Sharing a trio of videos Cody has written for the JoBlo Horror Videos YouTube channel.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and now I also write scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Videos. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
- Frailty, Dead Calm, and Shocker
- 100 Feet, Freddy vs. Jason, and Pin
- Night Fare, Poltergeist III, and Hardware
and - Dark City, Mute Witness, and The Wraith.
Below, you can see three more videos that I have written the scripts for.
Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy capper Army of Darkness is a cult classic now, but it was a box office disappointment when it was released. For an episode of the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie series, I dug into the behind-the-scenes issues the film had to overcome to reach its theatrical release.
Army of Darkness script:
Today, Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is known as one of the horror genre’s most beloved cult classics, but the film – which was a box office disappointment when it was released in 1993 – didn’t have a smooth journey from script to screen, as evident from the fact that there are four different cuts floating around out there, with the director’s cut being 15 minutes longer than the U.S. theatrical cut. From problems with the studio and the ratings board to some budgetary issues, Army of Darkness had to overcome several hurdles to reach its adoring audience – so let’s look back and see What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
Of course, the story of Army of Darkness begins with Sam Raimi’s debut feature The Evil Dead, which went into production in 1979, when the director was just 20 years old, and starred Raimi’s friend and future genre icon Bruce Campbell. Campbell took on the role of Ash Williams, a hapless knucklehead who goes on vacation to a cabin in rural Tennessee and ends up battling the forces of evil after demonic spirits are set loose on him and his friends through the reading of a passage from the recently unearthed and translated Book of the Dead. “Book of the Dead” was the original title of the film, and it was publicist Irvin Shapiro who gave The Evil Dead the title it had when it finally received a wide theatrical release in 1983. It was also Shapiro who suggested that Raimi should make a sequel with Army of Darkness in the title.
Evil Dead II involves Ash continuing to battle the evil beings known as Deadites in that Tennessee cabin, with a new bunch of characters showing up to get possessed and wiped out. At the end of the film, another passage is read from the Book of the Dead that’s meant to open a vortex that will suck in the evil and take it away. But Ash, being a hapless knucklehead, ends up being sucked into the vortex as well, and finds himself dumped into medieval times. 1300 A.D., to be exact. The idea to toss Ash into the past occurred to Raimi very early in the development of Evil Dead II; so early, in fact, that it wasn’t originally supposed to be the ending moment, the whole movie was supposed to be set in the past. Raimi wrote the story for an Evil Dead II that was set in 1300 and the idea was fleshed out into a screenplay by Sheldon Lettich, who would go on to write a bunch of action movies, including Rambo III, Only the Strong, and multiple Jean-Claude Van Damme projects. Lettich also wrote the “Marines vs. the Manson Family” classic Thou Shalt Not Kill… Except, which happens to star Raimi as a cult leader modeled after Charles Manson.
The problem with setting Evil Dead II in the past was that it would require a much higher budget, so when studios passed on the idea, Raimi focused on making the comedy Crimewave instead. Things didn’t go well on that production. Campbell has called it a disaster, and Raimi described it as a “horrible, horrible, horrible, depressing” experience. So when that was in the can, Raimi went back to Evil Dead II out of desperation – this was something he knew worked and had an established audience. Shapiro took out an ad in the trades announcing that Raimi was making an Evil Dead sequel called Evil Dead and the Army of Darkness, with artwork showing the Ash character fighting Deadites in the foreground and a castle in the background. But in order to push the project forward and get funding, Raimi realized he would have to set aside the 1300 A.D. idea in favor of making a lower budgeted film that would remain at the cabin. He wrote this new approach to the sequel with his friend Scott Spiegel, and in the long run it seems very beneficial that we got Evil Dead II between The Evil Dead and Army of Darkness, instead of the first sequel already being set in the past. Going from the bloody and brutal first film right into a medieval adventure in the second would have been too jarring. Evil Dead II and the enhanced humor it brought to the table helps smooth out the transition between the different styles.
Evil Dead II was the success Raimi needed, and from there he was able to make the superhero action movie Darkman for Universal. When Darkman did well, Universal was interested in staying in the Sam Raimi business – and Raimi saw that this was his opportunity to bring the Evil Dead 1300 A.D. idea to the screen. Evil Dead II financier Dino De Laurentiis was willing to fund another sequel, De Laurentiis had a deal with Universal, it was the perfect set-up. De Laurentiis and the studio each put in half of the budget, for a total around 12 million dollars, and production began. The one baffling condition that Universal put forth is that they did not want to promote this as being the third Evil Dead movie, one of the rare times in Hollywood history where a studio didn’t want to profit off of a known title. They wanted this film to stand on its own, which is why it was simply released as Army of Darkness, not Evil Dead and the Army of Darkness, or Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness. Universal’s stance also eliminated Raimi’s suggested alternative of The Medieval Dead.
