Original subtitles

Hi, this is Fred Olin Ray, and I'm sitting here with Steve Latshaw, and

here to do the Blu -ray commentary track for the movie Alien Dead.

Hi, Steve. How are you, Fred?

Hanging in there. Lots of commentary tracks this week.

We opened up on a theme that I've always hated. It was added, I think, at the

last minute just to get a little extra running time.

Shot handheld with Olex.

and the Zoom and no sound.

And I've never cared for this. I don't think it added anything. I was tempted

lop it off for this edition. But there are some people who are completists.

That would be me. They want to see every lousy frame of this.

This is the actor playing Tom Corman, the intrepid newspaper reporter.

Yeah. It's Ray Roberts, who was the announcer for the TV station where I

Channel 24, PBS in Orlando.

And we'll just get underway with this.

The original film elements for this movie have been lost.

And what remains is an existing 16 millimeter print.

And to accentuate that, we found in some boxes here, we found a couple 400 foot

rolls of scenes that we had printed before we were completed with the idea

we would show them to some distributors and stuff.

And they're first generation. So we went back and pulled those scenes from these

odd reels that we had and inserted them into the film. So the quality changes a

little bit here and there. It gets better sometimes.

As it was, of course, I was the DP on this film and I knew absolutely nothing

about what I was doing. So there's a lot of focus issues and framing issues.

You know, just stuff that goes with a really lousy movie. This scene, though,

was talking to somebody the other day, because we were talking about how many

times any of us had been arrested.

This was the first time I was ever arrested.

I guess we were on somebody's property that I wasn't aware of, and the cops

showed up and started taking us all away.

And they said, Fred, what do you want to do? I said, tell them just to do a

rehearsal. I said, turn the camera on.

So we did, and while we were being busted...

This scene was shot here. I think the earlier coverage and stuff might have

already been done.

But it stopped silent because we couldn't pretend to be shooting while we

being arrested.

So we went in later, and we didn't know how to loop or ADR anything, so we would

just simply have the actors read their lines or audio, and then I would try to

match them up with the picture later.

Now, this is some of the newer footage, right?

No, this was in the original.

I mean, the newer transfer that you've done. Yes, well, the whole film is the

newer transfer. This is the 16mm answer print, which is the only film element

that we're aware of remaining.

Because I've seen this movie quite a bit in the last 30 years, and I don't

recall it looking quite this good.

Right, there was a certain amount of detail because we obviously tried to do

some of the day -for -night stuff in the camera, which you shouldn't probably

do. You should do that in color timing later, but we're stupid, and that's what

we did.

This actor, Norman Riggins, was a guy who I was really impressed with because

he'd been on the original Dark Shadows TV series in the 60s.

He was a gypsy bandit in a handful of episodes, and he was probably one of the

more polished actors.

that we roped into being in this thing.

I can't remember the girl who got out of the boat. I just remember she had big

boobs. And she was a country girl, as so many of them are.

You know, his dialogue's very good, too. There's a really sort of old -world,

southern, very declarative sound to the dialogue he has in that.

Well, you know, Martin Nicholas and I wrote this kind of as a lark. And

initially they were going to be giant leeches. It was called Swamp of the

Leeches, which I thought was a pretty groovy title.

But when we went and finally got to making the film, we realized that leech

costumes were sort of beyond our scope.

But we could do zombie -type things in the water because I had worked on

Shockwave. So I thought, well, let's go ahead and...

Let's go ahead and do that.

And that's exactly what we did.

The title, the background animation, did you create that for this? This was done

by Brett Mixon, who later moved to, he was in Texas with his brother Bart

And they're twins. And they later moved to L .A. And Brett did a lot of titles

and rotoing for us for Biohazard and The Tomb and Beverly Hills Vamp and a lot,

a lot of stuff.

Brett and I still work together.

And I know that Bart was just nominated for an Emmy for his makeup work on

American Horror Story. So there you go.

So you have two composers listed here, Franklin Sledge and Chuck Sumner? I

believe they probably worked together.

Chuck Sumner was a partner on this. He was one of the producers. He had a video

post town and This was a synthesized score, of course

and one of the, probably maybe one of the early synthesized scores.

It was an unusual score, and as much as we later discovered that half the score

was the first half of the score played backwards.

The discovery, they obviously knew it, but the discovery came to me when we did

the mix, and they had to run the film backwards at real time, and I had to sit

there and listen to the movie playing backwards, and all of a sudden I

recognized it.

Wow.

It's a nice opening title sequence, probably one of the better things about

whole film.

Originally called It Fell from the Sky.

And I liked that title because I thought it was kind of classy, but everybody

thought it wasn't exploitive enough.

And so Dawn of the Dead and Aliens were popular at the time, so I simply took

the two of them and squeezed them together to make The Alien Dead.

Henry Kaplan had a long history in...

He was a partner, executive partner in Cinemation, Jerry Gross' organization,

and he was one of the producers of I Drink Your Blood, a girl on a chain

or a female animal.

And he was retired in Florida, and he was a third partner in making this film.

One of the things I really like about this film is a lot of regional

films like this, it's sometimes hit and miss in terms of the casting, but

there's some really strong actors in here.

The guy in the beard is very good.

His name is... That's Martin.

He was the co -writer on this. He's been my lifelong friend since junior high.

And we're still friends today.

And he was in drama and acting and plays and things like that. And Mike Bonavia,

with the hat, was a guy, again, who I was kind of impressed with because he'd

been in Disney's movie Moonwolf with John Kerry.

And I thought, you know, Mike did a pretty good job. And he also came on and

appeared in Biohazard later for us.

When he was visiting town, I wrote a part for him.

The girl in the middle, I don't remember. The guy on the left, I

at the TV station.

There's a lot of non -actors holding down roles in this film.

You know, it's just, it is what it is.

And like I said, you've got to understand

We'd never shot things down before, and other than the brain leeches, which

really barely qualifies as a movie, this was the first time I'd ever tried to

make anything that made sense of something.

Now, all the police station scenes were filmed at the Oviedo Police Station, and

they let us even have the uniforms. All the uniforms the guys are wearing are

Oviedo Police uniforms.

And that guy in the middle, of course, is Buster Crabb, the de facto star who I

had met when I was a cinematographer for a TV special on the Golden Age

Olympics. He was the Grand Marshal. And when I worked with Channel 24 and I

heard Buster Crabb was going to be there, I volunteered to go down and run

Bolex in slow -mo to get some of the Golden Age Olympics up like the broad

And I managed to meet Buster Crabb and get a contact number from him.

And then when it came time to do this...

I thought that that was probably the biggest name star that I knew that we

convince to come do something like this.

It's also really unusual for these kind of regional, lower -budget films at that

time. A lot of them, they don't have a name star in them. Is that something you

deliberately set out to do? Well, you know, I always said that. I thought

movie should have a star. No matter what kind of a name it is, every movie

should have a star. I can't say that every film we ever made has had one, but

that's the way I started out.

