Greetings, all. Ambush Bug here with a special two part AICN HORROR: ZOMBIES & SHARKS column focusing on the uber-fun ode to drive in and grindhouse horror features, CHILLERAMA. I’ll be talking with the fourth writer/director Tim Sullivan tomorrow, but first, here’s a conversation I had with CHILLERAMA creators Adam Rifkin (DETROIT ROCK CITY), Adam Green (HATCHET, FROZEN), and Joe Lynch (WRONG TURN 2, KNIGHTS OF BADASSDOM). But even before that, to add a bit of context, just in case you missed it in last week’s AICN HORROR column, here’s my review of the film.
New this week on DVD! CHILLERAMA (2011)
Directed and written by Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Adam Rifkin & Tim SullivanFind out more about the film here!
Reviewed by Ambush Bug
In the great tradition of such anthology films as CREEPSHOW and TWILIGHT ZONE, and even TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE and TALES FROM THE HOOD, CHILLERAMA takes some of horror’s freshest new voices and gives them a half hour to have a hell of a good time with. The film is not absolutely perfect, but hell, no anthology is. Even with CREEPSHOW, we have to sit through the Stephen King moss meteor segment. But the difference between CHILLERAMA and its predecessors is that the passion and creativity is evident in each segment. The route taken with this film definitely steers more towards gross out humor and over the top horror. The acting, though over the top, is well done, and the effects give a deep, low embrace to the horror films of yesteryear by being as practical and as rudimentary as they come. I think right about the time I wanted to go to the drive in to see creature features, the drive in died in America. Very sad, really. But CHILLERAMA serves as a love letter to that drive in experience with each short film serving as a snapshot of a different era in horror.
WADZILLAWritten & Directed by Adam Rifkin
Starring Adam Rifkin, Ray Wise, Sarah Mutch, Eric Roberts
WADZILLA is the first segment of the film and serves as an ode to classic Harryhausen monster films such as THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. I loved this segment which was directed, written, and stars Adam Rifkin (with acting chops I found quite admirable) as mild-mannered Miles Munson, a bumbling man with a low sperm count who goes to see quack doctor Ray Wise for a cure. The cure is a special experimental drug that goes horribly, horribly wrong as Miles’ sperm count doesn’t increase, but the size of his sperm sure does. Though this film has a grindhousey feel to it, it still embraces the genre of the monster run amok creature feature as toy tanks led by battalion leader Eric Roberts fire missiles at the toothy and testy teste-batter which once ejaculated, grows to monstrous proportions, sprouts teeth, and starts eating people. Though the tone is pure raunch, there are a lot of gross out laughs to be had with this segment. Rifkin proves that he is an accomplished filmmaker when it comes to slapstick. The segment almost reminds me of old Raimi, which if I was to choose a Raimi style, I’ll prefer that to Nu Raimi any old day. Not to be taken seriously, WADZILLA packs a full gross load of cartoony, potty-humorous fun right up to its splattery “climax”.
I WAS A TEENAGE WEREBEARWritten & Directed by Tim Sullivan
Starring Sean Paul Lockheart, Anton Troy, Lin Shaye, Gabby West
Out of all of the tales told in CHILLERAMA, I WAS A TEENAGE WEREBEAR feels like the most developed. Whereas others are treated with a heavy comedic hand, this short definitely has laughs, but also carries a complex message beneath its goofy exterior. Lauding John Waters or Greg Araki as much as it does the teen angst-monster tales of old like I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN and I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, Tim Sullivan tells a story of a man not only deciding is he is gay or straight, but also what kind of gay man he will come out as. Like Waters and Araki’s films, the innuendo is over the top, but the message here is somewhat subtle in the subtext of whether or not to walk out of the closet with one’s head held high or come screaming out like a banshee. Though the effects are as crude as some of the humor, this thirty minute segment seemed to be the one tale in this anthology that would actually make it as a full feature film and transcends a lot of past the more humorous fare in the other segments. With catchy songs straight out of the BEACH BLANKET BINGO and GREASE, I found Sullivan’s segment to be a pleasant surprise.
DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEINWritten & Directed by Adam Green
Starring Joel David Moore, Kristina Klebe, Kane Hodder
The combination of the over the top humor, the winks and nods to bad filmmaking, Joel David Moore’s impromptu German phrasings, and Kane Hodder’s groovy dance sequence secures Adam Green’s DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEIN as my absolute favorite segment of the film. I watched and rewatched this gut-burstingly funny segment twice, since in the first viewing, I didn’t realize Joel David Moore is making up German words rather than speaking actual German dialog, and laughed till shit jiggled both times. Some of the gags in this segment are pure gold, though some have been seen before in other comedies, but Green still knocks this one out of the park. The fact that this is Kane Hodder under the ridiculous Meshuggeneh Monster make-up gives me new found respect for the former Jason Voorhees. Though I felt I WAS A TEENAGE WEREBEAR could have been a feature, DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEIN feels just the right length, and the ending will have you laughing your ass off. Fun, fun stuff. More joke than horror, but still, great fun.
ZOM B-MOVIEWritten & Directed by Joe Lynch
Starring Corey Jones, Kaili Thorne, Cecil Kaufman, Brendan McReary
Joe Lynch has the unfortunate task of tying this whole thing together and he does so with a pretty capable hand, despite the fact that the narrative of this wraparound story is interrupted by the others. The surrounding story of a closing drive-in has all of the things we love about drive-in; crotchety but lovable drive in owner Cecil (OFFICE SPACE) Kaufman, star crossed lovers, concession stand romance, and of course zombies, Zombies, ZOMBIES. Some of the momentum of his story is stalled in the earlier segments to make room for the three features by his colleagues that are being shown on the giant drive in screen, but Lynch goes for broke once the zombies start advancing and he really seems to get into gear in the final scenes as the drive-in turns into the setting for a zombie apocalypse. Again, practical effects make this all the more enjoyable. Lynch is responsible for making this a seamless film rather than a jarring switch from one director to the next and he is very successful in doing so. His DEATHICATION trailer is as hilarious as it is disgusting, with poop used in ways that you’ve never imagined. It’s a heinously funny sequence you can’t unsee despite how many Drano to eyeball rinsings I performed.
Though not all of the humor hits its mark, this film, which showers itself in bad taste and pridefully parades around in it, is something to be admired. Films like these don’t happen often and as a fan of the anthology, I hope this one is successful enough to spawn a sequel. Though the brow is low and the tongues are firmly planted in cheeks in CHILLERAMA, you’re definitely going to have a lot of fun watching it.
Now let’s see what both Adams [Green & Rifkin] and Joe Lynch had to say about CHILLERAMA when I had a chance to interview them a few days ago…AMBUSH BUG (BUG): Adam [Rifkin], I didn’t know you were going to join us today, so it’s great having you here too. Thanks to all of you guys for meeting today and talking about CHILLERAMA. Let’s go around, how about each of you guys…can you guys talk a little bit about your contribution to the anthology?
ADAM RIFKIN (AR): Yeah, why don’t I start off and just tell you a little bit about how it got going, then I’ll give you a little recap of mine.
BUG: Okay.
AR: About 12 years ago I was directing a movie in Toronto called DETROIT ROCK CITY and one of the producers of that movie was Tim Sullivan and we met on that movie and when we were hanging out we kind of bonded initially over a mutual love of B movies, scary movies, horror movies, genre movies, grindhouse movies, essentially drive in movies and the idea at that time was hatched to do an anthology film--which you don’t see very often anymore, either--to do an anthology film that is an homage to a century of B movies.
