By Greg Lamberson
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but—
Timing is everything.
During a one-year period in 1982/1983, when I attended film school at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, three different horror films which had been shot on 16m, and had been blown up to 35mm, played theatrically in the Big Apple: Frank Henenlotter’s BASKET CASE, Douglas McKeown’s THE DEADLY SPAWN (written by Ted Bohus and John Dods), and Sam Raimi’s THE EVIL DEAD.
Inspired by these fright flicks, and disenchanted with film school, my friend Peter Clark and I decided to shoot our own film. The screenplay I wrote, SLIME CITY, fused the melting man concept from Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon (and not the melting man from THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN, as some have suggested), with the haunted apartment building from ROSEMARY’S BABY (I’d only seen the movie at that point), and the gross-out finale of THE EVIL DEAD.
It took us a few years to raise the money we needed to shoot the film, with the help of our partner, Marc Makowski. During that time, Peter and I worked on the 16m horror spoof, I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE, as did Robert Sabin, for whom I’d written the lead role in SLIME. In essence, we used ZOMBIE to learn the ins and outs of microbudget filmmaking. I also spent one day working on Troma’s CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH. Troma’s loss was definitely my gain, as I met Scott Coulter and Tom Lauten—who later did the SFX for SLIME—and Ivy Rosovsky, who designed our cosyumes.
Several months before we went into production, Scott and Tom assisted Jennifer Aspinell (who designed the Toxic Avenger) on STREET TASH, directed by my SVA classmate, Jim Muro, and written and produced by our mutual film instructor, Roy Frumkes (DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD). STREET TRASH and SLIME CITY are both from the goopy school of horror filmmaking, although our finished film cost $50,000 and theirs cost bout 18 times as much (and looks it).
Shooting on SLIME CITY lasted for four blistering weeks in the summer of 1986. We shot in Astoria, Queens; Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; the Grand Concourse in the Bronx; and Alphabet City. In a sign of solidarity, Jimmy came by with his Steadicam one day and did several shots for free.
Once shooting finished, we started editing. We’d barely begun when we got a call from Scott, who was then working on film in Connecticut called PLUTONIUM BABY. The entire crew had walked off the shoot, and they needed the Slime Guys to come to the rescue. We did, but there was no saving that production…
We resumed editing until it was time to begin pre-production on Frank Henenlotter’s BRAIN DAMAGE, which merged the crews from BASKET CASE, SLIME CITY, and STREET TRASH. I was Frank’s assistant director on that one. Three months later, editing resumed on SLIME.
We got to a finished work print for $35,000, which was all we were able to raise from investors (and our own paychecks). I remember screening the film on a Steenbeck (an old fashioned editing machine used in the days before computerized editing) for a representative from Vestron Video, then the largest independent video distributor in the country. The rep loved the movie (although he wanted to retitle it SLIME HEADS), and we started preliminary negotiations for Vestron to acquire it. They offered us $150,000 for all rights, which would have allowed us to complete the picture, repay our investors, pay our deferred salaries (everyone worked for free), and turn a profit. And--who knows?—we might have gone on to do other films for Vestron.
Unfortunately, as I stated at the beginning of this piece—
Timing is everything.
Vestron had built a fortune distributing movies on VHS. But they had lost a fortune on their in-house productions, one theatrical bomb after another. On the weekend after we had started negotiating contracts, a little $4 million dollar film of theirs opened—and opened big. That film was called DIRTY DANCING, and it went on to become the sleeper hit of the year. On Monday morning, word came down from high up: Vestron Video would no longer acquire low budget horror films. Do you wonder why I hate Patrick Swayze?
We were dead in the water. We looked all over for financing, and ultimately turned to Alexander Beck, a foreign sales rep who’d been spotlighted in Fangoria. Alex was famous for importing GODZILLA to the U.S, and for buying FRIDAY THE 13 TH from a disinterested Paramount, and then re-selling it to them at a huge profit when they had a change of heart regarding the film’s theatrical potential. Alex fronted us $20,000 to complete and market the film.
