, we’re dead for sure.” “I’m scared!” “Listen, Jennifer, you’ve gotta listen to me...” “Listen! Someone’s coming!”).

And so on.

Andy didn’t have anything in particular for me to do after the Amerikkka transcript was complete, so he decided to further indoctrinate me in the house style by sitting me down with another recent release, Troma’s War, which employed the signature Lloyd Kaufman/Michael Herz formula of sex, violence, sophomoric humor and paranoid, populist outrage against “the power elite” and all the other assorted scumbags, shysters and pests who plagued the lives of decent, ordinary people.

Of course, like many a populist, Lloyd himself lived much better than the working class heroes he championed, as I discovered when I was summoned one afternoon to the Troma kingpin’s spacious brownstone maisonette to discuss his upcoming production, Kabukiman.

Shortly after signing on as a P.A., I’d handed Andy a copy of my first ever screenplay, a John Hughes rip-off distinctly lacking in gratuitous nudity or exploding skulls. Andy nevertheless forwarded it to Lloyd, who praised the work as he escorted me into his private home office, then handed me a folder of news clippings about Japanese culture, virtual reality technology, insider trading, Al Sharpton’s defense of some teenagers recently arrested for “wilding” in Central Park and a variety of other disparate elements he somehow wanted to shoehorn into the plot of his next film.

“Basically, it’s a culture clash, East meets West,” Lloyd exclaimed, the carnival huckster exuberance of his public persona dialed back a notch or two in private. “I want the main character to be a real American hero, an honest New York City cop who gains these amazing kabuki powers and has to learn to eat with chopsticks and sing Madame Butterfly or whatever to balance his Western yin with his Eastern yang, or something like that...you know Madame Butterfly? Puccini? Oh, beautiful. A classic. Anyway, so he gets these kabuki superpowers and then he’s able to, like, chop up muggers and rapists with a Samurai sword and turn ‘em into sushi. Or something like that. You get the idea. Our Japanese producing partner, Fujimura-san, drew up a sketch of the Kabukiman costume...it’s in that folder somewhere...but anyway, you get the idea, right? East meets West. Culture clash. And that scumbag Al Sharpton...gotta work him in there, too, and that other guy...what’s his name? Milken, Michael Milken...and Boesky, all those Wall Street scumbags and their friends in Washington, funneling money to the CIA to smuggle crack into the ghetto...it’s all connected, oh yes...well, anyway, you’re a Harvard guy, you’ll figure it out. See what you come up with and we’ll talk about it tomorrow with the writers. Nice guys, you’ll like ‘em. College men.”

And so, for the rest of the day, I holed up with a spiral notebook and a pile of newspaper clippings, stitching together a Frankenstein’s monster of a story that would slowly stir to life in the coming weeks and months of my humid Troma summer.

To Be Continued...

Unwatchable #86: "Hobgoblins"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I haven’t done the math, but it’s within the realm of possibility that you could fill out an entire Bottom 100 list made up of nothing but Gremlins knockoffs. There have been at least four Critters movies, four installments of Ghoulies and a trilogy of Munchies, as well as lesser-known attempts like Beasties, Spookies and Kamillions. And then there’s our topic for today, 1988’s Hobgoblins.

I’ll admit to being unfamiliar with the work of writer/director Rick Sloane before now, and based on the evidence onscreen in Hobgoblins I would have been willing to bet it was his first and only movie-making effort. But I would have lost that bet. By the time he made Hobgoblins, Sloane already had several horror shows under his belt, including Movie House Massacre and The Visitants, which has a catchy title if nothing else. He is also responsible for six, count ‘em six installments of the Vice Academy series, which presumably bears the same resemblance to the Police Academy collective as Hobgoblins does to Gremlins: a smudgy, degraded Xerox of the original.

McCreedy, an elderly security guard at an abandoned Hollywood studio lot, is having trouble finding a reliable assistant. It seems everyone he hires ignores his warnings to stay away from the vault, despite the often fatal consequences of setting foot inside of it. He finally seems to have a worthy successor in Kevin (Tom Bartlett), a mild-mannered fellow whose frigid girlfriend Amy (Paige Sullivan) is constantly berating him for his lack of manliness. In his attempts at foiling a burglary, Kevin does indeed enter the vault, accidentally freeing its inhabitants, the titular hobgoblins. As McCreedy explains, the little critters arrived 30 years earlier in a tiny spaceship and virtually destroyed the studio with their other-worldly abilities. The hobgoblins have the power to make your wildest fantasy come to life, but in true “be careful what you wish for” fashion, the end result is deadly – except when it’s not, which is unfortunately too often the case here.