While promoting Evil Dead II, Raimi and Campbell had made it clear that the film was setting up a sequel they would gladly dive into if given the chance. They both mentioned in interviews that the script for the third film was already in place while Evil Dead II was in production. But instead of returning to the draft Sheldon Lettich had written, after Evil Dead II was released Raimi decided to write a new script. At first he turned to his part 2 co-writer Scott Spiegel, but since Spiegel was busy working on the Clint Eastwood and Charlie Sheen movie The Rookie at the time, Raimi had to find someone else to write it with. He chose his brother Ivan Raimi, who had become a doctor while Sam and their younger brother Ted were pursuing careers in the entertainment industry. Their collaboration went well, and turned out especially well for Ivan Raimi, since his involvement with Army of Darkness led to him meeting his future wife on the set, where she was a crew member.
Army of Darkness was a difficult shoot, but not for any truly negative reasons. The difficulty simply came out of the fact that the film required so many special effects. Even with effects duties being split between multiple companies – KNB, Alterian, Introvision – it was still incredibly challenging to get everything done, with some of the effects teams working for several weeks straight without any sort of break. The production was also extremely challenging for Campbell, whose character Ash has to continue his fight against the Deadites after being sent back in time hundreds of years. This film even has Ash fighting himself in a number of ways. There’s a sequence where he gets tormented by evil, miniature versions of himself, and then a full-grown Evil Ash emerges from his body, so Campbell plays many different versions of Ash here. He has said that this was “the most physically uncomfortable movie in the history of motion pictures”.
There were only a couple notable instances of sequences not turning out the way Raimi was hoping for during principal photography, and one of those was due to fight choreography proving to be too difficult to pull off in one continuous take. The other happened because they ran low on cash. Early on, Ash has a confrontation with a witch creature played by stuntwoman Patricia Tallman, who horror fans may remember as Barbara from Night of the Living Dead 1990. In the finished film, this fight consists of the witch knocking people around inside a room until Ash blasts her down with his boomstick, or his shotgun to those of us who aren’t primitive screwheads. As originally envisioned, the fight was supposed to take place outside, among crumbling pillars. At one point, the witch was going to get a log jammed in her mouth and her cheeks would puff up as she spit out the log. The miniature set with the pillars was built, KNB had the puffy-cheeked witch makeup effects ready to go, but the scene was going to be too expensive. So the version of the scene that’s in the film was a reshoot done in a garage, with cast members Marcus Gilbert as Lord Arthur and Embeth Davidtz as Ash’s love interest Sheila sporting wigs for their part in the set-up, hiding the fact that their hairstyles had changed since the rest of the movie was shot. The pillar sequence probably would have been a cool sight to behold, but fans don’t seem to be disappointed with the witch fight we got.
Filmed in 1991, Army of Darkness was aiming for a summer 1992 release. The filmmakers strongly believed that it was a summer movie. Producer Rob Tapert said it would be a crime if it didn’t come out in the summer. Well, that crime was committed. Universal initially scheduled the film for a January 1993 release, then ended up pushing it back another month, so it reached theatres in February of ’93. This delay occurred due to a disagreement between Universal and De Laurentiis, something that really had nothing to do with Army of Darkness at all. The disagreement was over Hannibal Lecter.
De Laurentiis had acquired the film rights to author Thomas Harris’s character Hannibal Lecter in the process of making the 1986 film Manhunter, based on Harris’s novel Red Dragon. Lecter is a supporting character in that story, and was played by Brian Cox in Manhunter. That’s an awesome movie, but De Laurentiis was so unhappy with it that he had no interest in making The Silence of the Lambs, so he gave Orion permission to use Lecter in their adaptation of that Harris novel for free. When it started to look like Lambs was going to turn out to be something special, Universal chairman Tom Pollock talked to De Laurentiis about making a sequel as part of the deal De Laurentiis had with the studio. And when LAMBS was released and became a huge financial and critical success, Pollock found out that De Laurentiis had a differing opinion on how their conversation had gone. Pollock felt they already had an oral agreement to make a Hannibal Lecter movie together. De Laurentiis thought they still needed to come to terms on this. At that point, Universal started to see Army of Darkness as nothing more than leverage they could use to make De Laurentiis accept their Hannibal Lecter deal. They stopped putting money into the film’s post-production while also demanding that it be completed by a date that De Laurentiis felt was arbitrary and unreasonable, they refused to schedule a release date, and they wouldn’t hold the test screening Raimi wanted so he could see how the film played to an audience. So De Laurentiis filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the studio.