Because I thought it would make the crummy little movie be more like a real

production. If there was a name in there that people went, oh man, you know, you

got buster crap, you know.

So, it was...

Very conscientious because it drew in people to help us and threw people in to

be in the film Let us use their restaurants and stuff like that because

back in 1977 or whenever it shot this Buster Kraft was still, you know, he was

in the Swimming Hall of Fame He still did a lot of openings and postings of

things and he was on Buck Rogers TV series right after this.

So He was sort of current, not a current actor perhaps, but still a current

name, like Johnny Weissmuller was still a current name at that time, or prior to

this, I should say.

How was he with the other actors?

Buster was extremely friendly.

He brought a bunch of 8x10s of Flash Gordon, and he'd sign them and give them

away to people.

He would hang out. He went to the Finn and Feather, which was a local...

swamp fishing, chicken place. And he'd sit there and he'd jaw with the locals

and autograph things.

And, you know, he hung around when he didn't have to, you know, when he could

have gone back to his hotel and stuff. And, you know, he's just a really

sterling guy. I mean, I drove him myself, which I do a lot of times with

stars, so I can talk to him in the car a little bit. And I remember that he was

very upset with me because...

i was trying to be very careful and i would stop i'd slow down when i saw

light he'd always say punch it bob punch it you can make it i mean he was like

he was like he obviously drove with a lead foot this was a scene this was a

movie that came up very short and this was a scene that we added because we and

we thought well let's add the girl who was in the print shop sequence uh and we

added this little scene and a bunch of little scenes and yet at the time you

know film was so expensive for us

That we bought a case of 16 millimeter and it was X amount of 400 foot rolls

we figured out the timing we said okay.

This is enough to to make make this whole movie We can make the whole movie

this one case of film well, we kind of went through The film and we had a lot

film left and we couldn't figure out what we were doing wrong And what

was even though Martin and I had written what seemed to be a fully script It

probably had a lot of air in it and the whole thing uh due to lack of coverage

and other things that you learn to do in the business um the film came up very

short so we continually kept going back and filming other little bits and pieces

but most of them we had to shoot silent because you had to we rented a cp -16

which is the camera that we're using here the same camera that don jackson

for demon lover and

We had to rent it every weekend and we had to have this insurance policy. It

very expensive.

So whenever we wanted to go out and do something small, we would just use a

Bolex and the stuff would be shot silent.

And because I cut the sound and the film myself, I didn't know anything about

cutting sound effects tracks. And we didn't have any sound effects to cut in

we had them. So you get a lot of silent sequences with music over them.

And it gives the film a very weird daughter of horror dream. It's got a

dreamlike sort of quality.

And I'm not saying that in a good way, but it does seem very spacey and stuff

because of the amount of silent footage that's just accompanied by this weird,

strange music that we had.

And I never realized it as much until I was working on this film, because I

don't sit around and watch my own films with any regularity at all.

But I did notice it when I was doing it. Same thing with the brain leeches,

which is also on this Blu -ray.

The brain leeches, a lot of it was shot silent because the Oricon sound on film

camera, the Antique I was using.

had to be plugged into a wall socket. So anytime you went away from a wall

socket, you had to go with a Bolex. And so there's a lot of silent footage

there, too.

There's going to be a commentary track on the brain leeches for anyone brave

enough to sit through it.

I thought it was interesting to put on here. It's a little embarrassing,

actually.

But it had so much in common with the alien dead.

the brain leasers did that I never realized until I was working on it that

are sequences and scenes right out of brain leasers which sort of somehow

subconsciously found their way into Alien Death.

Now I think if I'm not mistaken this might be one of the scenes where we

have any radio mics and if we were ever too far away for a boom we would shoot

it silent then the actors would act it out on tape and then we would line their

dialogue up so that we have sort of a walking

When I was listening to this on headphones, I could hear the difference

There's a couple of river scenes, too, where you hear them talking, and it

sounds like it's looped, and then you cut in for closer, and you're on a sound

camera. Right, right, right, because we're too far away, and we didn't know

a radio mic was.

I'll tell you about the sound on this. There's a guy named John Weirich who did

the sound.

And one time we got out to the swamp, and it was a long way out there

He had forgotten the sound tape.

Or Chuck had. Somebody had forgotten it. They had to drive back to town to get

the sound tape. And I said, listen, we can't afford to sit here and do nothing.

And John Weirich said, I know what to do. And he went into his car and came

with an 8 -track tape of Elvis Presley.

And he busted that 8 -track tape of Elvis open. He wound it up on the

And we started recording on the Nagra sync sound over top of an 8 -track of

Elvis.

It worked. It was take.

It was the same size take. Same size take.

This is George Kelsey.

George Kelsey.

He had a bum leg. He was the former sheriff of Obito. And this was a hunting

camp that no one was staying at. And they let us film there. And all the

and things were done at this hunting camp.

And George, his wife plays the wife who gets the pitchfork later.

And he wasn't really an actor, but he kind of does okay.

The film is kind of loopy. I mean,

it kind of bespeaks what I was doing back then and in later years.

Because it gets into the whole thing about whether Eddie Rickenbacker had a

dogfight over the swamp in World War I and the giant possum.

named Pasotax, as the Indians call it, that were eating all the alligators in

the swamp.

I mean, it's just, the whole thing is just ridiculous.

And this is actually a possum that George Kelsey's wife baked for us. We

the head on it.

And you can see that shot starts out out of focus because there's no focus

puller. I was the DP, and on a zoom lens like that, you know, you're supposed to

zoom in and focus.

And then back out. Obviously, I focused on these people, and when I zoomed into

the possum, it wasn't in focus.

Did you tell me that the crew actually had this for dinner?

Well, we did try. We all ate a little bit of it after the scene because

curiosity just gets the better of it.

But, you know, it's funny because, you know...

We've all talked about this in the past.

You know, I'm living in Orlando. I work in a TV station. I could have probably

shot on the downtown streets of Orlando.

But because I was near a swamp, I decided I would make a swamp movie. I

I would make the most. Every town has a downtown.

Not every place in America has a swamp.

So I wanted to make a movie like Attack of the Giant Leeches.

That all takes place in sort of an isolated, swampy southern locale.

And through my form, the monsters are Yankee tourists who've been turned into

zombies. And there's a little social commentary in here about letting all

people flood into Florida every winter, trashing up the place and ruining the

ecology. And then, of course, becoming actually a real minute for the residents

as opposed to just sort of a theoretical minute.

At that time, too, late 70s, this genre, this southern genre, was very big.

Well, this was made not too far from where 2000 Maniacs was filmed.

Another movie with a little bit of a message about too many Yankees.

There's no coverage in that scene at all. Not at all. No over the shoulders,

close -ups, no nothing.

There's a little bit of an attempt to...

And actually the pool ball was in focus all the way to the back, probably

because I wasn't actually shooting this myself, because I'm in the thing.

Is this your Hitchcock moment?

I wouldn't call it Hitchcock, because I probably do more than Alfred Hitchcock

ever did in there, probably way as much as he did.

