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Insights from home entertainment industry experts. Home Media blogs give you the inside scoop on entertainment news, DVD and Blu-ray Disc releases, and the happenings at key studios and entertainment retailers. TK's Take analyzes and comments on home entertainment industry news and trends, Agent DVD Insider talks comic adaptations, and IndieFile delivers independent film news.
Night of the Creeps
Night of the Creeps isn’t a horror film, or an ’80s teen comedy, or an alien sci-fi film — it’s all of those things. It’s no wonder the film never really made it to the same echelon as movies like Evil Dead or Nightmare on Elm Street, despite sharing similar qualities, as the movie unsettlingly hops from genre to genre. What other movie starts with a claymation alien invasion, moves to a Revenge of the Nerds style frat comedy and ends up in monster movie territory?
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the film on DVD and Blu-ray Disc today, in a director’s cut that includes Fred Dekker’s original ending. The discs also include such special features as commentary with Dekker, commentary with the cast, deleted scenes and making-of featurettes. We spoke with Dekker about his long-unreleased film.
IndieFile: This DVD has the ending you originally intended. Were you urged to change it?
Dekker: It was very much a compromise, a disagreement between myself and the studio that arose because the [intended] graveyard ending required a CG shot. I made the mistake of showing it to the audience in an unfinished form, and it was confusing to them and the studios. So they said, let’s change the ending. It gave it that Friday the 13th style cheap scare at the end. I’ve always hated that ending. So when Sony asked, “What you want to do?” I said, “I want to put the ending back on.”
IndieFile: It does tie it back to the beginning of film.
Dekker: It closes the circle. I’m a big fan of that in movies.
IndieFile: What were some of your inspirations making this film?
Dekker: I think they’re pretty apparent in the film. Obviously Night of the Living Dead, the Romero trilogy as I think of it. Day of the Dead, which is my favorite. Alien was obviously an influence in terms of the space critter that gestates inside the body. There was a huge — strangely enough, I only realized this since his death — but john Hughes was a huge influence as well. And then there were those cheesy ’50s movies like The Blob and It Came from Outer Space that informed it.
It just occurred to me that I just watched [REC], which I really liked a lot, and as I was watching I was thinking, “OK, they’re starting with a Blair Witch approach, then it starts to get scary and we’re getting into Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later territory, then there’s a little Exorcist in there,” and I was thinking, “Oh! This is a mashup.” And I was thinking of how there are these things on the Internet where they take two movies that are completely different and mash them together and I realized what I was doing was a mashup. This is a John Hughes comedy with Romero zombie movies and a dollup of It Came From Outer Space and Alien. But I think it’s important that it works without knowing that.
IndieFile: We had [another Dekker film] The Monster Squad come out on DVD two years ago and now Night of the Creeps. Has it been exciting to finally have your films come to DVD?
Dekker: Oh yeah, and even more so, because of the interest, is the chance to get to see it on big screens. I’ve shown it in Toronto, in Texas, in Scotland. These movies play very, very well with a theatrical audience, so it’s always fun to get the laughs and the cheers and all that stuff.
IndieFile: Can you walk us through some of the special features on this disc?
Dekker: There are two commentaries. One is myself and producer Michael Felsher. He’s a big fan of the movie and knows it well. I admit I sometimes drive in the car and say, “Hello, welcome to the director’s commentary for Night of the Creeps.” It’s a fun commentary. Michael and I were talking a mile a minute. The other is with the cast. Then there’s a documentary that Michael Felsher produced and directed. It’s really wonderful, walking us through the making of the film, the release and its resurrection recently.
IndieFile: Was it fun to get the old cast and crew back together?
Dekker: It was great. If you have friends you haven’t seen in a long time but you were very close, it’s like no time passed at all. We just got right back into the groove. It got me excited about working together with them again in some way.
IndieFile: I wanted to ask you about the line “Thrill me,” spoken by Detective Cameron (played by Tom Atkins) repeatedly throughout the movie. In a special feature, you say that’s the first thing that came to you. Where did that come from?