Thankfully, this lawsuit was settled within a matter of months, but it still dragged on long enough that Army of Darkness missed its chance of coming out in the summer of 1992. De Laurentiis and Universal did end up making a Hannibal Lecter movie together, but what makes this whole situation all the more absurd is the fact that the movie, Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, wasn’t released until 2001. Tom Pollock apparently thought they were going to strike while the iron was hot and get a sequel to The Silence of the Lambs made real soon, but De Laurentiis waited for Harris to finish writing the sequel novel before going ahead with the movie. It was a long wait, so Army of Darkness had been held hostage for a movie that wouldn’t happen until nine years later.
When things were worked out between De Laurentiis and the studio, Universal finally took a look at Raimi’s cut of Army of Darkness, and that just made things more complicated. This is when the film started to get away from Raimi, as not only did Universal think his 96 minute cut was too long, they also thought some parts were too silly, and they hated the ending, in which Ash is given a magic potion that will allow him to return to his own time by sleeping through the ages. But, being Ash, he takes one drop too much of the potion, sleeps too long, and wakes up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Raimi and Campbell saw this as a way to set up a fun, futuristic sequel where Ash could lead a robot uprising against the Deadites. Universal saw it as a bummer and demanded that a new, more upbeat ending be shot. At the same time, they started performing their own edit of the film, whittling 15 minutes out of it. On the audio commentary he recorded for the film, Raimi said he did have some input on the Universal edit, but it seems clear that he didn’t have much input. At the time, he told Fangoria magazine that Universal was cutting his film down and was quoted as saying, “I really don’t know what the movie’s going to be like now.” It’s obvious in the audio commentary that Raimi wasn’t pleased with the way Universal’s edits turned out, as he states on a couple different occasions that scenes weren’t as good in their theatrical cut, and that they play better in his director’s cut.
In the United States, Universal released their 81 minute cut with a new ending in which Ash makes it safely back to his own time, goes back to his job at S-Mart, kicks some more Deadite ass, and gets the girl. This theatrical release happened after Raimi got some further grief from the MPAA ratings board, which threatened to give the film an NC-17. If you’ve seen Army of Darkness, you know the idea of it being rated NC-17 is ridiculous. The filmmakers felt the MPAA just wanted to punish them because the previous two Evil Dead movies had been released unrated. In the end, Raimi got them to give the film an R rating. It feels more like a PG-13, but an R will do.
For international territories where Universal wasn’t the distributor, De Laurentiis put together an 88 minute cut that has the S-Mart ending and lifts several minutes out of sequences that Universal cut down as well, namely the sequence with the mini-Ashes and the climactic battle. De Laurentiis had also asked Raimi to restructure the battle so a character would join the fight sooner. When Ash arrives in 1300, he finds himself in the middle of an ongoing conflict between Gilbert’s Lord Arthur and Richard Grove as Duke Henry the Red. By the end of the film, Ash and the war with the Deadites will have convinced Arthur and Henry to set aside their differences and live in peace. The first indication of this truce comes during the battle at Arthur’s castle, when Henry comes riding in with his men to help fight the army of darkness led by Evil Ash. In Raimi’s cut, Henry doesn’t show up until the battle is almost over, and De Laurentiis wanted him to be part of the fight for a longer period of time. Raimi complied, and Henry arrives earlier in every cut except the director’s cut.
Sam and Ivan Raimi both think they missed the chance to put more character moments with Ash throughout the final battle, feeling that the action gets so overwhelming that Ash gets lost in it, and Campbell suspects the extended version of the battle might have been too exhausting for audiences to endure, but that didn’t keep the entire battle from being part of the director’s cut.
So we have the director’s cut, the Universal cut, and the international cut. The fourth official cut enters the picture because Universal had made the film so short – that 81 minute running time had to be beefed up a bit for the television version of the film. The cut that airs on the likes of Syfy runs 88 minutes, and while it has edits to protect viewers from harsh language and violence, it also puts moments back in, including a couple scenes that were only in this version. They could be found in the deleted scenes section of the home video release, but here they’re actually part of the movie. One of these is the only version of the windmill scene where the build up to the arrival of the tiny Ashes, which involves Ash smashing a mirror, makes some sense.
All the tinkering and reshoots that were done on Army of Darkness didn’t seem to do the film any favors when it reached theatres, and neither did the February release date or the decision to sell the film as its own thing instead of playing up the connection to the two Evil Dead movies. Not many people went to see Army of Darkness. The box office take sputtered out at around the same amount that was put into the budget. Some questionable choices were made that definitely hindered the movie, but it eventually found its fans when the Universal and international cuts reached home video. Years later, the director’s cut also started to make its way out into the world, so fans could finally see the film as Raimi had intended it to be seen, before financiers and executives started calling the shots.