And that's another guy who worked at our TV station, and there's Shelly Younger,

who was married.

to the hero, Ray Roberts, at the time.

And this is the local watering hole, right? This was the Black Hammock Swamp.

This is the boat where the boats and stuff were, fishing boats and stuff.

was just a bar and a thing. And now it's a very nice restaurant.

And it serves catfish and gator. And I've eaten there several times whenever

I've gone back to Orlando. And it's really nice. You wouldn't really

it except from the outside.

of the building.

And, you know, like a lot of other films, there were scenes shot for this

didn't make it in the movie for some reason or another. There was a scene at

marina where the little boats were.

And I remember there was a body found at one point where we put makeup and live

earthworms on their face and none of those made it into the film.

I have no clue why.

This is what it looked like from outside.

And it's all boats and stuff, and it's a swamp that's just really full of

alligators. He's wearing a shirt that says yes on one side, no on the other. I

never really understood what that meant because the no was on the back and the

yes was on the front.

Now, this is leading into a sequence that was shot prior to you actually

into production on this film. Right, what you're watching here. That's also

Roberts. I made this map, and I lived near this area where these catwalks went

through the swamp.

And so I shot this sequence with him in the mask and her wearing, unfortunately,

wearing the same outfit.

And this is what I projected onto the wall of Henry Kaplan's house. Not even a

screen. I just projected the footage onto the wall to show him what I was

thinking about doing, and that's how the deal was made for him to become an

investor, was to show him this sequence.

Well, it seemed silly not to use it.

That creature mask... Never appears in this film again in that form because

someone broke into my house, some teenagers they said they thought it was,

they stole all the monster masks and stuff for the movie.

So we had to make new masks from the mold, and this time Alan Duckworth

airbrushed them. And while you do see that zombie mask again later, it doesn't

quite look like this one. This one was supposed to look sort of like the

man.

The other one is painted differently, but you do see it maybe has a little

on it.

This was some day for night, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

And this sequence was one of the sequences, I believe, that we pulled

of the spot reels that we found.

Because the 16mm prints that we had, this sequence was always too dark.

And this is a very interesting location.

Like I said, it was very close to my house.

And I didn't actually live in a swamp. I think this was a park of some sort.

This was the day back then where nobody asked you if you had a permit.

Nobody cared.

You know, even if the cops drove by and saw you, they didn't know to ask you if

you had a permit or if you had any insurance or any of that other sort of

I think the only insurance we carried was on the cameras and things that we

to rent.

And we may have even bought it from the camera place every weekend that we

rented the camera.

I actually recognize this park. I think I've been there years ago.

Because I remember the catwalks. Well, this scene here is another one of the

scenes that was originally in the brain leeches. You see a girl running from a

zombie who hides into a concrete pipe, and then she comes out, and he comes up

and gets her from behind.

And it's one of those scenes that I don't know that I consciously did it,

definitely see the resemblance between the two sequences.

And that's the end of Shelley for...

For now.

And she's in the credits as associate producer?

Yeah. Somewhere along the line here, her and Ray split up.

And she was just very, very helpful in organizing people.

And she was the person who would make sure that I woke up in the morning and

where I was going, that I didn't oversleep, and that I made sure I was

was supposed to be.

And she was very organizational of putting all these people together for

shoots and stuff like that. So we felt like she deserved this credit.

And you were working, like, what, two jobs at that point as well as doing this

film? I don't know that I was working two jobs while I was doing this. Maybe

during some of the pickups. But I was very definitely, I believe, still at

Channel 24.

because Ray, I think, did all the voiceovers and work and stuff like that

Channel 24 there. The film took a while to finish because, like I said, it was

short and we had to keep thinking of ways to go out, but initially the live

action, the original script, was shot probably over a period of eight

which seems like a way long time.

Maybe it wasn't that long because you'd think it would be better if we spent

that much time.

doing that. We stayed around the big econ, the Econ -Lacatchee River, I

it's called.

And that was the big river that ran through everything.

That is not the woman who played Mrs. Griffith at the beginning.

That is Chris Ray's mother, Nancy, who was forced into

putting on this makeup and playing the dead, playing the dead body.

And Buster, it was Buster's idea to wear these long johns.

I wondered about that. Yeah.

Yeah, that was his contribution to the sequence.

And this is where Dennis started this sort of weird deputy where he could

swing his billy club. He's always swinging it and banging it into

It was one of those situations, and I don't know if it helped the film or hurt

the film, but we kind of let our sense of humor kind of get away with us in

was otherwise supposed to be a serious film.

And they're going, and Buster's saying right here, well, this isn't Mrs.

Griffith. Mrs. Griffith's the blonde.

And the guy goes, well, I think that's blood.

I think that's blood, Bernie.

And every once in a while, you know, Buster would be a little impatient with

because I was a newbie of grand magnitude here.

And like here, for whatever reason, they wouldn't shut up. And I think we just

had to fade out on them while they were saying something. They just wouldn't

shut up.

Now here's a band. If you look on the far left in the blue checked shirt is

sheriff, the current sheriff of Obito.

And you see that he's later the guy chopping wood.

Really? Who gets cut in half by the zombies. And there's a guy sitting at

table right there as he walked in with a red t -shirt who I think turns out to

be a zombie later. And the reason I recognize him is from the red shirt.

This scene here was the closest to a professional scene that I did in the

show. Because there were actually two close -ups. There's a little bit of a

master. And then there's a shot on Dennis and a reversal on Norman.

And when I got in the editing room and I cut the scene, I realized that, wow,

this is how the whole movie should probably have been shot.

You know?

It was just, I was just very, very pleased with the result.

I mean, here it looks like it doesn't look quite ordinary.

The camera was very hard to thread. It was a very hard to thread camera.

And you had to go into what they call a changing bag, which is where you

couldn't see your hands. And you put them in a black bag and you would take

plates off the magazine and trade the film out.

And one time out in the swamp, I went into the bag and once I get the plate

You know, and once I was empty, I would bring it out of the bag, and inside the

magazine with the film were all these dried leaves.

I don't know how they got in there, and they didn't seem to damage the film, but

it was full of, like, leaves and stuff from the trees out where we were

Now, this ranch, that's George Kelsey's wife.

Yeah. And the bluegrass player you pointed out to us is in that scene as

That's right, and he was the acting sheriff of Oviedo.

Did he replace George Kelsey?

I'm not sure if he was George's replacement or if there had been anybody

between them. I don't know how long ago George had been the sheriff.

But, you know, we picked this little town because it was close enough to

to drive through, but it was far enough away that it was a completely different

culture.

It was one of those towns where you didn't want to be black, you know.

It was just, like I said, it was just completely different culture from

It was like stepping into another world.

I first got out to Orlando in 1987, which was about eight years after you

this, nine years.

And I remember that about Obedo. I remember it was very, you were, it was a

different universe.

Yes. Now, this film was shot, not shot on a negative. It was shot on positive

film. It was shot on ECO, which was the film Doc used in Texas Chainsaw

Massacre. And ECO was never meant to be projected. It has a very soft emulsion

and a blue tint to it.