So we wanted to do four individual short films and each one would be an homage to a different era of B movie. We got very excited about doing the movie and we came up with the four ideas for the four individual shorts and then promptly forgot about it for about ten years and then about two years ago we met Adam Green and Joe Lynch and the four of us started hanging out and having dinners together and bonding ourselves, the four of us, over our mutual love of B movies and horror movies and we started telling these guys about this idea we had way back when for CHILLERAMA.They got excited about it, we all got excited about how excited they were about it and because everybody was excited we decided “Let’s, the four of us, make this movie right now. Let’s roll up our sleeves. This is the right group. This is the right time. Let’s do it.” So we divvied out t he four movies. Adam Green was given THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEIN and he’ll tell you about that in a minute, but he was basically given that title because he’s Jewish and we thought it would be the least offensive if he did that movie. I’m Jewish too, so I was allowed to come up with the title, but he’s Jewish and he’s the one who was supposed to make it.
Tim was always going to do the teen angst movie--you know, the movie that screams of the teen angst movies of the 50’s and 60’s and at that time it was going to be a vampire movie. It was Adam and Joe that came up with the idea of a “werebear” and we thought that was hilarious, so instead of a gay angsty teenage vampire, it became a gay angsty teenage werewolf movie. I always loved the genre where a giant monster attacks the city movies, so I picked WADZILLA.Joe then was of course handed with everything else, which was the zombie movie, the lead in to the zombie movie, the wrap around between all of the other movies, and he basically got fucked, but you know he did a fantastic job.
BUG: He was the glue that kept it all together, right?
AR: He is the glue that kept it all together. My movie, WADZILLA, is a send up of the atomic era 1950’s giant monster movies that were so common after WWII when everybody was panicked about this new atomic age and I always thought to myself, “It would be really cool to have a giant monster attacking New York, but I want this movie to be funny. What would be a funny monster to attack New York?” I thought “Well, a giant sperm might be funny. I’ve never seen that before.” And so that’s really pretty much how that came about, so it was really just all about making the most ridiculous, most outrageous giant sperm movie I could think of.”
JOE LYNCH (JL): One of the things that really sold us was Rifkin’s got one hell of a knack for Photoshop, so one of the times that we first met and first started talking about this project, Adam had fashioned fake movie posters and this is actually even before that whole like retro “Let’s put a couple of creases in the poster to make it seem cool and retro and use old 70’s kind of fonts,” Rifkin was doing this well before that and the posters he made for WADZILLA…one look at it and you’re like “I want to see this.” Since we were talking about our love for B movies and love for the drive in experience…I don’t know, where are you from?BUG: I live in Chicago.
JL: Okay, I don’t know if you guys have as many repertoire theaters as like out in LA or in New York, but when you go to these all night screenings or the grindhouse screenings at The New Beverly and stuff, it’s like that feeling of that communal experience that we wanted to kind of tap into. When we saw the posters we were sitting there going “Yeah, I want to see every one of these movies at The New Beverly at midnight.” They were great. They were a really good selling piece for Adam and I to kind of come in going “Alright, these guys know what they want to do” and also when Ariescope, the production company that went out with it to get the money, they used it as a selling tool as well, which was great. But yeah, a giant sperm having sex with the Statue of Liberty? Come on, that just screams “tent pole release” on 1,500 screens.
BUG: (laughs) Definitely…and Adam [Green], how about you? How did you become involved in this and how did you react to being given THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEIN? ADAM GREEN: When we first talked about it, my original reaction and actually Joe’s as well was to say “This sounds like a lot of fun, but no.” Only because when you work in this genre, literally everybody wants to make a CREEPSHOW or a TWILIGHT ZONE anthology. Everybody talks about “We should get together and make an anthology” and in theory it sounds like fun, but you just know it’s going to be a hassle and then the other thing is “Well, what’s going to be different about it? If it’s just four random short films thrown together…I could just make my own short film and put it on my website and get like a million views. I don’t need to go through this…” But the fact that Adam and Tim had the whole celebration of the century of cinema idea, they already had the posters and the idea of the wrap around that were going to tie it all together. There was something unique there. I love making short films, so after some more consideration I said “Okay,” then they said “Then you should do THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEIN,” I was scared shitless, because it’s like…I’ve heard that joke before. I think it’s actually been around since like the 50’s, but “How do you make a movie out of that?” I’m not into the whole being offensive for being offensive thing and I was very scared, but quickly I came up with the idea of “Alright, I’m going to do a Universal monster movie. It’s going to be all in German. It’s going to be a foreign film. I’m going to hire all German actors.”