Getting Army of Darkness made and released wasn’t an easy process, but Bruce Campbell and his wife Ida have a saying that goes, “If it’s easy to make, it will probably be hard to watch.” And this is a movie that fans have found very easy to watch over and over again for almost 30 years now.
Also for the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie series, I took a look at one of the most controversial movies ever made, Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust:
Cannibal Holocaust script:
Cannibal Holocaust is one of the most infamous and controversial horror films ever made. It’s a film that many genre fans refuse to watch, and many of those who do watch it are compelled to seek it out just to test their limits. It was a pioneer in the “found footage” sub-genre, and deals with subject matter so extreme, featuring violence and gore that’s so convincing, that it was not only banned in multiple countries, the director even had to go to court to prove that he didn’t murder his cast. Love it or hate it, you have to admit that the story behind Cannibal Holocaust is fascinating. So let’s dig into it and find out What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
Cannibal movies had become somewhat popular in the 1970s, with several being produced throughout the decade, primarily by Italian filmmakers. It all started with the Elliot Silverstein Western A Man Called Horse, which starred Richard Harris as an English aristocrat who is captured by a Native American tribe. Umberto Lenzi decided to tell his own version of that story with the film Man from Deep River, and in his take on the concept he had the British lead get captured by a tribe of cannibals that live in the rainforest. With that, the cannibal boom had begun. Five years after Man from Deep River, Lenzi was hired to make a sequel – but when he asked for too much money, the producer removed him from the project and replaced him with Ruggero Deodato. Known as Jungle Holocaust or Last Cannibal World, among other titles, that 1977 film from Deodato is along the same lines as Cannibal Holocaust; outsiders cross paths with a cannibal tribe, and the scenes of fake violence are mixed with footage of actual animal deaths. Deodato has said that the animal deaths were included at the demand of the producers, who told him that certain theatrical markets responded well to such things. At that time, Deodato refused to direct the scenes of animal killings himself, so the producers went ahead and shot the footage on their own, including a scene where a crocodile is skinned alive. Last Cannibal World was a hit, and a couple years later investors approached Deodato about making another cannibal movie in an attempt to replicate that film’s success. The result was Cannibal Holocaust. And as we all know by now, Deodato was not shy about shooting scenes of animals being killed for this movie.
When Deodato was asked to make Cannibal Holocaust, Italy was right in the middle of the eighteen years of terrifying violent acts carried out by the Red Brigades, a guerrilla group that was formed with the intention of creating a revolutionary state and removing Italy from NATO. The Red Brigades committed acts of sabotage, pulled off bank robberies, and killed around fifty people, including former Prime Minister Aldo Moro – and according to Deodato, the news reports on their activities were presented in an appallingly sensationalized way. His young son would ask him to turn off the TV when reports about the Red Brigades were being shown, and Deodato didn’t understand why nobody under 18 was allowed to see his movies, but images of real life horror were shown on the news, with the gory details out there for people of all ages to see. So he decided to make his new film a condemnation of the sort of journalists and documentarians that enthusiastically profit off of human suffering. Another inspiration for Cannibal Holocaust was the documentary Mondo Cane, which Deodato was a fan of. This was a documentary designed solely to be shocking to as many members of the audience as possible, the film being one long onslaught of bizarre sights and a whole lot of animal slaughter.
In an effort to make his own film look like it consisted largely of actual documentary footage, Deodato hired unknown actors and had them sign a contract agreeing that they would stay out of the public eye for a year after the release of the film. The actors who agreed to those terms were Gabriel Yorke, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen, and Luca Barbareschi. They play a documentary crew, headed up by Yorke as director Alan Yates, who venture into the Amazon rainforest to shoot a documentary called The Green Inferno, a title Eli Roth would later use for his own contribution to the cannibal sub-genre. This Green Inferno is meant to be about the warring cannibal tribes the Yanomamo and the Shamatari. The crew disappears during the shoot, so Professor Harold Monroe of NYU is sent down to the Amazon to search for them. Monroe is played by Robert Kerman, another actor Deodato thought was an unknown, not realizing that Kerman had already been in multiple porn films, including the 1978 hit Debbie Does Dallas. He wasn’t too pleased to find out he had a familiar face in his movie, and Kerman wasn’t too pleased to be working with Deodato. In later interviews, Kerman would describe the director as someone who treated people in such a cruel manner, it led him to believe that Deodato “doesn’t have a soul”.