It's meant to make another copy of it.

It's meant to be, you know, it's sort of a positive version of a negative film

style.

And because we thought this would be blown up and played in theaters, which

the only market, there was no home video, and television certainly wasn't

to take this.

There's that mask again, but painted differently.

We used ECO. The problem with ECO is the ASA rating.

It was 25 and 40.

I think maybe it was 40 indoors, and if you put an 85 filter on

it outside...

It was only 25 ASA, which is incredibly low. So even when people stand in the

shadows, they go super dark. It would be hard to get an exposure in the shade of

a tree.

Now here's a shot, again, that looks like it's right out of the brain

So this is why in the daytime, underneath a porch like this, there's a

there trying to get an exposure on her because the ASA was so, so low.

When we did shock waves...

They just brought out a new negative. The negative was 125 ASA, and everybody

thought they'd die and go into heaven.

Because that's high. Now, of course, you can shoot 400 ASA and all that other

stuff. But when you're shooting ESO, it was 25 and 40, which is an incredibly

low, low, low to work with. And when you're indoors with people, the lights

to be almost right up against them. It was just really, really rough.

Especially when you have sunlight mixed with shade.

You don't know what to expose for. If exposed for the shade, then the sunlight

burns out a little bit, like you see there on those leaves next to that guy.

But it's just the hazards of making movies.

The kids today, you don't need any lighting to shoot this HD stuff. No, no,

don't. There's one of the dogs. You know, eventually a little dachshund ran

there. I don't know if we used that shot or not, because it seemed kind of silly

that a little wiener dog ran over and started eating this guy's insides, which

was chicken, fried chicken, I think, from the fin and feather.

And I think a lot of this stuff is silent here, and it's probably because I

talking to them.

I don't know.

It's hard to say.

But, you know...

Alan Duckworth had come on as the makeup artist at this point, and he did a lot

of little partial appliances and things, and you see the guy breathing there a

little bit, you know.

Any port in a storm, brother.

Now, this has got an unusual story here.

It's open air. Was there a reason for that?

Well, there had been a big fire in Oviedo. It only had a grocery store in

drugstore there in the little restaurant.

And the grocery store had burned down.

And to provide groceries for people, they erected a circus tent.

in the parking lot.

And they started selling groceries to people inside a circus tent.

And this is the circus tent. And I'll tell you something, this movie's been

around since 1978, I guess.

No one ever asked me, what the hell are they doing selling groceries in this

giant tent?

And I just did this scene, which comes to nothing.

I did it because I said, how can you not film a scene in that circus tent?

I mean, how could you not do it? So we did this little theme.

I think this girl's name was Edie Stroop. She's got interesting eyes. She

a lot with her eyes in this.

She did. She had a great butt.

That's my tribute to Bill Graffay.

Here you go.

It just was what it was.

Obviously, I think she looked in the lens there. For whatever reason, I kept

Kind of like biohazard where I let the guy say cut at the end of the movie.

That's right.

I always wondered about that because the gag is she opens that up and it's

supposed to spray him, but it doesn't. No, it doesn't. We couldn't get it. We

did so many takes and then he just played it.

These are a couple of local boys, I'm assuming.

Yeah, they're standing there. Standing around.

And there we go with the gag again.

So this would be some of the early stuff. This movie started in the swamp.

It started with the river scenes, with the boats and stuff.

And so this was probably one of the days when we had Buster Crabbe.

And George Kelsey had property that went right down to the river.

So a lot of the movie was shot on that wilderness property and then down to

the... where you could land this boat.

I was always very nervous about all of this stuff because sometimes the water

wasn't very deep, and then sometimes it was, and you have people in zombie

outfits trying to go up and down in the water, and I was very nervous about all

of this sort of stuff.

You have a lot of actors in the water, a lot of underwater photographers.

Yeah, the underwater photography, I shot it twice because the first time I shot

it, again, I rented the camera and I rented an underwater light meter and the

meter didn't work. So I set it where I thought it should be and it all came

black. It was jet black.

So then I went back another weekend, rented it again, went back out and did

again. This time I just opened it up and I went to a higher stock of film called

VNF, Video News Film.

And it wasn't great for making copies of film from it.

But it had a higher ASA rating, like 125.

And I just opened up the aperture all the way on a 10mm lens, which is 16mm,

which is quite wide.

And I just swam along underwater.

Somewhere there's a photo, an underwater photo of me with the camera and Shelly

Young with her foot on the middle of my back holding me down to the bottom

because the camera made you want to bob up to the surface.

Now, did you have one of those underwater boxes like Jordan Klein had?

was a Bolex. It was a Bolex underwater housing.

And when it was out of the water, it weighed a ton.

Now, that's Michelle Nicholas over there on the left. That was Martin's wife.

She was brave enough to go out in the water and do these shots and play a

zombie.

I noticed when she first comes out of the water, she kind of adjusts her hair.

Yeah, well, you know.

Zombie's got to look good, too. Yes, that's true.

And here we go. This must have been your first shooting day with him. It was. It

was probably the first shot done in the film, and it was stupid of me to sit in

the boat and do it. I mean, I could have saved myself a lot of time by doing

just sort of standard coverage, but I had all these brilliant storyboards that

I'd drawn.

And the sad thing was, being as an experience, is that there was a

angle for almost every line of dialogue, and it soon became apparent that if we

were going to move the camera every time something...

every time something happened in the scene that we would never get done.

And I became so frustrated when Buster started getting impatient and he would

sing this little song.

My time is your time.

And I finally got so mad and got so upset with him, I threw the storyboards

the river and watched them float away.

Because as you see here, there's a different angle for almost everything.

had five angles probably since they started coming up.

And that was my idea of how films were made. Well, I was wrong.

There's another one. Completely different angle.

And it didn't really help because I was shooting these sort of master shots and

stuff. I should have gone two shots, two singles, two shots, two singles, and a

little bit of a master. And I would have been out of here in half the time.

But you know what? There was no one around who knew any more than me.

And I knew zero.

I was the...

The person who had the least amount of experience and I had the most amount of

knowledge, there's another angle.

And he was probably one of those actors, we all work with a lot of them, that

they like TV coverage.

They like it simple and quick.

Well, he did serials and he did westerns, B -westerns that were made in

of days, and they probably shot like lightning.

And here I am, I'm switching the angles up about every other line of dialogue.

And that's probably why you see later in scenes where the camera doesn't move,

the whole scene plays with five guys in it.

Didn't he tell you once that he'd made a Western where they had them get off

their horses and walk because they didn't want to pay the rental on the

anymore? Yeah, he said that was the last, that's why he quit the TRC

and stuff.

They took him aside.

told him to do something. And he went back to the guys and said, guys, he

when we get to the bottom of this hill, I'm going to raise my hand and just do

what I tell you to. And he said, I raised my hand and said, dismount men.

It'll be quicker on foot. And they all ran up the hill. And it's because the

horses were going to get overtime after 5 o 'clock. I didn't care about the

actors. They were worried about paying for those horses.

