Charles E. Sellier, Jr. - R.I.P.

CHARLES E. SELLIER, JR.

(11/19/1943 – 1/31/2011)

One of the most interesting and contradictory figures in the exploitation cinema history books, Sellier perfected the "four-walling" technique of film distribution while working for American National Enterprises and CVD Studio Center and later made millions for Sunn Classic Pictures as their senior v.p. and top producer. Even the Sunn films that were made without his involvement, like BROTHER OF THE WIND and CHARIOTS OF THE GODS?, continued to have theatrical life years after their initial releases thanks to his marketing ingenuity. It's been at least a quarter of a century since the T.O.S. crew tried to sit through a Sunn production, but we fondly recall the saturation TV advertising for their nature-oriented kiddie matinees and bullshit quasi-documentaries and still have the paperback tie-ins for every one of them (Sellier was a writer as well, and even penned the novelization of THE BOOGENS). To some, he's best known for THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GRIZZLY ADAMS (1974) and the television series that followed (1977-1978), while to others he'll be remembered as the man who made the notorious Santa Claus slasher flick SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984). Sellier passed away January 31st at age 67.

DRIBBLE (1979) -- Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Mystery Movie: DISCO SEXPOT (ca. 1979)

Marc Edward Heuck of The Projector Has Been Drinking inquired about this obscurity almost five years ago on AV Maniacs and the silence was deafening. We figured it was time to give it a second shot.

We know that it was actually made and finished, because here is a copyright entry for it:

Type of Work: Recorded Document
Document Number: V2693P067
Date of Recordation: 1991-09-26
Entire Copyright Document: V2693P067-070
Title: Disco sexpot.
Party 1: Estate of Jack Broder d.b.a. Standard Club, by Bill Broder.
Party 2: Wade Williams.

Below is an ad from a January 11, 1980 booking in Jackson, MS with the equally mysterious STAG PARTY.

Thanks to the "Anonymous" comment below, we know it also played a late show at the Carolyn Theater in Piggott, Arkansas the week of August 12, 1979.

Movie Ads of the Week: LISA AND THE DEVIL / THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM

Readers unfamiliar with the strange U.S. distribution history of Mario Bava's LISA AND THE DEVIL (1973) are encouraged to read the appropriate chapters in Tim Lucas' staggeringly thorough and possibly hernia-inducing tome Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark as well as Kevin Heffernan's essay "Art House or House of Exorcism? The Changing Distribution and Reception Contexts of Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil" (published in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, edited by Jeffrey Sconce). In a nutshell, most sources claim that Allied Artists sent LISA AND THE DEVIL directly to TV, while the reworked HOUSE OF EXORCISM cut was released to theaters by Peppercorn-Wormser Film Enterprises during the summer of 1976. Below we've posted a few ads as evidence for a revision: HOUSE OF EXORCISM landed at least one playdate as early as December 1975, while LISA AND THE DEVIL crept out a few weeks later and was still in circulation as of July '77. When Peppercorn-Wormser closed its doors in 1979, Nicholas M. Demetroules acquired HOUSE OF EXORCISM (along with WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? and MONDO MAGIC) and extended its theatrical lifespan by a few more years. LISA AND THE DEVIL, meanwhile, had been playing late-night TV since March 1978.

Naples, FL - December 17, 1975

Wisconsin Rapids, WI - January 14, 1976

Stroudsburg, PA - July 16, 1977

Bronx & Brooklyn, NY - October 1984

THE JOHNSONS and the Rewrite Blues

Amsterdam? The Amazon? Psychotic test-tube siblings? Xangadix, evil god of the Mahxitu Indians?!

"I watched it in Dutch and I watched it in English and I still don't quite get it," laughs screenwriter Rocco Simonelli, whose script The Johnson-Blues was the inspiration for Rudolf van den Berg's 1992 Dutch horror film THE JOHNSONS. "There's really not a word of our writing in there -- just the concept and some structural stuff."

Based on an original story by Simonelli's writing partner, Roy Frumkes, the Johnson-Blues script bears little resemblance to Leon de Winter's final draft for the finished film. Although set almost entirely in Manhattan, the Simonelli-Frumkes story begins in the mountains of upstate New York, where Greenwich Village artist Victoria Lucas is enjoying a weekend camping trip with her 13-year-old daughter Emalee. The fun is spoiled, however, when a monstrous, fur-clad mountain man stumbles upon their campsite and attempts to rape Emalee. Victoria decapitates him with a machete, incurring the wrath of his clan, the dreaded "Johnson-Blues" ("They all got blue eyes!" the local sheriff tells Victoria -- three pages before the kill-crazy inbreds shoot him full of arrows and burn the police station to the ground).