What Monroe discovers in the Amazon, in the possession of the Yanomamo, is the documentary crew’s film reels, and their skeletons. So this is a “found footage” movie in the most literal sense, since we see Monroe find the footage Yates and his crew shot. He then takes it back to New York and watches the footage with executives from the Pan American Broadcasting System, who are interested in salvaging the documentary and airing it on television. The previous documentary Yates had made was popular, even though it’s known behind the scenes that he staged some of the moments to make it more shocking and dramatic to the audience. When Deodato shows a clip from that documentary, it’s actually stock footage of real executions.
Despite the more traditionally shot and edited parts of the film involving Monroe, a substantial portion of Cannibal Holocaust is presented as if it were documentary footage, and some viewers at the time were tricked into thinking that Yates and his crew were real people – which is exactly what Deodato wanted. Through seeing their raw footage, we also learn that Yates and his companions were complete scumbags. To say that they manipulated situations and staged events is an understatement. They terrorized the natives as they made their way through the rainforest, murdering people and burning down their homes while intending to cut the footage together so it looks like these are things the natives are doing to each other. The most well-known image from this film is of a native girl impaled on a spike, and that’s something Yates and his crew did to that girl after raping her.
This isn’t to say life in the rainforest would be all sunshine and rainbows if Yates hadn’t been there; Monroe witnesses rape and murder during his time there as well, and the documentarians didn’t have anything to do with that. But we see the crew do enough awful things in their footage that in the end it’s understandable why the cannibal tribe wiped them out – and their deaths happen in front of their own cameras, so Monroe, the TV executives, and the viewers get to see exactly what happened.
Both the documentary footage and the Monroe stretch of the film contain scenes of real animals being killed, which is the main reason why Cannibal Holocaust is so controversial. Seven animals were killed specifically for this production, six of them for the Yates footage. Deodato has gone on to say that he was stupid for including these animal deaths in his film, but you get the sense that he only regrets doing so because it has caused so much trouble for him over the years. He’s probably tired of hearing about it. He has defended the animal killings by saying that all of the animals were eaten by locals and crew members after they were killed on screen, and that anyone who is overly shocked by the imagery is viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses. He said, “People don’t make the connection between the food on the table that mummy cooked from the supermarket, and the fact the animal has actually been killed. I saw pigs and rabbits being killed, growing up on a country farm when I was young.”
The animals killed for Cannibal Holocaust include a turtle that gets decapitated, a tarantula and a snake that get killed with a machete, a pig that gets shot with a rifle – and Deodato said this pig was killed at the request of a crew member who was tired of eating fish during production – and two monkeys. Within the film, only one monkey is killed, but two died for the movie because Deodato wanted to do a second take of the monkey death. The killing of the monkeys provided locals the chance to eat something they consider a delicacy, monkey brains.
One animal is killed during the scenes of Monroe traveling through the rainforest. That was a coatimundi, a cousin to the raccoon, and Kerman begged Deodato not to go through with having the animal killed. He didn’t see or hear the killing when it happened, but knowing that it had been killed bothered him, and it bothered him even more when he saw it in the movie. For many viewers, its death is the worst of the bunch, because it doesn’t die as quickly as the others. It dies a painful death, and lets out a haunting shriek. Kerman would go on to say that if he had to do it all over again, he would have made sure the coatimundi hadn’t been killed, even if he had to get physical and knock it out of the hands of the person who had it.
Another cast member who was disturbed by all of the animal killings was Gabriel Yorke. He ended up in the role of Alan Yates simply because he fit the wardrobe that had already been purchased for another actor who had been cast as Yates but dropped out. Interviewed around 25 years later, Yorke said he had been asked to be the one to shoot the pig, but he had traveled to the set with the pig and couldn’t bring himself to kill it after spending that time with it. So the task was handed over to Luca Barbareschi, who had an upbringing similar to Deodato’s and didn’t have any issue with the animal killings. Yorke still had to be nearby when the pig was killed, though, because he had to deliver dialogue straight to the camera immediately after it gets shot. He was so upset that he stumbled over his lines, and you can see this in the finished film. Deodato couldn’t get another take because they didn’t have another pig to kill to lead into the dialogue.
For his part, Barbareschi was apparently unaware that Yorke had objected to the killing of the pig, because he has said that nobody on set rebelled in reaction to the animal deaths.