Oh, boy.

Any snakes on the river?

You know, snakes aren't as prevalent as people think they are. The biggest

snakes and the most snakes I ever saw in my life was a few in Magaconda up at

the old Iverson Ranch.

I saw snakes up there, at least two of them that were five feet or longer. They

were humongous.

But Florida, you know, they're out there.

It's like alligators. I don't believe I saw a single alligator while I was

filming in the water.

But when I was on my way to Oviedo one morning, there was an alligator on the

side of the road just sort of sitting there.

It was a big one, too. You'd see them in the ditches and stuff along there.

Now, this is back out at Black Hammock. This was a bait shop.

So this is part of the restaurant. Wow, I didn't realize. It's not attached to

it. It's part of the complex where people got their boats moored up and

And initially, these guys, I shot them getting killed right there, right there

at the Black Hammock.

marina or boat dock or whatever. I don't know why I didn't like it, but I reshot

it again later.

Now it's starting to rain, as it does so often in Florida, so we put a little

thunder in there, and then Mike comes in and they make some mention of it being

a sun shower and that it'd be over before you know it, because we figured

be sunny when we left.

Remember, it'd be three o 'clock every day in Florida.

Yeah, it was like clockwork. Rain every day, but sometimes only for five

minutes. Now this is Chuck Sumner. This is Chuck Sumner.

uh here and he was our partner he's one of the first people that i knew had hbo

and he was one of the first people i knew who had a vhs machine uh it was

the vhs machine was extremely expensive blank tape for eighty dollars it was a

pretty pretty crazy but uh this was obviously uh one of the main

main day shoes because we've got the cp -16 camera now the tv station i had work

was working at had a tv but they wouldn't loan it to me

but what they had was an ancient archon which they had retired when they bought

the cp -16 and they did let me use the archon for the brain beaches and they

gave me the refrigerator full of black and white film which was all outdated 15

years old that's why the brain leeches is incredibly dark it's incredibly dark

filming very hard to see what's going on at times because the film was outdated

but they wouldn't let me have their cp -16

But I did manage to rent one.

It's really interesting seeing the contrast of the outside in this.

Maybe it's a transfer, but I don't recall.

It's raining out there. Of course, the lighting is different. See, indoors, I'm

probably not using the 85 filter, right? So anything outside is going to go

blue.

And then when you go outside, you put this 85 filter on there, which is kind

orangey looking, as you know.

And that makes the outside blueness come down to be, more or less normal, like

this would be with an 85 filter, but it would be blue if I didn't put the filter

on.

These are the docks of Black Hammer? No, now we're at Rock Springs.

We're at Rock Springs where the girl was swimming around with the wet t -shirt

on.

Rock Springs is crystal clear. This is where I shot all the underwater stuff.

The problem with Rock Springs is it has a fairly moving current, and it's only

about three feet deep.

at most places, four feet deep maybe.

Right ahead of them, it takes a left -handed turn at a corner. And at that

moment, it's about six feet deep. So anytime you see the girl with her feet

treading water, we had to do it in that one corner where the creek took a turn.

The problem was that the current was enough that it kept sweeping me down

the river.

And I had to keep trying to fight my way back up to stay in the area that I

wanted to film. Because the underwater camera became like a buoy and it would

just get caught up in the current.

I remember the Rock Springs, there was like an arena kind of area at the very

end. There was a little something there. And again, they never asked us for a

permit. We probably asked somebody for permission.

uh it just was one of those things where we weren't um we weren't denied uh and

again i'm not sure who these guys were they might have been a tv station but as

you see as these guys stand up you can see the water is not very deep at all no

one's gonna no one's gonna drown in rock springs this would be the bend of the

bend of the creek which was about like i said six feet seven feet deep

Here I'm getting very, very, very stylish.

Or a moron with a camera.

It was fluorescent light, so it made everything green.

His eye and everything. And as soon as he pushes it away, of course, the color

kind of goes back to normal. I'm not sure if this was, I believe, I believe

was really a game warden's office.

It's very strange how, you know, back then, if you just asked for something

politely, you could probably have it.

you know if you had any kind of manners at all and you weren't a problem people

people were so they would just want to watch that's it right and this film even

though like you know this lighting's not that great it's probably 70s drive -in

type lighting this movie was made with almost no crew whatsoever there was a

sound guy

And I don't think there was anybody who knew anything about lighting. We plugged

them in the wall. There was a Lowell Totalight kit, a little kit, where the

lights were only about eight inches wide and had like a little halogen bulb in

them. And they were super hot, and we had no scrims, no flags, no barn doors.

They had little flaps that opened and closed a little bit. There were three of

them in a kit.

And except for maybe one other light that somebody may have loaned from the

station, the entire movie was shot with a three -kit light. And it's not

terrible. It's not good, but it's not terrible.

This guy's a real police officer.

Yeah, he looks and sounds the part.

I'm sure the film stock you were using, you had to pump all that light into it,

too. Yeah. I mean, I've seen that with 70s movies in general. There's so

Well, those Lowell Total lights were probably the way to go because they

for a very small light, they were very intense.

They were an intense light.

And I believe we made a scene out of the cop and Buster that wasn't in the

script because in the script...

There wasn't a topless girl swimming around, I don't believe.

So I think we went back and took scenes or footage that we hadn't used,

alternate takes, and packed that together.

Now, that's probably my mom's car because it has her name on the license

in the front.

Is that a Pinto?

No, I think it's a Corolla. I can't tell right now. But Henry Kaplan, you know,

wanted some nudity in the film.

i was a fairly naive sort of kid i didn't know what i i mean i guess it

to me i could have gone to a strip club and you know made some connections maybe

but i called a modeling agency in orlando and i just said i was looking

girl who would do a topic thing why this girl got into that swampy water and

it's only me there was no crew here and again we're talking about uh the the asa

you know what you could get an exposure on her skin but it was just dark and

dark down in there

Dennis was filmed at a different time completely. I just went out with this

one afternoon with the Bolek and shot this scene.

But you can see, though, she's pretty exposed.

Yes. But that water, yeah.

That part of the swamp is definitely

very, very dark.

So this is not the first time you did this for this film, though. I mean,

there's a couple of other.

There was only one other instance of nudity in the film where the girl was a

giant, giant jug, and the footage didn't turn out right or something. It didn't

make it in the film. The girl made it in the film, but her pompous scene didn't

make it, which is a pity because she was a stunner.

And all this stuff here, this was all footage from the underwater stuff that I

just, like I said, after the fact, I tried to piece a scene together with

and stuff from other bits and pieces that I had filmed.

And I still do that today sometimes.

I'll build a telephone call where you hear one actor listening to the other

actor, and when the other actor speaks, you cut to the other person so that

neither person ever speaks on camera, and you can build a phone call out of

and pieces from alternate takes.

Well, this is a pretty fully realized... I mean, there's a lot of different

things going on in this scene considering it's just thrown together. I

there's... There's the girl, there's his comedy. I could be wrong. I don't

know that I am, but I could be wrong about a lot of things.