We’ve all heard of doing more with less, but somehow Sloane has managed to do less with less; if he spent any more on Hobgoblins than I spent on lunch today, he didn’t get his money’s worth. The creatures themselves appear to be Gremlins puppets straight from the Toys R Us shelves, the grand total of three locations are underdressed and underlit, and the apartment when Kevin and his friends hang out looks distressingly like a place I used to live in North Hollywood. (I know I shouldn’t hold that against the movie, but I’m only human.) I’m not suggesting that Sloane set out to make a bad movie on purpose…just that he was aiming low and didn’t quite hit the mark. There’s a spoofy, Troma-like sensibility to the proceedings, including a very silly and pointless rake battle between Kevin and the Army-trained boyfriend of his friend Daphne, a slutty Cyndi Lauper fashion victim. The only remotely endearing character in the movie is Pixie, the beehive-haired waitress/go-go dancer in the endless Club Scum sequence that more or less serves as the movie’s climax.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Hobgoblins – for all I know, everyone had fun making it and nobody got hurt. Perhaps I should be more forgiving of the low budget, even though wit doesn’t cost anything (yet can be very hard to find). But…wait! What’s this at the top of Rick Sloane’s IMDb page? It’s…it’s…(choke) Hobgoblins 2, scheduled for release later this year. Please excuse my fleeting magnanimousness.

Previously on Unwatchable:
87. The Sidehackers
88. College Road Trip (pending)
89. Bloodlust!
90. The Bat People
91. Horrors of Spider Island

My Troma Summer, Part Two

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Previously on My Troma Summer

What happened was this: while filming the second Toxic Avenger sequel on location in Japan, Troma, Inc. co-founders Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz somehow got hooked up with Toxie fans Tetsu Fujimura and Masaya Nakamura, big wheels at Namco, the Japanese video game company responsible for Pac Man, and the foursome entered into a deal to create a Kabuki-themed superhero movie with a $1.5 million dollar budget, the most lavish in Troma history.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. I’d only just received a call from a guy named Andy (soon-to-be First A.D. of the project, then titled Kabukiman), who’d invited me to come down to Hell’s Kitchen and join the Troma Team for the princely sum of fifty dollars a week. In New York City.

Fortunately, I had a friend from the Harvard Lampoon who lived on the Upper East Side with his beautiful wife from Spain, and they offered me room and board in exchange for my help writing text for a coffee-table book featuring artistic photographs of feces. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

And so, thus installed, I showed up for my first day at Troma’s second floor walk-up headquarters on 9th Avenue, a cramped office stuffed with posters and swag from the company’s long and storied history. Off the main room was the private office shared by Lloyd and his silent, intimidating business partner, Michael.

Lloyd welcomed me and gave me a brief introduction to the company, then asked what my favorite movie was. At the time it was The Big Chill, which, I gathered from Lloyd's reaction, was not exactly the answer he'd been hoping for.

After that, I was handed off to Andy, a tightly-wired, anal retentive type who clearly relished his role as resident drill instructor in Troma’s boot camp for aspiring filmmakers. “All you college kids come down here after four years of parties and sleeping late and think you know how to make movies. Well, that’s not how it works in the real world, and I’m not here to wipe your ass, okay, so if I tell you to do something, you do it, then you tell me you’ve done it, otherwise I’m not gonna know and everything gets fucked up and it's your fault, understand? Now go down to Blimpy’s and get us some lunch, and don’t forget the fucking receipt!”

By the end of the first day, I’d screwed up Andy’s lunch order, accidentally washed another Troma Teammate’s contact lens down the drain after rinsing out a cup I thought was empty and somehow felt even stupider than I had after deliberately flunking out of college (though I hadn’t nearly killed the gorilla yet...that would come later).

But I also knew Andy was right: I’d been living in a boozy academic cocoon for the past four years, totally unprepared for the real world outside. Thus chastened, I headed back to my temporary East Side residence, determined to get my shit together, then took a crap on a plate of linguini for one of my friends' feces photos and went to bed.

Tomorrow was another day.

To Be Continued...

My Troma Summer: Part One

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, indiewire.com announced that Troma, Inc.’s, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, “debuted” at New York’s Village East End Cinema with “a finger licking good per-screen average of $10,700,” thanks in part to the typically relentless promotional efforts of the film’s director (and Troma founding father) Lloyd Kaufman, who “dressed as a chicken” and picketed the theater prior to the premiere.

Troma’s brand identity and marketing have always been at least as entertaining as the cinematic output of the defiantly independent (formerly) Hell’s Kitchen “studio.” Since the production company’s inception in 1974, Yale graduates Kaufman (and his partner, Michael Herz) had no illusions about the carnival huckster nature of their enterprise: the name TROMA itself is (allegedly) an acronym for “Tits R Our Main Attraction,” in honor of the duo’s early slate of sex comedies, including Squeeze Play and Sizzle Beach, U.S.A., featuring a then-unknown, now presumably mortified Kevin Costner.

