The average person probably wouldn’t expect $3000 to go very far when it comes to making a film, but that’s all Scott Phillips had at hand when he was working on his feature directorial debut. The result was one of the best micro-budgeted movies of the last twenty years; the highly entertaining and strikingly unique zombie tale The Stink of Flesh.
Phillips had started dreaming of working in the movie industry after a mind-blowing viewing of the George A. Romero classic Night of the Living Dead when he was ten years old. He and his friend John Howard couldn’t get anyone else to help them with the Super 8 shorts they wanted to make when they were teenagers, but that didn’t stop them from shooting some by themselves. Eventually Phillips moved out to Los Angeles to pursue a screenwriting career – and while he was able to write the Mark Dacascos action movie Drive and a handful of Full Moon titles during that time, he also had a heartbreaking experience with a production company that was set up at a major studio. Once he was done working with that company, he was so disenchanted with the Hollywood system that he didn’t even enjoy watching movies anymore. Enter the hero of this story, his then-girlfriend Shannon Hale. She suggested that Phillips, who had moved back to his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico by then, could revitalize his passion for movies by making his own short film. With Hale producing, he did have a good time knocking out a 25 minute comedy short called Science Bastard. That short went over very well with the audience at a 2002 Bubonicon convention screening, where it caught the attention of an attendee named Gordon Garb. Garb offered to give Phillips $2000 to go toward the production of a feature film… and when you receive an offer like that, you start brainstorming ideas for a feature.
Due to his love for Night of the Living Dead, Phillips chose to make a zombie movie. If this were a decade or so later, genre fans might roll their eyes to hear that yet another low budget zombie movie was in the works. There have been so many zombie movies and TV shows made since this century began, many viewers have been feeling zombie fatigue for years. But Phillips was ahead of the curve on this one. The zombie resurgence hadn’t yet begun when he started plotting The Stink of Flesh; the film 28 Days Later, which kicked off the zombie revival despite the fact that some argue it’s an “infected people” movie instead of a zombie movie, hadn’t even made it into U.S. theatres. Which makes one element of The Stink of Flesh come off as being rather prescient. The fast-moving creatures in 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake would soon have movie-goers arguing over how quickly zombies should be able to move. Which are better, quick zombies or the slow shamblers of Romero? Phillips wrote a zombie story in which we get both. The Stink of Flesh takes place during a zombie apocalypse that began with slow-moving zombies, but lately there have been encounters with a more fast-moving variety, creatures that are referred to as hyperzombies. The inspiration behind the inclusion of hyperzombies was the 1980 Umberto Lenzi movie Nightmare City, also known as City of the Walking Dead. Another movie that stirs up “are they zombies or infected people?” debates.
When working on a small budget, it’s always smart to include as few locations in your story as possible, but Phillips didn’t want to just make another Night of the Living Dead knock-off about people being trapped in one location during a zombie outbreak. While The Stink of Flesh does take place primarily in one location (brought to the screen through footage shot at four different locations), the people inside don’t spend every minute worrying that zombies are going to come busting in. They’ve been living in the apocalypse for a while now, they know how to handle zombies… although those new hyperzombies are concerning. And while the zombie attack sequences are fun to watch, it’s the characters that Phillips populated the film’s primary location with that make The Stink of Flesh so great – and so different from any other zombie movie out there. Anyone can make Just Another Zombie Movie these days. The Stink of Flesh is a zombie movie that only could have come from the mind of Scott Phillips.
At an earlier time, Phillips had started writing and then abandoned a script for a zombie road movie. In that script, the characters were abducted by a man who was bringing people to his home to service his horny wife. This scenario had just been one part of a larger story then, but Phillips realized it could be expanded into a feature of its own. And that’s how we got the set-up for The Stink of Flesh. The opening scene introduces us to married couple Nathan and Dexy, and Dexy informs Nathan that she’s feeling “the ache” again. The strong sexual desire to bring other people into their bedroom. So Nathan has to go out into the wasteland to try to find someone who can satisfy his wife. This is why the film has the tagline “How do you lead an alternative lifestyle… when everybody’s dead?” Problem is, Nathan is starting to resent the fact that Dexy is always looking outside their marriage for pleasure. Many of the best zombie movies ever made have presented the idea that the zombies aren’t the biggest threats in the zombie apocalypse. The greatest threat to people trying to survive during a zombie outbreak are other people. Their emotions, their tempers, their selfishness. The characters in Night of the Living Dead might have survived if they had been able to reach a compromise in the “is the cellar safe or not?” argument. The characters in Dawn of the Dead are living their best life in the shopping mall, until a gang of bikers decide to raid the place. The cuckold / hotwife scenario in The Stink of Flesh is a brilliant addition to this type of zombie storytelling, because of course it’s going to lead to trouble when one of the participants is not happy about the situation. Especially since Nathan and Dexy’s home becomes quite crowded over the course of the film.