That’s when the idea first came up, “I’m going to hire Joel David Moore who I love to work with to be Hitler and the whole thing is that I’m not going to teach him any German whatsoever and he’s just going to try winging his way through his performance” and it’s a 19 minute short film making fun of Hitler and there’s no reference to concentration camps. There’s nothing serious about the war, so I was much more comfortable with it. Mel Brooks and some of the AIRPLANE movies, those were my favorite comedies and I come from comedy. I was a stand up comedian. I was a TV comedy writer before all of the movie stuff happened for me. It was very good to get back to that and just make it a straight comedy and I think out of all of Joe and mine’s probably least offensive even though it probably has the most questionable title. I think people are going to be like “DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEIN? I’m going to be offended by that” and then shockingly and ironically enough it’s the one that is like the most sweetened and good natured. So far we’ve shown it overseas and stuff. Germany fucking loves THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEIN. We went into Germany thinking I was going to be leaving alone, but yeah the only people that have really not liked it haven’t seen it--they just on principle are like “No, I’m not watching that one.”BUG: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask. Has there been any outcry from the Jewish community or anything like that because of the film?
AG: No. I think anybody who hears the title and gets concerned and just looks at what the log line is and what it actually is about…they laugh. I mean, no self-respecting Jewish person is going to get offended by somebody who plays the part of Hitler for 20 minutes. You’re going to get offended why? Because we made fun of the most evil person of all time for 20 minutes? I was very careful with the script that…there are a lot of obvious jokes you could draw from and go to the well with something like this and I purposely didn’t. I think the only one that I was a little wary of was when after Hitler killed the Frank family he picks up a journal and handed it to one of his soldiers and says “Here, write some depressing stuff in this book. We’ll sell it after the war and make millions.”AR: And that gets the biggest laugh.
AG: The joke isn’t making fun of what happened. The joke is that whole neo-nazi thing how they still try to say it didn’t really happen, which is unbelievable. But yeah, laughter is the best way to heal and there’s nothing funny about the Holocaust or Hitler, but if I as a Jewish person spend 19 minutes making him into a clown and taking the piss out of him, there is a little healing in that and it is a little empowering. Even for the German audiences that saw when Hitler gets his comeuppance at the end, they all cheered and clapped and you know it’s a part of their history that they obviously wished never happened and they are embarrassed by and they hate him too. I don’t really have any fear about somebody being offended by my segment. The other ones…(laughs).
AR: What’s funny about Green’s is just the fact that this really takes the piss out of Hitler by making him speak gibberish. One of the greatest things about this movie has been that we have been able to travel all over the world with it and see different cultures react to it and at first when we showed at Comic Con and we showed at a couple places in the States, it takes a couple of minutes for the audience to kind of get that he’s not speaking German. When you start hearing “Osh, Osh kosh bigosh” and Jedi references you’re going “Okay, this guy is clearly making a spoof of it.” When we showed it in Germany, the second he opened his mouth everybody started cheering, because they got the joke immediately.AG: The behind the scenes on the DVD has like a 25 minute segment on ANNE FRANENSTEIN, but a lot of it is devoted to the process of making it, like all of the actors involved and the level of respect that we had to be for the fact that we were trying to make a comedy about one of the worst tragedies that’s ever happened, which is really well put together. I was very happy with it when I saw it, how it all came together. Our back story in making the movie…what Joel Moore and I talked about was this actor was originally an amazing actor hired to play Hitler in this movie and he quit the day of production, so they grabbed a gaffer who just kept saying “But I don’t speak German!” And they said, “Just wing it. Just do it.” So this guy got thrust into this role that he was not prepared to play. So none of that is really in the movie, but that was our back story kind of going into it and I think after all of the stuff that Joel has done from AVATAR to TV work to Happy Madison stuff, I think this is the funniest thing he’s ever done and it’s actually a very hard performance to pull off.