"And then the whole clan comes creeping out of the mountain to get revenge," Frumkes explains. "It's CROCODILE DUNDEE for the second act. They're going through Harlem, Central Park, Tavern on the Green -- it's like another world to them." Before arriving at Victoria and Emalee's 9th Street brownstone for a tense, STRAW DOGS-inspired finale, the murderous out-of-towners feast on snow monkeys in the Central Park Zoo, pose for photos with a life-size Ronald Reagan cutout and -- in the script's most outrageous scene -- bludgeon a few of New York's Finest to death with dildos in a Times Square porn emporium! "Just great, great stuff," Simonelli sighs. "We thought it would be so commercial."

Frumkes is no stranger to the genre, having written and produced the outlandish STREET TRASH and directed the George A. Romero behind-the-scenes classic DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD. Simonelli was one of the writers of the 1992 Mafia comedy ME AND THE MOB, featuring James Lorinz from FRANKENHOOKER and early turns by Sandra Bullock and Steve Buscemi.

The Johnson-Blues was born in 1988 at the School of Visual Arts, where Frumkes has been teaching courses in film production and screenwriting for over 30 years. "I had a Dutch student, Richard Abrams, whose father wanted to establish some kind of business so his son could stay [in the U.S.]," Frumkes reveals. "So they put $100,000 into a film development company. The goal was to develop two screenplays and not produce them." Frumkes had recently formed a writing partnership with Simonelli -- "the best screenwriting student I ever had" -- and the two scripts they developed together were The Substitute and The Johnson-Blues. "I wrote The Substitute, and Rocco wrote The Johnson-Blues," Frumkes notes.

"Roy's constantly pitching me ideas," Simonelli adds. "I said, 'That thing you told me about the Johnson-Blues sounds like something we could do.' So I ran with it, and made my own additions and changes."

At one point, the script was almost produced by a Canadian company on a budget of over $4 million, with Glenda Jackson as Victoria and Oliver Reed playing Unk, the leader of the bloodthirsty clan. "It breaks my heart that it didn't get made with them," Simonelli says. "The last time they worked together was WOMEN IN LOVE, right? And he was trying to kill her in that! We could've picked up 20 years later, and he's still trying!"

Abrams' company, R.A. Film Marketing Projects, dissolved after only one year, but settled with the two writers by returning The Substitute to them and keeping The Johnson-Blues. "They went back to Amsterdam, and I figured the thing would never get done," Frumkes says with a laugh. "The way it was written, it seemed to us that it could only take place in New York." (The Substitute was eventually produced and released in 1996.)

The two writers seem pleased with Rudolf van den Berg's version of The Johnsons, although Frumkes admits, "We felt the plotting was a little confused." "But we like the film," Simonelli quickly adds. "We have great fun with it, and I think the women are really very good, especially Esmée de la Bretonière. And visually, it's quite strong. I just don't understand all of it."

The writers have completed over a dozen screenplays together, including several in the horror genre. "We have One Bloody Christmas Eve, and one called The Carriers, which we jokingly refer to as NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD meets BABY BOOM," laughs Simonelli, who also hopes that The Johnson-Blues will someday be filmed the way he wrote it. "Who knows -- maybe this article will convince somebody to make the American version." -- Chris Poggiali

(Fangoria #174, July 1998)

"Slimetime" by Steve Puchalski

"We sleaze to please" was the motto of Steve Puchalski's late, lamented Slimetime newsletter, which emerged from upstate New York in 1986, enjoyed a brief but memorable three-year run and then collapsed under circumstances too complicated (and strange) to discuss here. Puchalski bounced back a year later with the similar but more substantial Shock Cinema, a magazine he still publishes to this day, but what became of Slimetime? Thanks to the folks at Critical Vision, most of the material from those 27 exciting issues has been packed into an entertaining guidebook guaranteed to sleaze 'n' please new generations of junk film junkies.

A six- to 12-page schlock cinema review 'zine, printed on swamp-green paper and covering all forms of fringe film nastiness, Slimetime came across like a great big middle finger in the face of the sanitized, Reganized sensibilities of the mid-1980s. While some of the crudeness and spontaneity of the newsletter has been lost in the translation, the strong writing still remains; Puchalski's keen observations and sharp wit cut right to the bone in a fast, furious, achingly funny style.

The final summation on BUMMER!: "One vomit scene does not a schlock film make."

How about Jerry Lewis' THE NUTTY PROFESSOR? "Sure, it ain't Kubrick, but an entire nation of snail-eaters can't be all wrong."