In 1989, I was working in a Cambridge, MA video store (Central Square’s late lamented Action Video), and only knew Troma through memorable titles in our “cult” section like Surf Nazis Must Die, Class of Nuke’Em High and, of course, the essential Toxic Avenger series.

At the time, I was on the lam from Harvard University, having skipped all my finals in a passive-aggressive attempt to free myself of the liberal arts grind and concentrate on my one true love: movies. As it turns out, it’s harder to flunk out of Harvard than one might expect, but my stunt worked well enough to get me put on academic suspension for a semester, allowing me plenty of free time to dabble in LSD, feud with my horrified parents and, in my spare time, attempt to become rich and famous.

Despite tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, countless hours in the halls, libraries and career offices of academia and Harvard's reputation as a networking paradise, I hadn’t managed to schmooze up a single show biz connection there, and had no freakin' clue how to get started in the movie business (or, indeed, any other business).

I'd heard about Roger Corman, whose legendary low-budget productions had been the training wheels for actors and directors like Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese, and hoped, while alphabetizing the titles in the Action Video cult section, that Troma, Inc. would be an East Coast indie boot camp equivalent.

And so I sent my resume to the address on the back of one of the weird Troma video boxes and waited...

...while halfway around the world, Lloyd Kaufman was gearing up for his next big project, a Japanese co-production that was about to become the most expensive film in Troma history.

To Be Continued...

Which Came First? "Poultrygeist" vs. "Blood Freak"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, a film directed by Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, opens in theaters this weekend. Which is kind of weird, because it already opened in New York a couple of Christmas seasons back, and then had a belated general opening last year. Apparently the always-innovative Kaufman has decided to keep opening it at periodic intervals until somebody notices. (We noticed, Lloyd. You can stop now.) What's also unusual about Poultrygeist is that, by making a film about "chicken zombies," Troma has opted to make a movie that will probably not be the worst movie of its kind ever made. With the Toxic Avenger series, Troma all but cornered the market in bad franchise films about a superhero born of toxic waste. No sorrier examination of the phenomenon of fat guys going nutzoid exists than Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid; all surf Nazis films are surpassed in lousiness by Surf Nazis Must Die. But without having seen Poultrygeist--a state of virginal innocence that I fully intend to maintain for the remainder of my days on Earth, so that it'll be a fresh experience for me if they want to show it to me in Hell--I feel confident in my belief that his film will pale in ghastliness to the immortal Blood Freak, co-directed in 1972 by Brad F. Grinter and the picture's star, Steve Hawkes. Lloyd is getting on in years and has been at this a while now, and certain things benefit from the enthusiasm of youthful amateurism.

The film opens with a monologue delivered by Grinter, seated at a desk, smoking, and creepy enough that Larry Flynt would decline his offer of a lollipop. Looking seedy and pissed off--maybe he didn't want to appear on camera but had no choice but to jump in when Brando pulled out at the last minute--he stresses the instructional nature of the passion play we are about to behold. Enter Hawkes as the burly, massive-haired Herschell, who crashes a pot party held by the well-tanned Ann (Dana Cullivan) and settles in for a good, all-night theology discussion. Unfortunately, the combined power of Ann's sultry wiles and her addictive wacky weed prove too much for Herschell, and he's soon violating his Christian vows right, left, and sideways. Blood Freak is available in an impressively bonus-packed DVD from Something Weird Video, and it would be wrong of me to give away too much of the plot even if I understood it, but suffice to say that after Herschell, his internal defenses weakened from too much free love and hemp, takes a job as a test subject for some pointy-head scientists working on an experimental turkey-breeding drugs, it's only a matter of time before crazed bloody homicides and a big papier-mache bird hand are in his future. The trailer below can give you a hint of the awful wonders that are to come in this film, which is unusual for its mixture of proselytizing for the Christian-message market and its unrestrained use of the blood pump. This is especially notable in a scene involving a circular saw, for which the filmmakers hired the services of a man with a false leg. The scene is all the more remarkable for how unconvincing it is, due to the man's agonized screaming, which is not of Actor's Studio quality. I guess that if you're making a Christian poultry zombie splatter flick on a very tight budget, you figure you can't just say to the first one-legged man who shows up at the audition, "Listen, physically you're what we're looking for, but we're going to hold out for a one-legged guy who really needs the fifty bucks and who can act!" But still...