BUG: Yeah, it is really great. Back to WADZILLA and even in ZOM-B-MOVIE and really all of them, they really do have rudimentary kind of special effects and I don’t think there’s CGI…it looks like it was used in the way those films were filmed at the time. Was that done out of necessity of budget or was that done out of just respect for the original sort of material? AR: You know what? I’m going to answer that question first, because then I have to actually unfortunately jump. I actually start shooting tomorrow morning and I’ve got an art department screening, so I’ll need to get off the phone.
BUG: Sure, okay.
AR: So the intention was always right from the beginning to do all of the special effects old school style. I wanted all of the WADZILLA effects to be stop motion just like MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, just like THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. I wanted to really embrace that old fashioned special effects technology and that’s why I went directly to the Chiodo Brothers, who are famous for KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE and a host of other movies, and they are awesome lovers of this kind of movie and this era of movie and this genre and they are really, really great at stop motion animation and they are one of the few places that really still do it and do it well and love to do it and I knew that they would bring so much personality to the Wadzilla character if I were to be able to put that character in their hands. I told them when I first called them, I said “There’s no money. This is all just a labor of love for everybody involved, but if you love the genre and you want to have some fun, we would love for you to be a part of it.” They read it and they said, “We are totally in. No questions asked. Whatever the money is that you have to spend we will make it work” and all of the effects were done in the same styles that KING KONG was done, stop motion animation with one little picture at a time.
BUG: Great. Well, thanks a lot, Adam. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.AR: Thanks again. Bye guys.
[Rifkin gets off the line.]
BUG: How about with ZOM-B-MOVIE? Joe, what were some of the toughest effects to do in that one? You had a lot of practical effects with those segments.
JL: Yeah, again that was something that we all stressed again “The more that we can implement as much practical effects, especially when it came to the gore, the better.” I’m not a big fan of CG blood, but it will get there at some point. Someone’s going to create the right lighting program to make it look really good, but for now especially since we are homaging older films that all had to deal production-wise with the blood, the clean up, the reset, you know, it’s a messy process even though we were extremely fast doing ten pages a day. I literally at one point had four filming units going at the same time at the drive in, so it was like an effects unit, two acting units, and an insert unit and being able to double all of this stuff and deal with hundreds of extras…well, not hundreds, but we made it look like a hundred all in zombie makeup and the blood. We wanted to keep it as gooey and as fresh as possible.
Now there are maybe three or four digital shots in the film that deal with blood, but those are only because like there’s this shot in the film where the camera literally attaches itself to one of the main characters as they are running through the drive in and I’m like to be able to setup the camera rig and do all of the practical effects that I want to do in one take…“I have half an hour to do this huge setup? Yeah, that’s not going to happen”, so thankfully Jason Miller who is one of the producers on the film who has worked with Ariescope before and also has his own effects company called Skull Tree, he helped me out in figuring out the ways that we could make all of those digital blood shots look real and a lot of it is done with the lighting, but other than those instances we kept it as gooey as possible. There was a lot of cleanup at the drive in afterwards…again, nothing beats the real thing.BUG: Yeah, definitely. Adam, how tough was it to get Kane Hodder to dance at the end of your segment?
AD: (laughs) Kane at this point really trusts me implicitly and if I tell him something is going to be funny or something is going to be sad or whatever it is, he believes me enough just to go for it and on the behind the scenes, the making of, you see a little bit where I’m teaching him how to do that dance, but he was really excited to do it. I think Kane, in his career, he’s sort of getting over the whole like “I’m so tough I could beat the shit out of you, look at how awesome I am” thing and he’s much more into showing everybody what he can really do. I mean, in HATCHET 1 when he got to get out of the makeup and actually cry on screen, now he’s like the leading role in a lot of movies and he’s getting to do comedy, he’s getting to do drama…he’s done sex scenes. He’s done a dance number…he’s really started coming into his own when a lot of people at his point in his career would sort of be coming a relic on the convention circuit, he is really just getting started. I love that he dances at the end like that. I thought it was hilarious.JL: And what’s great about that moment too, just when you see it in the theater, is that one of the really smart choices I think Adam had on the film was to give it that sound mix quality that sounds very tinny and feels like an old film, but then in that one moment and we didn’t really get to experience this until we should a test screening at Comic Con which was a great screening to have since it really helped us shape the movie even more, but the moment when the music soundtrack goes from the very tinny sound, almost through like a cardboard box in to the full 5.1 mix like we started hearing people clapping and everything…we looked around and the enter audience was clapping along to it. There was just this wonderful boisterous sense of fun that everybody got out of this moment and if Kane didn’t bring his all and look like he was having fun, I think the audience would have laughed more at it than with it.