Phillips and his producer Hale were able to assemble an excellent cast for the movie, drawing from a pool of local talent, friends, and friends of friends. Ross Kelly and the mononymous Diva play Nathan and Dexy; Billy Garberina, Andrew Vellenoweth, and Science Bastard himself Devin O’Leary play a trio of soldiers who seek shelter in their home; Bryan Gallegos, the son of Garberina’s boss, plays a Spooky Kid who is taken in so Dexy can raise him up right; Kristin Hansen, the niece of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface Gunnar Hansen, plays one of the most exceptional characters, Dexy’s sister Sassy. Who has an odd way of participating in her sister’s bedroom activities, and has a drooling, parasitic twin on her torso. Only Scott Phillips would have thought to work a drooling, parasitic twin into a zombie story. There’s also Stephanie Leighs as a nude zombie Nathan keeps in his workshed, Tanith Fiedler, Bob Vardeman (who wrote a novelization of The Stink of Flesh), and Chris Vardeman as other survivors briefly encountered, Jeremy Owen as a Lucio Fulci tribute zombie, and Israel Wright as various other zombies.
The most difficult role to fill seems to have been the man Nathan captures to bring to Dexy, the badass zombie fighter Matool (named after a location in the Fulci movie Zombie). A character who was enhanced through suggestions made by the actor Phillips was hesitant to cast, Kurly Tlapoyawa, a pride fighter trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Phillips only wanted Tlapoyawa to be the fight choreographer on the movie, but Tlapoyawa was constantly asking to be cast as Matool - and was eventually able to convince Phillips that he was the right choice to play the character. The martial arts moves Matool displays, his weapon of choice (he likes to use a hammer and large nails to take down zombies), and the fact that he’s precious about the condition of his glasses, those are all things that Tlapoyawa brought to Matool. And the performance he delivered in the role makes Matool worthy of being named an iconic horror movie hero.
Much like Romero started rolling on Night of the Living Dead with a budget of just $6000 and then had to get more money as production went on, Phillips started filming The Stink of Flesh in the summer of 2003 with the hope that he could get it made with just the $2000 provided by Garb. But while Night of the Living Dead ended up costing more than $100,000, Phillips was able to finish The Stink of Flesh with an extra $1000 kicked in by O’Leary and cinematographer Richard Griffin. Making a movie with so little money was possible due to advancement in technology; The Stink of Flesh wasn’t shot on film, it was shot on mini-DV with a Canon XL-1 camera. But not every digitally shot, low budget movie looks as good as The Stink of Flesh does. Griffin worked wonders with that Canon XL-1 and the one light they had on set. Production value was also added through digital effects that VFX artist Steve Fong did for free, and the Unimog that friends let Phillips use as a military transport vehicle in the movie.
It’s very impressive to see what Phillips and his cohorts were able to accomplish on a $3000 budget, but truly the most impressive thing about The Stink of Flesh is the fact that Phillips was able to make a zombie movie that offers a different viewing experience than any other zombie movie out there. The zombie sub-genre has been exhausted in recent years, and yet this movie still stands out as something special. And it even, at the request of Gordon Garb, confirms that zombies do poop. Phillips has a distinctive style of storytelling that brought something fresh to this tale of the living, walking dead – and leaves the viewer wanting to hear more of his stories. The Stink of Flesh has yet to reach the eyes of as many horror fans as it deserves to be seen by (this re-release will help it reach more of them), but many who have seen it have been quite positive about it. The movie received praise from Sam Raimi collaborator Scott Spiegel (Evil Dead II, Intruder, Skinned Alive), and after director Mark Neveldine saw it he hired Kurly Tlapoyawa to do stuntwork and take on acting roles in his films Crank: High Voltage, Gamer, and The Vatican Tapes. Tlapoyawa worked steadily in the stunt department for several years.
The Stink of Flesh was so well-received, Phillips was given a “director for hire” gig soon after its release… but that went about as well as some of his more disappointing experiences in Hollywood. Thankfully, he rebounded with another great movie of his own with 2007’s Gimme Skelter, which features Gunnar Hansen in a memorable role. Phillips then decided to set aside the camera and put his indie filmmaking days behind him, focusing on writing novels instead. It’s disappointing that a film collector can’t fill a shelf with movies directed by Scott Phillips, but at least we still have access to his storytelling through the written word, and his novels are full of the same sort of cleverness, quirkiness, and madness he brought to The Stink of Flesh.
It is difficult to shake the hope that we’ll see more Scott Phillips movies someday, though. Just like it’s tough not to imagine that there are more stories to be told about Matool. You know, he’s probably still out there. Still surviving the zombie apocalypse. Still being a badass while protecting his glasses. And still hoping to get laid, which is tough to accomplish in a world of flesh-eating corpses.
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