“These days, THE SENTINEL has found its place in horror film history and is almost considered a respectable work. But when I met MICHAEL WINNER in 2009, when he was primarily making his living as one of London’s pre-eminent food critics, being a fan of THE SENTINEL was a lonely sort of love. Reaching out to Michael about the film for a book I was writing, I found him charming and open to speaking about both the film and all of his many wonderful adventures in cinema. Simply put, I adored him. Months later, he mailed me a copy of his autobiography, the delightful Winner Takes All: A Life of Sorts, which I still cite as my favorite account of making movies, one that captured Winner’s ‘voice’ and breezy love of art, food and life. We stayed in touch right up until his death …”
CHRIS ALEXANDER: Let’s get right to the point: CECIL B. DEMENTED has just gotten better with the passage of time.
JOHN WATERS: I agree, and CECIL is the one I always pick when I have to appear somewhere because I really like it too.
ALEXANDER: Do you think it was a bit ahead of its time? Certainly, the critics weren’t receptive to it, generally speaking.
WATERS: The critics weren’t kind to any of my movies in the beginning!
ALEXANDER: So negative reviews have never really bothered you?
WATERS: I always read reviews, I always wanted to get good ones and the bad ones are the ones you remember. But you know, in the beginning I built a career on bad reviews. But it was a different time; it was “us versus them”. The critics then were all straight, and that didn’t mean sexually, that meant drug wise. Back then, the bad reviews from the square critics really helped. Now, there are no critics stupid enough to give me that …
“Right from the first scene [of NIGHT PATROL], we know we’re in a weird world. We know that something is wrong. Even the opening titles seem cheap and sleazy. Like a Crown International drive-in flick, generic and style-free. The first strains of Carl Stewart’s theme song LAPD, with its reggae-informed beat, pops onto the soundtrack and one notices that Stewart must have been a realllllly big Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry fan. Because if I didn’t know better, I would have thought that this WAS a vintage Roxy track, it’s that good of a forgery. And if you groove on it, I’ve got some great news for you: it repeats over almost every inch of the damn movie! …”
“When we speak of possession-centric horror films, attention will forever turn to THE EXORCIST and with very good reason. It’s the gold standard of sophisticated, intelligent, and truly shocking and scary horror cinema and its international success dictated that scores of imitators would follow in its wake. Some were excellent, some were dire, and some were just plain odd. Nestled among these imitators sits 1974’s lurid blaxploitation effort ABBY, a shocker that’s not quite worthy of erasing William Friedkin’s masterpiece from your memory, but is most assuredly a magnificent little picture, a movie that openly steals from its blockbuster source but has more than enough distinction and eccentricity to function as its own entity …”
CHRIS ALEXANDER: The movie NOSFERATU IN VENICE is a beautiful but flawed film. Is it true you directed some of it? Can you tell us about your experiences on that film?
LUIGI COZZI: I was hired as supervisor for the special visual effects of NOSFERATU IN VENICE. Once the shooting started, I was also asked to act as second unit director, as there was a great delay in the working schedule, mostly due to KLAUS KINSKI’s crazy behavior. So, I ended up directing the visual effects and just a few minor scenes in order to reduce the strong schedule delays. As a matter of fact, the movie wrapped shooting when still about one third of the script had not yet been shot …
“When Roy Ward Baker’s bizarre, scary and charming 1981 horror anthology THE MONSTER CLUB came out, the sort of thrills it was peddling were old hat. After THE EXORCIST, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13th, younger horror fans wanted no part of their father’s horror movies and actors like Vincent Price and John Carradine just didn’t speak to that generation’s hunger for violence, sex and more visceral and nihilistic entertainments. Because of that, THE MONSTER CLUB was a box office dud and critics weren’t kind. But, like with most out-of-step horror pictures, time has been good to THE MONSTER CLUB and a viewing today is almost certain to rock your world …”
“LARRY COHEN was one of the greatest writers for cinema full stop, always showing a sure hand and blending eccentric, believable characterizations, arcane situations, black humor, social commentary, doses of potent violence and — when he’s playing in that sandbox — visceral horror. But in IT’S ALIVE, which in many ways was Cohen’s breakthrough film, his tapping in to the primordial ooze of what it means to be a parent, of the fear and joy of the birth process and the elemental ties we have to whatever child emerges from the womb, is profound. And the ways in which he perverts those emotions and instincts into a blood-spattered nightmare are still profoundly shocking …”
“As GEORGE [A. ROMERO] loved to tell me, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD instantly made him an ‘above the credits guy‘ and contractually, he always had final cut. Every movie he made, even the adaptations of other people’s works, they were his movies. Made his way. With his people. His written words. His politics. His humor. His love of film, music, art. His cynicism. His joy. His spirit …”
The author’s friendship with Romero was immortalized in sculpted resin.