Yorke, on the other hand, has even confessed that he began to fear that the production could be building up to the murders of the cast. The tipping point for him was the killing of the two monkeys. He said, “I didn’t know if this was a snuff movie or not. I wasn’t sure they would stop at monkeys.” So every time he went to set, he carried his passport, plane ticket, and money with him – although he points out that this wouldn’t have done him any good, since the filming location in the Colombia rainforest was so remote. It was a 45 minute boat ride to the nearest town, so if the crew turned against the cast while they were out there, Yorke wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Yorke and the rest of the cast made it through filming alive, but once Cannibal Holocaust was released the Italian court system was briefly convinced that it truly was a snuff film. For ten days, the film was doing quite well while playing on the big screen in Italy, and during that time legendary filmmaker Sergio Leone even caught a screening and was compelled to contact Deodato afterward. Leone described the second half of the film as a masterpiece of cinematic realism, but cautioned Deodato that he felt the director would get in trouble for it because the events seemed so real. And he was right. After an audience member complained, Cannibal Holocaust was pulled from theatres, the prints legally confiscated due to laws against animal cruelty and footage of animal cruelty, and Deodato was charged with obscenity. Then, believing the deaths in the film to be real, the Italian authorities went a step further and charged Deodato with murder. To prove his innocence, he had to scrap that plan to keep the actors out of the public eye for a year and gather them together for an interview on Italian television. That proof of life got the murder charge dropped, but Deodato, the producers, screenwriter Gianfranco Clerici, and a representative of the distribution company United Artists Europa were officially convicted of obscenity and given four month suspended sentences. Cannibal Holocaust was banned due to animal cruelty, and Deodato fought for years to get that ban reversed. He was eventually successful.
Italy was just one of several countries to ban the film. It was slapped with an X rating in the United States, and banned as a video nasty in the United Kingdom. At various points it has also been banned in Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Singapore, among others. Many of those countries did allow Cannibal Holocaust to cross their borders after a while. Even then, the film was difficult to get a hold of for a couple decades in some countries – and an important player in getting it out into the world in a bigger way was Sage Stallone, the son of Sylvester Stallone. The kid from Rocky 5! With Bob Murawski, Stallone co-founded the distribution company Grindhouse Releasing, and in 2005 they celebrated the 25th anniversary of Cannibal Holocaust by remastering the film and giving it a special edition DVD release. Grindhouse has since given it a Blu-ray release as well, and brought the film to many theatre screens over the years.
When Kerman was interviewed for the DVD release, he advised Grindhouse to cut out the animal deaths, specifically the killing of the coatimundi. While Grindhouse was initially hesitant, not wanting to censor the film, in the end they did include an “animal cruelty-free” cut on their physical media releases.
At one time, Cannibal Holocaust was a mysterious, banned film, shrouded in controversy, and if you wanted to see it in certain areas you had to put effort into seeking it out. Now it’s readily available in the highest possible quality presentations, and was even featured on an episode of The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs. Cannibal Holocaust being on a horror host show would have been unthinkable in the past, but now it’s just something that can be slotted into the line-up. Not without upsetting some viewers, of course. In fact, the Shudder streaming service released a version of the Cannibal Holocaust episode of The Last Drive-in that consisted only of Joe Bob’s host segments, so viewers who didn’t want to see any part of the movie could avoid it entirely.
Cannibal Holocaust is deeply disturbing, and its grotesque visuals are made all the more sickening by the score from composer Riz Ortolani, music that is often incongruously lovely. Deodato said he wanted “very sweet music” for his very ugly film, and Ortolani provided it. The movie is difficult to sit through, especially those awful moments of animal deaths… but it should be out there so that anyone who wants to see it can do so.
While many other places in the world were struggling over the decision whether or not to release this movie to their citizens, audiences in Japan were eating it up like a cannibal feast. When it was released there, it became the second highest grossing film of the year. Right behind E.T.
And for the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I recommended Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case:
Basket Case script:
Many genre fans are fascinated with the grindhouse era, and with the idea of watching movies at the rundown grindhouse theatres that stood on 42nd Street in Manhattan, a place that was said to be dangerous and populated by some… we’ll call them unique individuals. One cinema fan who had the time of his life watching movies on 42nd Street back then was Frank Henenlotter. He was so enamored with the whole scene, he was inspired to make a movie right there in the 42nd Street area – and that’s how we got Basket Case, the subject of this episode of The Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: About a decade after directing a circumcision-themed short film called Slash of the Knife, which got theatrical play when paired with John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, Frank Henenlotter decided to team up with his friend Edgar Ievins to make a feature film. This was really done on a whim, with no larger goal than getting their movie shown in a theatre on 42nd Street. They scraped together some cash and dove into production with an initial investment of eight thousand dollars a piece, Henenlotter writing and directing the film and Ievins serving as producer.