Considering you only had him for a couple of days, I think it's pretty

amazing how Buster Crabb appears throughout this film.

It's not like a cameo part.

major character yeah so well today i would do it differently um today i would

shoot he would be in every scene of the day which we didn't do back then um and

yeah you wouldn't he would be in he would be in 16 minutes of the footage

instead of eight or whatever it is now and you know this young lady just she

just pulled all this off on her own and we just like i said we added bits and

pieces of stuff i shot at the springs

You know whatever happened to her?

No, it's not a person I would keep track with. I know what happened to Dennis

Underwood.

He married my girlfriend, or she married him, depending on who you ask,

probably. They're still together.

He's got a white beard and white hair now, and he plays Santa Claus every

and she plays Mrs. Claus.

And they're still in the Orlando area, still involved in dance.

Now, this is a sequence that was added later, silent.

It's the return of Shelley, too, right?

Yeah. We did this after the fact because we wanted more gore in it.

And it might have been when we decided to change the title to Alien Dead and

make it, you know, more bloody or whatever you want to call it. The Bolex

I don't know what to do with the lenses, but it has this hazy quality.

which I think gives it a very dreamlike feeling.

It just, it just, it has this otherworldly, you know, like, what were

to ask, that type of look. And I think we're playing the song from the Brain

Leaches. Yes, yeah.

That came out on a 45 RPM record, the love theme from the Brain Leaches.

That's great. And they're playing it, and the voice on the radio, on their

radio. Is Ray Roberts the hero of the film? When you hear them say, blah,

blah, blah, blah, and he's doing the radio disc jockey, that's Ray Roberts as

well. The song is sung from the alien perspective, and I always love the

we just want your body, we already have a mind.

Yeah, well, there you go.

So the whole idea here was just to add some cheap thrills to the

film. I'm not sure who all the zombies are.

Now, that's their truck, though. I had the wherewithal to put George Kelsey's

truck driving through.

Might have helped if I had established that truck as George's earlier, so that

you know that is the truck when you go through. But that's just how clever we

were. Now, there's Shelly in the middle, and there's my brother John on the

right side in the checkered shirt there.

And now they're zombies.

There's some slow -mo, as I recall.

Yes, well, the Bolex would run at any number of speeds, so I decided at one

point to give it a spin and see what would happen.

We're on some kind of a dirt road here, or a shell road. You know, Florida uses

a lot of crushed seashells instead of gravel, because I guess they've got more

of that.

This is another case of something funny going on with the Bolex lens.

And you know, for all, and there's another shot like right out of the brain

lesion, for all of its problems, this is the most distributed motion picture I

think I've ever made. It came out on at least five different VHS labels in the

United States alone. And you can find,

you can find, there's even a box cover from overseas with a nude girl, topless.

you know floating around in a river and there's one with a beautiful painting of

george kelsey firing a rifle from the truck window i've never seen anything

it maybe if you guys are lucky i will put this little gallery on this blu -ray

now that i'm thinking about it it's not too late love to see that is i remember

in the 80s you could find you could find it on various vhs lab labels and the

the issue was always Which version is it? Is it a cut version? Is it a

74 -minute version?

Well, it's like Scalps. There never was a VHS release of it that was complete.

Only until we put it on a DVD and then Blu -ray was it ever complete. It was

always cut.

There's a death by Afro kick.

And he's holding it through his fingers and the green slime's coming out.

You know.

Yeah, and that's your brother.

That is my brother.

But like I said, you can see how hazy the lens is. Maybe there's something on

the lens that we didn't see.

But it has a sort of hazy quality to it.

It makes me remember that Florida humidity, too.

Everything had a hazy quality. It was miserable down there, but you don't know

any different.

It's the way every day is. You don't notice it in Madden until you come to

California and there isn't any humidity.

And here we go. There's the slow -mo shot you were talking about.

Yeah, and it wasn't as easy back then to get a cut off hand and things like

that. Now you run down to Hollywood Toy, you can get brains and arms and legs.

Did you make these?

No, I don't know where. That doesn't look like something we would have made.

looks like something we would have bought.

We just tried to just get some blood and gore.

going here. It's got that H .G. Lewis look to it. What did you use for blood?

I used the old Dick Smith Cairo syrup flower and food coloring.

You know, because it was cheap and you could make it because you couldn't,

again, it's very hard to buy stage blood in Orlando in 1977.

This guy's putting liver in his mouth. I thought that was pretty good.

This guy's got a mouthful of blood the way he bites her.

it should run down run down her arm there it is there it goes there it goes

then we had her cough out a little bit more blood you know no budget no budget

you know what can you do what has the desire to fight i think well you know

somewhere along the line you know and to continue with our uh with our naivete

we we truly believe this would play in theaters

We truly believed that this was going to go to the drive -in.

And were you consciously protected for 185? We definitely tried to, but

there weren't any guides because we didn't have a monitor, obviously. You

looked through the eyepiece. You had to try to imagine.

There's a peacock, and it honks like a horn on the soundtrack.

This person has peacocks, and the peacock makes a noise, and then it

And you can hear it on the track. As soon as I turned the camera on, all

animals decided to start running through. A dog, I think, went through.

horses.

Peacocks.

You name it.

This actor here playing the doc.

Martin Nicholas.

Oh, again.

Doc Ellerby.

So he's playing the same character from the print shop.

I thought, okay.

It's the hat that threw me, I guess.

He's got his doctor's hat on. He's got his doctor's hat, his doctor's bag.

And they're going to go here.

And there goes some other animal walking back there again.

It's like when you turn the camera on, everything comes alive.

There goes the dog. The actress playing the female lead, the blonde.

I think her name was Linda Lewis.

She was, if I'm not mistaken, she was the wife of kind of an Orlando bigwig

who owned drapery doors, curtains.

And there was an article about me in the paper when I did the brain leeches.

And she contacted me, and she wanted to be an actor.

And she came over, and I did an appliance on her face with a skull which

kind of eaten away.

And that picture also found its way into the newspaper with an article about me.

And I liked her because to me, she kind of had movie star looks.

You know, I saw her and I said, you know, the camera likes her. She kind of

looks like she belongs in a movie.

And again, she was very willing to get out in the swamp and get out in the

water. And she was very dedicated.

This is a flashback. Here's the houseboat. Now on this houseboat,

Were these Yankee tourists and this girl she did Originally did pop the top and

she did go topless in the scene But that something went wrong with the footage

or whatever. We didn't have it I was gonna ask you about her She you see her

sort of the Daisy Dukes outfit with the white blouse tied and she's just smoking

hot. Yeah, there she is And there's my brother he's wearing a different shirt

than he was when he came up as a zombie.

I don't know except that maybe

That one scene, one of these things was done at a different time.

I don't know. This is actually on this houseboat.

And this is the girl on the left. That's her.

I wish that footage survived.

Now, are they in that houseboat? Yeah, that's the houseboat. Yeah, for real.