Dekker: I don’t know. It just seemed that it spoke volumes about the attitude of someone. I thought it was a great way to introduce a character. In two words it just says that this guy is tired and weary and really needs a reason to get out of his char.
IndieFile: What would you tell the uninitiated watching Night of the Creeps for the first time?
Dekker: I would tell them that my staff and I and our hair and makeup and wardrobe departments went to a great deal of trouble to recreate the mid-1980s and you would never know that we just made the movie last year. I would say forgive its ’80s-ness, forgive it its analog sound effects, and just enjoy it.
By: Billy Gil
They don’t make ’em like they used to. So goes the saying, whether it’s about songs, books or movies about people who kill people.
Thankfully, Nicholaus Goosen has directed a horror film that’s a lovely throwback to horror films that scared the crap out of us as kids — movies like Poltergeist and Carrie and Halloween — movies that remembered to actually develop their characters because it was a lot more terrifying when they were killed off. The Shortcut, a straight-to-video gem from Anchor Bay, is out on DVD now. The film follows a group of teens in a town in which the land behind the high school holds dark secrets, with kids daring one another to take the shortcut through the woods in which a mysterious old man dwells.
Far from the faceless masses of most gory straight-to-video horror, The Shortcut is rated ‘PG-13’ — and that’s a virtue. I found myself recalling R.L. Stine and others’ teen horror novels I read when I was younger, in which there’s due time given to these kids’ everyday lives, complete with actual witty dialogue, and the horror they encounter seems like something you could have heard about as a kid, the urban legend stuff rather than the more esoteric generic crazed killer or monster story. The film stars Drew Seeley, who is the singing voice for Troy in High School Musical, and Katrina Bowden, who plays hot intern Cerie in “30 Rock,” and the film is a production of Happy Madison, Adam Sandler’s company. Goosen says the idea came from Sandler’s real life, from “an old guy who lived in the neighborhood that everyone was scared of.”
HM: What were some of your inspirations for this film?
Goosen: When I was brought onto the project, everyone had Disturbia in mind … but I saw it more as along the lines of Wolf Creek, which is one of my favorite slasher films in the past few years. Originally it was rated ‘R.’ All of the deaths were taking place in the second half of the movie. What I really liked about Wolf Creek was that it was a slow build … so that when they died in the end, it was a slow impact. We have to make sure we care about these characters and that we know them so that when they kick the bucket at the end, it has meaning, rather than the body count starting really early on and we don’t really care.
One of my favorite ‘PG-13’ horror films of all time is Poltergeist. The movie bears not a lot of resemblance — I guess the family moving to a new town and discovering things around the neighborhood — but growing up, that was one of the movies I remember loving.
HM: It reminded me a bit of R.L. Stine teen horror stories I read when I was younger, and also films like Halloween.
Goosen: I love Halloween and John Carpenter is one of my favorite directors. Being a kid in the ’80s, I looked up to him a lot. I love the way that those guys played everything real, as if they could really be happening. What would it be like if you lived in a haunted house in a suburban neighborhood? Where that’s where the evil’s taking place.
HM: The look of The Shortcut I thought was really cool because it didn’t look like it was trying too hard. The idea of this closed off area behind an elementary school is already scary to most kids. Was that something you were conscious of?
Goosen: There were a lot of things like that I tried to avoid. I made a conscious decision, we’re not going to use a mist machine at all. We don’t need to have a light coming in at night with the fog coming in behind it because to me that just smacks of cliché and unoriginality. We don’t need to put up fake cobwebs and that kind of stuff. When it came time to address that little back area for the school, it was just, “put up a fake fence and make it look like it hasn’t been used in a while.” It just had to look real.
HM: Were there any urban legends or anything as a kid that freaked you out that you drew inspiration from?
Goosen: “Say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times in the mirror” — that one still freaks me out.
HM: Was it tough to keep it in the ‘PG-13’ rating? Some of the stuff I was actually surprised to see, given the rating.
