Hmmm... This is gonna be long but I hope at least a couple of you will read it and maybe even watch this at some point and tell me what you think.
I've been watching the documentary,
In Search Of Darkness, about 80s Horror movies, for the last several days (it's 4 hours and 40 minutes long and has a
Part II that is another 4h 23m) and saw some interviews with Jackie Kong. Jackie was the director of
Blood Diner and a movie I loved when I was like 12 years old called
Night Patrol with Linda Blair, Pat Paulsen, and The Unknown Comic.
She seemed like such a cool lady, and her story about how she got three Academy Award-winning actors to star in her first film, a low-budget Horror movie financed by a skin-flick producer no-less, just made me really root for her and wanna see her movie.
And I didn't dislike it, honestly. It's not terrible, although many movie-watchers might call it that and many more likely wouldn't even finish it, but all of us here have a different definition for what a bad movie is. There's certainly some pluck to the film and she actually does seem to have an eye for shots (it was apparently her story-boards that got the producer to give her the money to make the film despite her having zero directing experience, not even a commercial or student-film or anything). Honestly, despite terrible acting by lead Rexx Coltrane and a really, really muddy look to the film, I thought it was going along alright.
But then, I decided to read a little bit about the production of the movie. And my feelings started to change.
First of all, the person who gave her the financing for the movie was actually her husband.
Second, he gave her
4.5 MILLION DOLLARS to make this movie. 4.5 million
1981 dollars.
And this is the movie she made.
This movie looks, outside of its gaudy cast (for an allegedly low-budget Horror flick) like it was made for well under a million. If someone told me it was made for less than $100k, with the actors just pitching in for good-will, which is kinda the story Jackie sells, that they just admired her pluck and did the movie, I'd believe it.
But she had $4.5M to spend on this movie.
By contrast, Abel Ferrara made
Ms.45, a vastly superior film in every way, for $62,000.
But maybe that's not fair because Ferrara didn't need a lot of special effects for his movie. So maybe for perhaps a more direct comparison,
The Boogens, which is actually a pretty similar film, was made for $600,000 and is at least as good as, probably better than,
The Being. I mean,
Halloween was made for literally 1/14th of the budget of this film and looks at least twice as good and is of course a classic. So how could this movie appear to be so cheap?
Suddenly I started to question Jackie's story (not to mention her ability). Did she really join Martin Landau's acting class just so she could meet him and make her pitch and did she really sell herself so well she won him over and not only did he agree to star in the film but he also personally recruited two other Academy Award-winners to be in the film, as Jackie claims?
Or did Jackie offer Martin Landau a million bucks for a couple-few days filming to be in her low-budget film and told him she had another $2M for anyone else he could get? And then made the movie, not that well actually, for $1.5M? Which it still doesn't look like it cost to make. And if that
isn't what happened then... where did the $4.5M go?!!! Because I'm not sure if there's even a million bucks on the screen. Did her husband use the film to launder a few million dollars? I just don't know.
My charity toward this film took another hit when I read not one single positive review of the film while virtually every review speaks of its amateurishness not just in the usual ways with Horror but in most of the technical categories as well and I learned that the movie couldn't even get a low-budget distributor for
three years despite the producer and
star (yes she cast her husband, who was not even an actor, as the star of the film, meaning she didn't have to pay for him either) being her
husband and him having gotten distribution for several low-budget skin-flicks! No one wanted this movie.
So, anyway.
I actually didn't mind the movie, I'd probably even watch it again, but I just don't know if you can call a $4.5M movie, in 1981, "low-budget" and I don't think, therefore, that you can use the budget as an excuse for all the short-comings of the film. Which means that maybe it actually
is a bad movie.
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