Take Five: Take Four

Peter Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

As a professional film critic, it is my most sacred duty to deliver honest, truthful assessments of the films I am assigned to see — and to review them fairly without prejudice or favor. It would be a betrayal of my professional and personal standards to review, positively or negatively, a film without actually seeing it. Having said that, here’s a prediction: Saw IV, which opens today nationwide after having been completed approximately three days ago, is going to suck. Now, I say this without having seen Saw IV; for that matter, I say this without having seen Saw I, Saw II or Saw III. For all I know, they’re cinematic masterworks the likes of which Orson Welles could never dare to dream. But let’s face it: the fourth installment in any series, let alone one as misbegotten as the Saw series, has the deck stacked against it from the jump-off. The number of Part 4s that have been worth watching can be counted on one hand; it just so happens that I have five fingers on my left hand, so here’s five fours that aren’t complete wastes of time.

THUNDERBALL (1965)

Believe it or not, there was a time when there weren’t so many James Bond movies that nobody bothered to count them. Thunderball wasn’t quite as good as Goldfinger and From Russia with Love, the two films that preceded it, but it’s still a Bond flick in the grand tradition, with lots of fun lines, exciting action sequences, and swell spy gear, and it’s one of the last 007 adventures that still feels like something you can enjoy rather than just live through, like most of the long-slog installments of the 1970s. At any rate, Sean Connery seems to be enjoying himself, and who wouldn’t, with Claudine Auger around?

ROCKY IV (1985)

Ha, ha! Just kidding. This isn’t a good Part IV at all. It’s terrible. But taken strictly for laughs, it’s an inadvertent masterpiece, with its overblown jingoism, mindless commie-bashing, and endless hilariously bad dialogue. It also introduced the world, however briefly, to currently unemployable Swedish galoot Dolph Lundgren and Sly Stallone’s gargantuan Danish girlfriend, Brigitte Nielsen. A movie decidedly of its era, it is a fine measure of the tenor of its times, and I had the pleasure of getting thrown out of a theatre during its initial screening for loudly cheering for the Russian fighter to pound the obnoxious Rocky into soup.

BRIDE OF CHUCKY (1998)

The fourth installment of the "Chucky" series of tongue-in-cheek horror movies following the adventures of a homicidal doll, Bride of Chucky benefits enormously from not taking itself at all seriously. Surprisingly well-directed by Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu, it features a genuinely funny script, some surreal dialogue between the supremely professional Brad Dourif and a game-for-anything Jennifer Tilly, and one of the most ridiculous sex scenes in cinema history. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to win any Oscar nods (by the time you get to Part IV, you’re generally running on fumes even if the original film was decent), but it’s highly enjoyable just the same.

CITIZEN TOXIE: THE TOXIC AVENGER IV (2000)

Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma pictures may not be particularly well-crafted, which is not unexpected given that they are generally made for as much money as Kaufman happens to have in his pocket at the moment. And they aren’t Art with a capital A, dealing as they do with things like surfing Nazis and the question of whether or not they should die. But they’re occasionally hilarious, brilliantly campy, and damn it, they give their fans what they want, which is more than you can say for a lot of studio films. Citizen Toxie’s shotgun approach guarantees at least a couple of solid hits, and it’s chock full of ridiculous celebrity cameos, from Corey Feldman to Ron Jeremy.

LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)

Why is it that horror movies rack up the biggest sequel counts as well as the biggest body counts? If a movie title is followed by a Roman numeral higher than V, it’s a, well, dead certainty that its plot revolves around serial killers, monsters, and/or megadeaths. Anyway, the fourth of George Romero’s zombie series (after Night of the Living, Dawn of and Day of the Dead) is by no means the best; it’s full of plot holes, marred by a ridiculous ending, and generally a tad ridiculous. But it’s also George Romero, and that means it’s chock full of visceral thrills, black comedy, and social commentary — and this time around, we even get a couple of juicy star turns from Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo.

— Leonard Pierce

Tromatic Stress Disorder

Peter Smith — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

A lot of people wouldn’t mind being Lloyd Kaufman. His Troma films have a worldwide cult following; his book Make Your Own Damn Movie: Secrets of a Renegade Director is one of the finest guides to guerilla filmmaking one could ask for; and he’s just been named chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance. Still, to hear him tell the story to our friends at PopMatters, Kaufman is one pissed-off movie mogul. Festivals won’t accept his films, movie theatres won’t screen them, and bloggers trash releases like Poultrygeist while championing mainstream studio fare that’s no less ridiculous in concept or execution, but feature twenty times the budget. In an intriguing interview from a man who’s been in the business as long as Spielberg or Scorsese, he makes a convincing case that he’s the Rodney Dangerfield of filmmaking. — Leonard Pierce