Goosen: Our schedule was really, really tight, so we pretty much everything we shot is pretty much in the movie. So I devised all the kills to work in a ‘PG-13’ way. I was thinking ahead of time how to do the kills without having to see things on camera necessarily. The one time I got to use a little bit of blood is when Taylor (played by Josh Emerson) gets hit by the sledgehammer … they made me take out where the blood splatters on one of the character’s faces. … It was stuff like that. And making me lower the sound of the sledgehammer. Otherwise, everything pretty much made it in there that I had planned.
HM: Do you feel like this movie stands out from the pack of straight-to-video horror films?
Goosen: As far as the home video thing goes, I was thinking that comparatively, our movie is as theatrical-worthy as any. Certainly for the amount of money we spent on it. Most movies in the genre that go to video aren’t considered that good, but the way the industry is changing, and the way people are seeing movies — people like Steven Soderbergh putting movies out on demand the same day (as theatrical, in reference to 2005’s Bubble) — … a lot of movies are released theatrically just for the vanity of the filmmakers, when the audience who are going to see certain kinds of films aren’t going to see them in theaters, they’re going to watch them online or on HD or something. So I guess it’s better to have people pleasantly surprised when they see the movie than having some sort of disappointing box office numbers.
HM: There’s a decent amount of gore here, but there’s way more time devoted to developing the characters. Is that something you think is missing from modern horror?
Goosen: There are certainly a lot of horror films out there that are stylishly shot, but there are very few that have the combination of story, style, characters and acting. It seems like most characters these days in these types of films are pretty clichéd, pretty two-dimensional — you’re really just waiting for them to die. You’re not thinking about them as character. You can always kind of predict what’s going to happen. Predictability is a movie killer for me.
By: Billy Gil
Asian extreme horror fans, listen up: Palisades Tartan is flying two people to London Oct. 5 to see the premiere of Thirst and have lunch with director Park Chan-wook. U.S. and U.K. residents can enter at www.PalisadesTartan.com.
Park Chan-wook directed Cannes 2004 Grand Jury Prize winner Oldboy. Thirst is about a priest who becomes a vampire. Take a look at this trailer (complete with miniscule subtitles). Looks pretty sexy and awesome.
By: Billy Gil
Street Date: 10/13
Studio: Genius Products
Price/Format: $19.95 DVD
Reserve on Amazon
Reserve on Netflix
The Killing Room looks really intense. The film premiered at Sundance this year and follows an experiment designed to test the limits of human fear as a group of volunteers are put in a room and told only one of them will survive. Fearnet.com calls it a “rough and tough psychological thriller,” and it is directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning). Chloe Sevigny stars as one of the people behind the glass, looking into this group of poor shmucks. Other classy actors dot the cast, including Timothy Hutton, Clea Duvall and an always-creepy-as-hell Peter Stormare (Fargo).
By: Billy Gil
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is giving cult-film fans two reasons to celebrate, come October.
Ballyhoo master William Castle gets the boxed-set treatment Oct. 20 will The William Castle Film Collection. The $80.95 set includes new-to-DVD films The Tingler (1959), 13 Ghosts (1960), Homicidal (1961), Mr. Sardonicus (1961) and Strait-Jacket (1964), along with previously released Zotz! (1962), The Old Dark House (1963) and 13 Frightened Girls (1963).
Meanwhile influential director Samuel Fuller, who is said to have helped inspire the likes of Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch, will have his films released in The Collector’s Choice: Samuel Fuller Film Collection at $79.95. It’s the third release under the partnership between SPHE and Scorsese’s The Film Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to film preservation. DVD debuts in the set include It Happened in Hollywood (1937), Adventure in Sahara (1938), Power of the Press (1943), Shockproof (1949), Scandal Sheet (1952), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Underworld U.S.A. (1961). Special features include “Martin Scorsese on Underworld U.S.A,” “Curtis Hanson: The Culture of The Crimson Kimono,” and “Sam Fuller's Search for Truth with Tim Robbins” and “Sam Fuller Storyteller.”
By: Billy Gil
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