You know, trying to, again, this is something Henry wanted because, you

made Girl in a Chain Gang and shit like that, you know, or A Thousand Convicts

and One Woman, or, you know, some of those great Jerry Gross movies.

And at the time, Henry was interested in getting Jerry Gross involved in this,

and I believe Jerry Gross was running the counter of a 7 -Eleven.

But he did make a comeback, and he did Zombie.

Or maybe that was the comeback, but I remember at the time here,

He was working on 7 -Eleven.

Now, that's just a hand holding some sparklers. That's supposed to be the

that falls and destroys the house. That's ridiculously bad.

Paul Bladedel, who was a guy who did effects for AIP back in the 50s, like

She -Creature suit, offered to do that falling meteorite shot for me. Really?

Yeah. But he wanted $1 ,000. And there's no way on a $12 ,000 movie that we

could afford...

to give paul blaisdell a thousand bucks but i i was um i was impressed that he

was willing to sort of come out of retirement uh to do that now this the

here in the daisy dukes yeah who is that she was a belly dancer i don't know how

he found her she was a belly dancer and um and we wanted someone in this film uh

to do this flashback to explain

where all these guys, these monsters came from.

And, you know, it's a pretty big cast for a nothing movie. I just, most of

people just escaped me in my old age. I mean, I don't know how old this movie is

right now.

But I probably shot it in 77.

Almost 40 years old. Almost 40 years old. Well, I'm only 49.

So, that you were nine. I was nine at the time, yeah.

Pretty impressive film for a single. This is a nice reveal, too.

Yeah, one of those, and he's crazy, you know, he starts cackling and laughing

and stuff.

The movie would have been a lot better, I think, if we'd shot the entire film

with the CP -16 and had production down all the way.

As it is, you know, like I said, we just kind of shot the script and then found

out we didn't have enough to make a whole movie. And so without having the

to continue to rent this expensive camera all the time, you know, we

resorting to the Bolex and the silent footage.

But like I said, it's never stopped this film from being distributed. I kind of

wonder if it was just that the licensing fee was so damn cheap or whether or not

there was no one watching the store, you know.

of who had the distribution rights. It might have just been a master floating

around, a lot of fly -by -night companies, you know, get their hands on

Now this girl here, she agreed to come out and do the theme complice.

And for sure, once we got out there, she didn't want to do it.

And she was hired to do it.

But, you know, we're stuck.

So a lot of plaid flannel shirts in this hillbilly community.

So she wore this white top that was almost the root.

And I remember she was one of these girls who had sort of like predominant

prominent ears. And she would always hook her hair behind her ears. And I've

always said that I've never liked girls who used their ears as hair control

devices.

Well, those are certainly large enough ears to do the job.

She's going along here. It's only about three feet of water.

But you can't really tell until she stands up. Somebody startles her.

There she's downwards deeper.

They startle her and she stands up and then you realize, oh my God, she's only

in like three feet of water.

You know? But this was Rock Springs and the water was crystal clear and we

weren't scared of cold.

You can just see how cold it was right there. Yes, you can.

In vivid color.

3D.

But yeah, no, we went for the underwater.

I mean, as crude as this film was, as amateurish as it was, and there was no

underwater GoPros to go to, it was a 50 -pound camera.

And I was terrified to be out there with the CP -16, which was a $15 ,000 camera

on a tripod. I said, this was a fall over. See, now she stands up, you see

shallow the water is.

If that camera was to fall over, it'd be the end of us.

Yes. It would be the end of us.

Well, I remember those cameras.

Underwater housings were pretty big. It was like 50 pounds.

It was big. Cast iron.

Looked like Sputnik from outer space or something.

Or a Mac.

An iMac.

Those guys came along just so she could stand up again.

This is me just swimming along during that curve where it was the deepest.

A little fish would go in front of me.

I'm just cruising along, and I'm just holding my breath.

There's a gooba gear used in this movie.

Everybody just held their breath, and I would just stay down as long as I could,

you know, until I couldn't stay down any further.

Shelly stood on my back, which she did a few times.

Well, I think the amount of underwater footage that's in this kind of elevates

it, too. I mean, you've got...

You've got a name actor in it. You've certainly got the amount of gore, nudity

you want. You've got some production value with the underwater stuff.

And it's a great title, too. I mean, commercial title for that title? Well,

know what? It was a great title. And I think even Canon Films distributed this

at one point.

And there's one of the deeper, deeper water sounds.

Now, back in the narrow end, that's got Sumner behind her.

Where he wanted to plant a rayon, a bandwagon.

Now, George, I don't know why he killed the bobshell turtle.

I should be sharpening a knife or something, you know? I said, well, why

kill it? Well, I'm going to eat it later, you know?

Okay, George.

Now, I love this.

These guys are trying to cop a feel in this girl's pits in the worst possible

way. And if you keep your eye... Now, this guy, remind me later, this guy shot

me. He shot me right here. I thought I would die. Now, watch.

He's copping her feel right now.

As they take her away, they're squeezing her boobs for all they're worth.

I don't know if I blame him.

Jordan made his own blank.

He loaded his own blanks. They were yellow.

But he also had, in the box, he had real shells that were yellow. And I said,

God damn it, make sure you put the blank in there.

You've got the blank.

Don't worry, Fred, don't worry, Fred.

And I'm running that camera. And he comes down and he fires that thing. And

feel something hit me in the stomach, on the thigh, and ripped through my shirt.

And I went, oh my God, he shot me.

And I was afraid to look down. I thought my guts would be hanging out.

And I looked down and there was a hole in my shirt. And I looked down and there

was a welt the size of a silver dollar.

He had used cork.

as the wadding on his blanks and the cork even though he wasn't firing

at me the cork veered because it wasn't a bullet it the wind has you know the

atmosphere has its effect on him and it curved and it curved over and hit me um

coming out of that gun and i was i was furious i was furious i thought you know

this guy shot me and i thought my life was over wow i was pissed you know

Sometimes he did fire live ammo because he would say, well, this is my property.

We can get away with it. Now here there's a ranger tower that they used to

for forest fires. There wasn't anybody up there that day, so we climbed all the

way up there.

We didn't always take the easy way out. We were amateurish. We were naive.

But it wasn't for want of trying.

You know what I'm saying?

We would do things like climb a ranger's tower or go underwater.

We just...

We just didn't know what to do. Well, it's the classic thing of, you know,

you rather ask permission now or apologize later?

Well, it was even that, but I mean, time was an issue for these films always,

and the time and effort that it took to climb, you know, you had to climb. Those

are stairs.

How's that climb to the top of a lighthouse? I think it was 111 steps to

up there without equipment.

And we would do these scenes and then we would just record dialogue and lay them

over the truck.

Now, I always wanted to set a car on fire. Someone gave us a car and at the

moment they said they didn't want us to burn the car.

And so what I did is we wet the car down and placed newspapers on the car

surface and put kerosene or something onto the, or lighter fluid, onto the

newspaper and we lit that on fire and it didn't damage the paint on the car.

So we got the car burning.