WILLIAM CRAIN: Oh, we found the place up in Laurel Canyon. That community is still there, but there are houses just off of Laurel Canyon way at the top and we found an old one and yeah, we surveyed that, looked around it and it looked perfect.
CHRIS ALEXANDER: CHARLES MACAULEY was one helluva Dracula…
CRAIN: He sure was. I’ll never forget when he came in to my office to talk about doing [BLACULA]. He walks in dressed to the nines. I mean immaculate, in a slick black suit, hair perfect. He sits down and pulls out a gold cigarette case and pulls out a cigarette and lights it and says “Okay William, what do you got for me” [laughs]. He was unbelievable. The real deal …
CHRIS ALEXANDER: When you were a kid and discovered the wild world of the fantastic, things weren’t like they are now. What was fan culture like then?
GENE SIMMONS: Things were completely different. I was a child of obsession and in America those obsessions became comic books, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Castle of Frankenstein and horror movies on television. But understand, we had very outlets to share that love, not like today. We had some fanzines, and I even published six of my own for a while. There were a few conventions out there too. There was Lunacon, and that was more for monster and science fiction fans with only a small portion of comic book content. I remember Lunacons as being very literate and on occasion Isaac Asimov would speak at them. You know, many years later, I found out Asimov was my neighbour …
CHRIS ALEXANDER: So, you know that in some circles, PSYCHOMANIA is considered the epitome of cool.
NICKY HENSON: Cool? [laughs] I can’t believe that, I don’t think it was ever cool! But I’m astonished at its popularity, really. It’s just bizarre that I now get invites to go to universities and talk to their film societies about it.
ALEXANDER: Well, it was written by two ex-patriot Communist sympathizers. And if you really dig, there IS subtext there…
HENSON: There is? …
“But in recent years, the western has returned to the modern film and television landscape. Witness contemporary pictures like BONE TOMAHAWK, HOSTILES, and HBO’s perverse, profound, mutation of the genre with their ultra-violent, hyper-sexual remount of Michael Crichton’s WESTWORLD. […] GUY PEARCE is one of the stars of BRIMSTONE albeit in a radically different kind of role. Here, he’s a steroidal, possibly supernatural riff on Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER by way of Vincent Price’s Matthew Hopkins in WITCHFINDER GENERAL; a mad, sadistic and hypocritical sadist who uses his position to manipulate and pervert the natural world and redefine its rules to suit his nature …”
“I can vividly remember the first time I met PAUL NASCHY.
“I was a kid, maybe twelve, and, as I did in those days, I opted to stay up all-night, watching and videotaping every class of horror related film or show that filtered from my cathode-spitting screen. Perusing the TV guide with highlighter in hand, I ran my yellow ink across a 4:15am screening on local Toronto channel CFTO of something called DRACULA’S GREAT LOVE starring all kinds of Spanish-sounding people I’d never heard of.
“I stayed up. I watched. And was profoundly affected …”
“CONTAMINATION is positively swimming in references to classic fantasy filmmaking, with a narrative thrust that echoes INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and elements of the Hammer Studios Quatermass movie ENEMY FROM SPACE woven into the story, while also favoring two-fisted action and Ian Fleming-esque derring-do to propel it (and with the dashing Ian McCulloch as its lead, the movie certainly feels like a dump bin James Bond picture remade by a wide-eyed monster kid) …”
CHRIS ALEXANDER: How did you end up in New York though? Did you have to audition for MANIAC?
CAROLINE MUNRO: God no, not at all. What happened was that I was in New York doing — I think — a Fangoria convention and that’s where I met William Lustig. Tom Savini was there too. So, JOE SPINELL came by and reconnected with me and took me out for dinner. He told me that Italian actress Daria Nicolodi was supposed to play Anna D’Antoni and had to drop out of the film and they were now struggling to find someone to play the part. They were scheduled to start shooting on Monday and this was, I think, Saturday …
Yango’s Gun artwork (top) by L Jamal Walton