BUG: Definitely. Well, I was going to ask you guys about that. You guys have been touring around the country promoting CHILLERAMA; what’s it been like sitting in the audience and experiencing this the way it’s intended to be, in theaters? Have you been able to screen it at drive ins? AG: Adam and Tim actually got to do it out in the Midway. I think that’s in Michigan or something like that. They said they got a great turn out. We were shooting HOLLISTON at the time, so we couldn’t do it.
JL: We’ve had two drive ins that they have done I think. We haven’t been able to. We tried to do it at the drive in that we actually shot it at, but I don’t think they want us back. (laughs)
AG: Well no, I think it was too far away, but our premiere, instead of doing it in a theater we did it at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and finding these unconventional outside the box ways of exhibiting the movie that make it more of a communal experience for people and the reception has been unbelievably responsive. If you are our age or older, and we are in our mid 30’s, you remember going to the drive in and you did see movies like this, but a lot and especially for me in particular because of the HATCHET films, a lot of my fan base is very, very young and they don’t really know the movies that we are referencing all that much, like when I do an appearance and somebody comes up to me and mentions that they have not seen John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN because it looks boring, it’s like “Agh!” That’s their era. That’s their age group, but it’s hard to not grab them and punch them in the face.
[Everyone laughs]
BUG: Yeah, it hurts to hear that. I know you guys don’t have a lot more time, but I want to make sure to talk about your new project that you two are teaming up to do.
AG: Yeah, HOLLISTON is the sitcom. It’s the first original show for Fear Net Television. Fear Net is a cable network that most people do have in their main lineup by now, but by the spring everybody should have it alongside Spike and Comedy Central and ESPN and it’s their first original production. It’s the show that took me 13 years to get done the way I wanted to get it done. It was the thing when I first kind of came out to Hollywood to do. It’s been set up a bunch and fallen apart with different mergers and different things, but I’ve never been more excited about anything I’ve done. I guess the important thing to stress is it’s a sitcom. It’s not making fun of sitcoms. It’s not spoofing sitcoms. It’s a traditional sitcom, multi-camera, with a laugh track, except people’s heads explode sometimes or they might stab each other in the face or there’s the occasional monster in it and yeah, it’s a sitcom for horror fans.BUG: So what is it about? It’s about two filmmakers? You are like two up and coming filmmakers?
AG: Yeah, it’s about two up and coming, aspiring, struggling filmmakers who live in Holliston, Massachusetts which is in the middle of nowhere and they are trying to become directors.
Meanwhile they work at a local cable access station making terrible local commercials and stealing the company’s equipment at night to make their own short films and they also host a show on Saturday nights on the local cable network called “THE MOVIE CRYPT” where they show horror movies and talk about them. It’s all based on my real life and my real story for how I got started, but then there’s also the relationships about…my character, named “Adam,” which is really creative, is still in love with his childhood sweetheart who he thinks he’s going to end up getting back together with. Joe is dating a girl who is my ex-girlfriend’s best friend who is probably the best character on the show played my Laura Ortiz. She is so cute and so funny, but she’s seen like the darkest shit you have seen in your live, like aborted clown fetuses and pictures of Hitler. And then Dee Snider plays our boss at the cable station who is a cross dressing 54 year old man who is still stuck in the 80’s. He’s the lead singer for his Van Halen tribute band and he rocks out.Then my imaginary friend is “Oderus Urungus,” the lead singer for the band GWAR and he lives in my closest and only I can see him and he gives me the worst advice about how to get out of each week’s predicament I find myself in.