Doc Ellerby's car, supposedly.

We got the car burning without actually damaging the car.

Well, it's pretty convincing.

Yeah. At least.

Again, we were trying.

It's stupid to know any better.

Now, the poster you were talking about is based on this thing?

Yeah. And I don't know why, but someone did one that was fantastic, like Italian

paintings for the poster. And it was really George pointing that rifle.

Here and there you can see some light leaks going on the side of the film that

comes from probably me trying to change it out of the changing bag Now this was

supposed to be sort of it at night.

You don't didn't have to try We talked about the exposure problems with his low

low as they begin with And here's how they feel. They see Doc Ellerbee Now

typically, you know, we should have looked over seen Doc Ellerbee then cut

to them and George ran over But that's not how we did it

It wasn't really edited. It was assembled.

I mean, I'm not an editor. I never have been. I don't claim to be.

He gives a little squeal out here when they take him down. Was that him?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We didn't have any edge coating, so any time you wanted to make an edit, if you

wanted to find a thing again, you had to make these grease pencil marks all over

the soundtrack and the picture so that you could sync them back up after you

the slate off.

It was quite, it wasn't even cut on a moviola, it was cut on two rewind arms

with a little viewer in the middle.

So you couldn't hear the sound in sync and you couldn't run it at real time and

watch it as a film. I mean, it was really just an assembly that is just

amazing that it ever got done at all.

So obviously we're doing the old Night of the Living Dead thing here. We're

still at that hunting camp.

I always kind of liked this sequence though. It felt...

For a minute, almost, like we were making a movie.

Well, the tone, the third act of this thing, the tone gets pretty dark.

You know, the humor goes away, and it's pretty relentlessly dark.

Oh, and there's a spear gun.

Only in Florida. And then gunpowder. Oh.

You couldn't buy gray powder, but you could buy black powder without a

because that was used for, like, muzzle loading. There's Henry Kaplan.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

So you can buy black powder, which is why when George shoots, I made my own

squibs, and when it blows out the back of the zombie at the truck, big black

boom of smoke comes out.

It's because black powder creates a lot of smoke. Gray powder is the smoke

variety.

So we were able, though, to make a bomb.

And that's, I think, Michelle Nichols' hand.

We made a bomb to explode, like when they throw the can of gunpowder.

and we put it in the ground, and Chuck Sumner was going to film it.

And somebody called me and said, Fred, look, look.

And I looked over, and Chuck was on his knees with a lit sparkler. He was going

to put the sparkler down into the bomb to use as a fuse, but it was throwing

sparks off.

And all of a sudden, the bomb exploded right in his face.

And he came over, and he was okay, but his hair, his eyebrows were gone.

His hair was singed and he had that smell, you know, of burning hair.

And I was like, I didn't want to say, oh my God, why did you do that?

But he blew himself up.

And Michelle Nicholas, I believe, is walking with a limp here. She twisted

ankle in some way. You see her right there. She's limping.

Now this is the scene where Mike throws the Molotov cocktail.

And it blows that up. This is the redo version of it. I have to chuck and blow

this stuff up.

He doesn't last long.

No, Mike didn't last too long. Now, Mike had a hernia in real life.

And he couldn't be strapped up.

He's going to be hanging from a meat hook here.

And he couldn't be strapped up there because it was medically not advisable.

was probably too painful, too.

He did a little close -up standing on something with the meat hook coming out

his chest.

And then it was his nephew who subbed for him right there in the

hanging. And I kind of thought that was kind of cool. That's where they used to

hang the deer up, I guess, when they'd shoot them.

I thought that was pretty groovy.

And this was all. I thought all of this was kind of okay.

You know, she agreed to take a little fall here.

You know, which I thought also was very brave of her.

That's the tension.

That's the something.

Should have trimmed the head of this.

Now you see the completists like me. That's right. You'd be missing those

frames. Yeah, absolutely.

Missing those frames.

And they're trying to...

They're going to try to escape.

Now, that, as you know, is not the boat they had before. They had a red strike

on it.

They call those John boats, right? They call them John boats. They're flat

-bottomed aluminum boats. You see them on that show where they shoot those

alligators all the time.

It's an inexpensive boat. It's hard to flip it over.

You can stand in it. A lot of people use duck hunting funnels. Yeah, we had one.

There's a shell coming back out of there.

Could be the most active zombie in this film.

Well, you know, some of them have masks, so it's hard to say how many times you

see the other people, but then she takes the bent spear.

She had a run -of -show contract, right? Yeah.

From beginning to end.

There's another, and that was pretty good. She just jumped over the line

And then they just, kind of like the Wolfman of a later movie, they just pass

out.

Exerting themselves.

And then we've still got a little more river action coming.

Yeah, you've got to wrap this thing up. I don't think there really was an ending

to this movie. It was a nice little out of focus. How do you get a shot like

that out of focus?

You just do it.

And our last appearance of... Well, you know, that's kind of it. You want your

star in the beginning, the middle, and the end.

And he was doing this...

Southern accent, that was part of his contribution with the southern boy

He didn't actually talk like that.

Crab? Yeah, buster, yeah.

Yeah, more of a natural midway accent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He had a, it was

rough, like, you know, cowboy type accent.

Did he smoke? He smoked a lot. He almost chain smoked. And I was stunned that a

guy who was an Olympian swimmer, blah, blah, blah, smoked as much as he did.

I got photographed of him and it's long gone.

I don't want to be darned. But you know what?

Buster was in charge of Buster.

That's true.

That's true.

I love that there's a last line from Buster.

Dreamers and fools. Yeah, dreamers and fools. Come on, Campbell.

And we went ahead and did a free frame, which was also expensive for the type of

film at the time.

Nowadays, you know, you do it in your computer and it costs you nothing.

That's a slick optical for your end times, right? Yeah, we had to pay

It was one of the things we couldn't do ourselves.

And now you can see who the different people were.

A lot of these people. I wonder if it tells you who the girl in the water was.

Girl swimmer, Jacqueline Davy.

Edie Stroop was the girl. Edie Stroop, yeah.

Her I remember.

And it probably might tell you, might tell you who, where we got that

restaurant. With the Bluegrass Express.

And they let us add an album out, and they let us use the tracks off their

album. And real bluegrass doesn't have a drummer.

Now, Paul Johns and Sugar Lee, he was the star of Brain Leaches, and he lived

the apartment complex where I live. And they had performed at the Holiday Inn.

I was incredibly poor.

I didn't even have a car, I rode a motorcycle.

And I used the motorcycle as collateral on a loan that my mother co -signed for

me to get my share of the money.

My mom co -signed a loan at the bank and they gave me $2 ,500 and then I just

sort of earned the rest as I went.

And that was how I came up with my share of the money and I did pay the loan

back and kept my motorcycle.

It says 1980, but I believe this was filmed probably in 1978.

Probably took us that long to get to the end. And it's taken the viewer a long

time. Steve, it's been great.

Oh, I've enjoyed this. Thank you for coming by the Alien Dead Blu -ray

commentary.