The idea for Basket Case began with an image that Henenlotter imagined: the sight of a man walking around Manhattan, carrying a wicker basket with a monster inside of it. As intrigued as he was by this visual, he found the script tough to crack because he couldn’t figure out exactly why someone would want to keep a monster in a basket. The answer to the problem struck him while he was at the Nathan’s hot dog stand in Times Square: the guy is taking care of this monster because it’s his brother. Once Henenlotter came to that realization, Basket Case started flowing so quickly that he was writing dialogue on napkins before he even left Nathan’s that day.
Since Basket Case was made on such a low budget, it’s no surprise that it wasn’t just Henenlotter’s feature debut, it was also the feature debut for many of the cast members – and for several of them, it was the only movie they were ever in. Kevin Van Hentenryck, who had been in Slash of the Knife, was cast to play the lead character Duane Bradley, that young man who keeps his monstrous brother in a basket. Terri Susan Smith of the punk band The Tattooed Vegetables was cast as Duane’s love interest Sharon, and had to wear a wig in all of her scenes because her head was shaved. This was the only time she ever acted. Diana Browne, Lloyd Pace, and Bill Freeman earned their sole feature credits as a trio of people Duane and his brother are holding a grudge against. Robert Vogel and Joe Clarke were cast as notable characters at the hotel Duane and his brother stay in during their time in Manhattan, and Beverly Bonner – who would go on to be in every genre movie Henenlotter made after this – took on the role of Casey, the friendly prostitute next door.
But above all, the real star of this film is the character that draws us to Basket Case in the first place. The monster in the basket. Duane’s brother, Belial. Described as looking like a “squashed octopus”, because Henenlotter had originally envisioned him having a tentacle that didn’t make it into the film, Belial is an odd little fellow designed by effects artist Kevin Haney and brought to the screen through a mixture of puppetry and stop-motion animation. This character has some serious issues, and he makes a mess of several of his co-stars.
BACKGROUND: Basket Case took more than a year to shoot, because production would start and stop based on how much money Henenlotter had on hand at any given time. This was just part of the reality of making a low budget movie, and everyone involved knew what they were getting into. Henenlotter shot it on 16 millimeter and handled the editing himself, and the only trouble he ran into during the making of the movie – other than the fact that he kept running low on cash – was a crowd control issue when shooting scenes on 42nd Street. Random pedestrians would wander in front of the camera, and there was one incident where a storeowner threatened to kill Henenlotter and the crew because he thought they were a TV news crew trying to film his place of business. Once the director explained what was going on, the guy didn’t have any issue with having his store being shown in a horror movie.
As production went on, the tone of the film began to evolve. Although Henenlotter had chosen to make his first feature a horror movie because it was something that could be made cheaply and still have a good chance of landing some kind of distribution, he could see that his film wasn’t turning out to be terrifying. So he leaned into that, adding more humor, figuring that if the movie wasn’t going to work as a straightforward horror film, it could sell as a horror comedy. And even though Henenlotter has gone on to make several more movies that are considered to be part of the horror genre, he doesn’t consider himself to be a horror movie director, because none of his movies were intended to be outright scary. He prefers to call them exploitation movies, because they’re all “wacked out comedies” at their core, with horror, gore, and gratuitous nudity mixed in. He said, “I have the elements of exploitation in all of my films. It gives me a certain freedom. If I had to make a movie where I had to worry about making an audience jump, I wouldn’t be interested. I like the fact that I can make them laugh or get grossed out. That to me is more fun. … Exploitation films are what I grew up with, it’s the kitchen sink approach.”
Just as he was hoping, he was able to secure a distribution deal for Basket Case soon after it was completed and screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The problem was, part of the distributor’s plan to present the film as a comedy included removing all of the gore. Against Henenlotter’s wishes, the distributor cut out the bloodshed and released the film to a few theatres across the country as a midnight movie. According to the director, this release of a bloodless Basket Case was a failure. But then the legendary Joe Bob Briggs came into the picture.
The distributor planned to release Basket Case in Dallas, Texas, and since Joe Bob was already popular in the area for his “drive-in movie critic” newspaper articles, he was asked to host the premiere. That’s when Joe Bob revealed that he had already seen the movie – he was at the screening in Cannes, so the version he had seen was Henenlotter’s preferred cut, with the gore still intact. He refused to host the Dallas premiere unless he could show the uncut version. The distributor relented, and once the uncut Basket Case reached Texas, that’s when the film’s fortunes took a turn for the better. So basically, Basket Case was saved by Joe Bob Briggs.