Let's not forget GIRLS SCHOOL SCREAMERS: "...it's probably more fun than flossing your teeth with razor wire."

And pity the has-been actors appearing in some of these movies, for they have nowhere to hide in the pages of Slimetime (while discussing SATAN'S SADISTS, Puchalski points out that "A beer-bloated Russ Tamblyn...spends most of the movie with a floppy hat pulled down over his face -- probably so the guys at the Welfare Office won't recognize him and cut off his monthly checks." Ouch!

In addition to the reviews (over 400 of them), the publishers have included three well-written, informative essays that originally appeared in the British magazine Shock Xpress, covering biker, blaxploitation and LSD movies. Nicely illustrated with ad mats and rare newspaper clippings, Slimetime -- in book form -- is entertaining enough to be read cover to cover, like a big, 200-page issue of the 'zine itself. It's highly recommended...and certainly more fun than flossing your teeth with razor wire. -- Chris Poggiali

(Fangoria #162, May 1997)

"Bleeding for the Mob" in EYES ARE UPON YOU (a.k.a. DEMON LUST)

Pulp novelist James M. Cain once wrote, “True beauty has terror in it,” but none of his femme fatales were quite as terrifying as Amanda, the mysterious woman who enters EYES ARE UPON YOU at the 35-minute mark and turns a fairly standard crime story into a blood-soaked tale of horror.

Thaddeus J. Pipon’s offbeat screenplay starts off with best friends Tony (Edward Lee Vincent) and Nick (Zander Teller) and their half-baked efforts to raise the $10,000 needed to settle some outstanding debts with big-time mobster Sonny Morocco (Sam Nicotero). Meanwhile, in another part of town, a mentally retarded man named Cecil (Harold Keller) has been using his new telescope to spy on the wealthy and beautiful Amanda (Brinke Stevens), who lives across the street and is actually a demon who tears apart her lovers during sex.

Somehow, these two plots intersect.

“I haven’t seen many independent horror movies, but it seems to me that this one has a slightly more sophisticated storyline than some of the others out there,” says first-time director David A. Goldberg, who shot EYES ARE UPON YOU in Pittsburgh in 1996 on a budget of just under $150,000. Goldberg, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Filmmakers, had been operating his own video business, taping special events and making industrial videos, when his friends Pipon and Anthony Cuda started talking about making a movie. “It was actually their idea to do it, and when they told me about it…I kind of took it over,” Goldberg laughs. “But we all had a different specialty that we brought to it. Thaddeus had been working on the script, Anthony has always been into the special effects and makeup, I had some money to put in – the timing just seemed right.”

That is, until Old Man Winter joined the team. Filming started in late January, but dragged on until August because of the weather. “It was the longest winter of all time,” Goldberg groans. “It sort of broke mid-April, and we were able to do our first outside shoot, but a week later it was snowing again. Once we got out there, though, everything fell into place.

Although the filmmakers consider EYES ARE UPON YOU to be primarily a crime thriller with some horrific elements, the cast features several names familiar to the horror genre. “Brinke was at a comic book convention, and our director of photography (Joseph Robert Jobe) wanted to do a photo shoot with her – and this was about halfway through the shooting of the movie,” Goldberg recalls. “Her part hadn’t really been cast yet. We were sort of holding out for a big name, trying to see who we could come up with, and it turned out that she was interested in doing it.”

Horror fans will no doubt be surprised to see Nicotero, uncle of KNB FX wizard Greg Nicotero, playing mobster Sonny Morocco. But his lineage, it turns out, had nothing to do with his involvement in the project. “Sam is a local actor, and he had sent in his head shot when we were holding auditions,” Goldberg explains. “He looked like a good mob boss, so that was it.”

Thanks to his background in makeup FX, Cuda was able to land Pittsburgh’s very own Tom Savini for a substantial supporting role. He plays Eddie “The Goose” Rao, a sadistic henchman who tortures Nick with a yo-yo (!). “Tom was great,” says Goldberg. “Probably more than anybody, he had a lot of suggestions as far as different ways to shoot things. Really good suggestions.”

Despite the presence of Stevens and Savini in the cast, EYES ARE UPON YOU remained unreleased until the summer of 2001, when it debuted on home video (from E.I.) under the title DEMON LUST. The DVD appeared in 2005 and is still available for purchase from the E.I./Alternative Cinema website. It contains outtakes and a featurette titled DEMON FAMILIARS, starring Stevens "in her sexiest role to date!" -- Chris Poggiali

(Fangoria #165, August 1997)