We premiered SLIME CITY at the Waverly Twin, where BASKET CASE had played as a midnight movie for two years, and I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE had played for six weeks. We played it at the Bleecker Street Cinemas in Manhattan, now the location for Kim’s Underground video store (which I later managed). We played as a midnight movie for five weekends. It still surprises me how many people I speak to saw the film during that run; what a gas.
By that time, the bottom had fallen out of the home video market, which had become glutted with low budget films, and no-budget films like ours. Camp Home Video, which had released several Fred Olen Ray titles, was the only company that offered us an advance ($13,000, for anyone who’s counting). They sold 2500 units—not bad—before they went out of business, and the warehouse they used—and owed money to—flooded the market with another 2500 units, which we never saw a dime on.
Beck’s deal called for him to take 25% off the top of each foreign sale he made. The balance of the monies received went toward the $20,000 he’s advanced us. After selling the film to Brazil, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Spain, and England, he recouped his investment, and we actually saw $3,000. At that point, our contract allowed us to take back the film. When he picked up our materials from his Scarsdale mansion, he told us we were the only filmmakers that ever took their film back from him. Thank God Edgar Ievans—Frank Henenlotter’s producer—had hooked us up with a good lawyer. This is the most important advice I can offer to any independent filmmaker: GET A GOOD ENTERTAINMENT LAWYER!
To all intents and purposes, we’d milked the film for all it was worth.
Or so we thought.
In 1998, a New Jersey outfit called E.I. Independent Cinema—which had released my second film, UNDYING LOVE, on VHS as NEW YORK VAMPIRE—expressed interest in re-releasing SLIME CITY. I harbored no illusions about getting rich on the film, I just wanted to keep it available. And I wanted to fix a few things that had always bothered me about it: the titles, some awkward pauses, etc. In total, I edited almost ten minutes from the running time. I also made MAKING SLIME, an eight-minute featurette about film’s making, complete with behind the scenes footage.
E.I. re-released SLIME in 1999, under its Shock-O-Rama banner. They did a nice job packaging and promoting it, but with at least 5,000 copies floating around out there, there wasn’t a huge demand for the film. Besides, DVD was fast becoming the format of choice.
Jump ahead five years. Mike Raso, one of the founders of E.I., informed me that their shot-on-video lesbian vampire flicks—upon which they’d built their empire—were not selling nearly as well on DVD as the older films that they’d acquired and, often, restored. Much to my delight, he invited me to sit in on an all-new, high definition transfer of my only print of the film, which was in excellent shape. We decided to letterbox the film, which was great. When we shot the film in 16m—which has a square screen—we’d framed it to be blown up to 35mm (a rectangular screen, which requires the one third of the image to be cropped from the top and bottom of the frame). We never got our blow-up, and for years I’ve been disappointed with the extra image on the screen. By letterboxing the film, it now looks the way that Peter and I had intended. Better, in fact: the picture detail and color quality are amazing. I also restored a few of the minutes that I’d cut for the VHS Special Edition; some of the cuts had been improvements, but I missed some of the other moments and appreciated the opportunity to put them back.
Because Shock-O-Rama—or in this case, Retro Shock-O-Rama—releases two films per DVD, I was able to convince Mike to include my third film, NAKED FEAR, which had never been released on video, as the second feature. It finally sees the light of day! In addition to trailers for both films, and the MAKING SLIME featurette, the SLIME CITY DOUBLE FEATURE includes commentary tracks for both films. I really couldn’t be happier with the final product.
And something strange happened during the last couple of years: thanks to the DVD market, and companies like E.I., Anchor Bay, Blue Underground, and Media Blasters, there is a booming, resurgent interest in ‘80s horror films. Shortly before we did the DVD transfer, a company in France finally bought the rights to the film. Red Scream Magazine just interviewed me about SLIME CITY and my novel, Personal Demons. And Succubus Press, a publisher based in the Netherlands, asked me to write a lengthy piece on the film for their upcoming book, Gods in Spandex: a Survivors’ Account of ‘80s Cinema Obscura. And I’m screening the film at various venues in the coming months: at Twisted Nightmare Weekend, in Ohio; at Horrorfind, in Baltimore; and at the Halloween Horror Picture Show in Tampa.
Quite a life for a garage horror flick shot 19 years ago.
But then, timing is everything.