The bloodless cut of the movie was replaced by the uncut version in all of the theatres that it had opened in, and people finally started going to see it. A theatre near where Henenlotter lived in New York had so much success showing Basket Case at midnight, they kept showing it for two and a half years straight. Despite this success, the distributor still went bankrupt, so Henenlotter took the film over to a different distributor that gave it a nationwide release, and not just midnight showings this time around. With more people having the chance to see it, Basket Case officially achieved cult status – which isn’t something Henenlotter was extremely enthusiastic about. The more viewers his movie was able to reach, the more embarrassed he became. He said, “I was horrified at the end result. One of the reasons why I did the movie was because I thought no one would really see it. I thought it would play on 42nd Street, no one would see it, and my sins would never be uncovered. If I thought I was smart enough to make a cult movie, I would have messed it up so much that it would be forgotten about.”
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: The filmmaker may be embarrassed that so many people have seen his work, but Basket Case absolutely deserves the cult following that it has. The dirt cheap, D-I-Y look and feel adds to its charm, and given that this was meant to be a tribute to 42nd Street, it wouldn’t have been appropriate for it to look glossy and pristine anyway.
At its core, the film tells a simple revenge tale, but the setting and characters make it unique. There have been a lot of revenge movies, but how many of those were about twin brothers who were born conjoined seeking revenge on the doctors who separated them? And no other movie out there has Belial – well, except for Basket Case 2. And Basket Case 3.
Kevin Van Hentenryck turned in a great performance as Duane, the brother who can actually make his way around the outside world and interact with regular people without terrifying them. There’s a major conflict within this character, as he loves and cares about his mutant brother, he wants to assist him on this mission of revenge, but at the same time it’s clear that Duane really wants to have a normal life. He wants to have friends. He wants to have a girlfriend, without Belial interfering with the relationship. Beverly Bonner and Terri Susan Smith both do great work as the characters Duane connects with the most in Manhattan. The friendship Duane develops with Bonner’s Casey is somewhat surprising, as you would usually expect the Casey character to be someone Duane has to be wary of. Instead, she’s one of the only people in Manhattan who has his back and doesn’t want to see him get ripped off.
Smith’s performance wouldn’t have fit into just any movie, but it’s pitch perfect for this one. She delivers comedic lines very well, but things take a dramatic turn the longer she’s around Duane. And then Sharon is put in a really horrible situation by the end of the film.
While those characters carry the majority of the running time, Belial emerges from his basket now and then to spice things up with murder and mayhem. Even though this character is only played by a puppet, Henenlotter still manages to make us understand where he’s coming from. He was treated as a freak from the moment he was born, so despised by his father that he was named after a demon. Duane and Belial didn’t want to be separated, their father demanded it and forced the twins to undergo a back-alley surgery that ended with Belial getting dumped in the trash. It’s no wonder he’s bloodthirsty and out for revenge. Once we understand Belial, Henenlotter also makes us just as conflicted about the character as Duane is. We appreciate when Belial claws somebody to death or slams their face into a bunch of scalpels, but we can also see that he needs to be taken out of the equation before he ruins Duane’s life with his jealousy and homicidal rage, not to mention the telepathic connection he torments his brother with.
BEST SCENE(S): Of course, most of the best scenes have Belial at the center of them, even if only part of him is being glimpsed in the scene, or if he’s barely moving. The most we see Belial move comes in an amazing stop-motion animated sequence. Left alone in the hotel room while Duane goes on a date with Sharon, Belial crawls out of his basket and wrecks the room in a fit of jealousy. Henenlotter animated this sequence himself, a job he found to be quite challenging because he didn’t have the patience to do it properly. Feeling that the sequence was turning out to be choppy and lousy, he got so frustrated that he stopped working on it and threw the reel of film across the living room in his apartment. He then just left the film on the floor of the living room for a couple months, to torture himself for making something that was so bad.
Thankfully, he eventually returned to the sequence and ended up putting it in the film, giving us one of its most entertaining scenes. This may not be the flawless work of Willis O’Brien or Ray Harryhausen, but it’s awesome to see Belial move around in stop-motion nonetheless.
PARTING SHOT: Obviously Henenlotter can be a harsh critic of his own work, and while he didn’t want a lot of people to see Basket Case, I hope his embarrassment has been replaced with pride in the long run. This film’s success and cult following is a great achievement for someone who put his movie together piece by piece as the money came in. Few filmmakers would have even attempted to bring something like Belial to the screen when they had so little cash and resources to work with, but Henenlotter forged ahead and brought us an unforgettable character in a movie that’s worth watching more than once.
When even the great Joe Bob Briggs has said that he could watch Basket Case a thousand times and not get tired of it, naming it the ultimate midnight movie, there’s no question that Henenlotter made something special here.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Videos!
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