BUG: That sounds fantastic. I can’t wait to check it out. When is that going to be showing?
AG: It’s going to start airing in April and tonight in just a few hours we are going to show 8 minutes from one of the episodes at the Alamo Drafthouse as part of our Christmas charity event that we are doing. I’ve never been more excited to show early footage. Normally you’re kind of terrified to show early footage, because you’re like “Are people going to get that this isn’t really what it’s going to look like?” They haven’t seen the pilot yet, they don’t know…but I have never been more excited to show something. I think because it’s a sitcom and it’s not a movie, I think very quickly you get exactly what you are looking at. I’m so, so proud of it and hopefully very soon we are going to get to work on the second season and there’s even talk about stretching the first season not to be six episodes as originally ordered. The network is extremely happy with what they are seeing, so we might actually do more episodes this season. It’s a great problem to have and then soon we are going to be announcing all of the different guest artists that we got, which a lot of great people came out of the woodwork to be part of it and I know Fear Net has asked us not to say who yet, but they are going to be announcing it soon.
BUG: Sounds great. Well, guy--one last question. It sounds like you guys had a blast making this film. Do you think there would be a chance for a CHILLERAMA 2 sometime? AG: I think time and money will tell on that one. We had a lot of people excited about further installments of it and this sort of film based anthology. Since we use the drive in as a device for this one, there are so many different ways that you can set up another anthology, like you can have one at a film festival or if you go in a video store…there are so many different outlets and ways you can be able to do something like we did with this, it just happened that the drive in allowed us to do something that was a little different and ever since we announced the project and we made it and we had a bunch of our filmmaker friends see it as well, a lot of them said, “When can I do one?” So there’s definitely interest on the creative end, but again time and money will tell. If enough people buy it and not download it illegally, then there’s a real good possibility that you will see further CHILLERAMAs. It’s all down to the fans now. To be clear, though, we wouldn’t do another installment. The idea has been, whenever we have discussed it, that we would come up with four new titles to pitch with four new directors and give it to them to expand on the titles, kind of like what happened to us, and then it’s up to them to figure out how to make the movie for that title, but we wouldn’t be directing.
BUG: Very cool.
JL: Yeah, we would be very much the executive producers. We would help out on it and everything, but that was the exciting thing about at least the experience that Adam and I had from the beginning. It’s kind of like what Corman did back in the day: he would come up with the poster and a title and go “Okay, now I’ve got to make a movie.” Here what happened to us is they went “You’re going to make ANNE FRANKENSTEIN and you are going to do the wrap arounds and do something with zombies.” They never mentioned anything about defecation, so that’s where I made the ultimate movie. (laughs) For the new one, like what Adam said, if we came up with four titles and four concepts and then just unleashed that onto the filmmakers it’s like “Okay, now go forth” just like Corman did and hopefully there’s going to be some really fun and more outrageous stuff in the future.BUG: Well guys, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I know we went a little bit over time, but I really appreciate it. Good luck with the film. I really had a good time watching it. It was a lot of fun, so thank you so much.
AG: Thanks man.
JL: And it’s “Ambush Bug” on Ain’t It Cool, right?
BUG: Yeah, I do my horror column every Friday and comics on Wednesday.
JL: Keep up the great work. I read it every week.
BUG: Oh? Thank you. It’s an honor that you guys read it.
JL: Thanks, bye.
BUG: CHILLERAMA is available now on DVD! Look for part two of this interview with writer/director/producer Tim Sullivan (2001 MANIACS, I WAS A TEENAGE WEREBEAR!
Ambush Bug is Mark L. Miller, original @$$Hole / wordslinger / reviewer / co-editor of AICN Comics for over nine years. Mark is also a regular writer for FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND and has just released FAMOUS MONSTERS first ever comic book miniseries LUNA (co-written by Martin Fisher with art by Tim Rees) You can pre-order it here! Support a Bug by checking out his comics (click on the covers to purchase)!
(Just announced: NANNY & HANK is soon to be a major motion picture from Uptown 6 Productions!)
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