Brett Piper is another filmmaker I interviewed at length for my new book CHEAP SCARES! Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets. Piper has been a hands on indie filmmaking wiz for decades. Check out the trailers (following the obligatory IMDB commercial for far less interesting material) for PSYCLOPS, ARACHNIA and A NYMPHOID BABARIAN IN DINOSAUR HELL. He achieved greater glory as the director of such E.I. Cinema/POP Cinema offerings as SCREAMING DEAD, BITE ME! SHOCK-O-RAMA and BACTERIUM. The following excerpts are "deleted scenes" from CHEAP SCARES.

I shot my first two films on 16m and my third on Hi 8 video. The guy who shot the last one admitted he wasn't a DP, that I was paying him just enough to offset the price of his camera as he was learning how to use it. There was a chilling moment on the set when I looked at the monitor and I said, "You know, it looks kind of dark..." He said, "No problem"--and reached over and turned up the luminosity on the monitor! I just looked at my AD and he took over lighting for the rest of the shoot.

Oh, no! (laughs) I was a DP for a few days on a movie a little while ago and one of the problems I had was, we were shooting it on 24p video, and I'd go and look at the clip on monitor on the camera and I'd go and adjust my lights and I'd come back and somehow it never looked any better. What I didn't realize is that every time I left the camera to go adjust the lights they would readjust the camera. I never knew what I was getting, and I finally caught them doing it and said, "Leave the damn camera alone."

Who were "they"?

The Polonia brothers, who are terrific guys, but let's just say it's an experience working with them. They had many little quirks, but I don't want to badmouth them because they're friends of mine. The thing about working with guys like them is, they do things like that and you laugh about it; other people do things like that and you want to strangle them.

(NOTE: Sadly, John Polonia died earlier this year, before this interview was conducted)

ON REALIZING THAT THE POLONIA BROTHERS WERE IDENTICAL TWINS:

Well they sent me their first movie, FEEDERS, and I knew them before I'd seen the movie, I'd met them first. There's a scene halfway through where the aliens create a clone of one of the characters, who's played by John Polonia. So when the clone shows up it's just his brother, Mark. But they do a whole fight scene, and for the first few seconds I'm going, "Damn, how did they do that?" And then I realized it's like Richard Drefuss in Moon Over Parador, he's got a twin brother. They did the same thing with Linda Hamilton in TERMINATOR 2. But it's quite an experience working under those conditions.


This book has a lot of love and good natured ribbing of the situations and people we deal with. We're like carnival workers that band together in these troops and work intensely together and move on.

That's kind of what separates us from the real movie industry, where there isn't that kind of camaraderie and good feeling; it's all just vicious and back stabbing. It's a horrible business. It really is.

You strike me as the ideal CINEMAGIC filmmaker.

When I read CINEMAGIC I could really appreciate what they were doing, because it was all the stuff I had to invent for myself 10 or 15 years earlier. The only magazine dealing with my kind of movies when I was a kid was (Text) Famous Monsters and you didn't learn a hell of a lot in that; it was fun. Occasionally you learned something. I learned how to make armatures by sitting down with pictures of the KING KONG armature and a magnifying glass and studying the joints. But that was kind of the exception.

It's kind of hard to direct a movie when you're worried about getting cold cuts on the bread to feed the crew.

Oh, yeah. It's really tough, and on some movies it's like warring factions. I never really had to worry much about the crew because pretty much I was the crew. I would have someone help, an extra pair of hands, and I'd have a soundman, because you can't run the camera and sound. Well you can, but it's really something you don't want to do. I've had movies where the actors got together behind my back and ganged up on me and made me shoot almost impossible. Literally sabotaged the movie. And then when the movie is done and it's crap they're all and at you because you stuck them in such a lousy movie.

Which of the films you worked on were directed by Donald Farmer?

That was done under the title BODY SHOP. Now it's got as different title, which I believe is DEADLY MEMORY. That's never been released. If Don could, he'd do every scene in a master take.

Was NIGHT THIRST another Polonia brothers film?

It must be, because I don't know anything about it. I've got a lot of credits I don't know anything about!

Let's try it this way: Is it true that you did makeup and or special effects on a film called HELLGATE: THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED PART II?

No, that's another deal where I simply sent them stuff.

Well, even if you're sending them stuff you're still contributing...

Well that's true, but it wasn't really made for them. It's sort of like sending someone your old clothes and hen getting credit as Wardrobe Designer.

Was ARACHNIA a contentious project while you were shooting it?

It was tough. Most of the problems with that came afterward. The actual shoot was tough because there was no real preparation. The whole point of doing ARACHNIA was to get some cash flow for the studio. They actually said that. The guy came to me because at one point I was dragging my feet, I didn't really think I wanted to do it. He came to me one night said, "If you won't do it I've got to shut the studio down and lay everybody off." And 'everybody' meant like two people, because nothing was happening. But basically that was the situation there, so I'm really not privy to what went on as far as raising the money and how it was spent and everything. But also, they kept dragging their feet getting the money to me so I could start working on it, and it actually reached the point where I was building props for the Polonia brothers at the same time I was building props for ARACHNIA. I was working 20 hour days. I'd work like 10 on one job and 10 on the other, because the Polonias were paying me and ARACHNIA wasn't.

You didn't get a fee for ARACHNIA?

I did eventually, but not at the beginning, so there was no money to do anything, I couldn't seem to make them understand this. "Look, I've got to build things, I've got to do this, I've got to pay my rent, I've got no money coming in." And this dragged on for a long time. By the time it finally became possible for me to start working on the movie we had to shoot in like two or three weeks. So it was just a rush job. During the actual shoot I was shooting 12 hours a day and then working all night to get props and stuff ready for the next day's shoot. I mean, I literally would come back to the studio with the crew and the actors, and I'd say goodbye to them and they'd goof to eat, and they'd get up in the morning and come back to the studio and see me still working there. I went for like three days without stopping; literally three days without sleeping or anything, just to try and keep on schedule. And that eventually became impossible and we had to bring them all back for a couple days.

You probably directed Erin Brown ("Misty Mundae") in her first so-called straight role, and then by SHOCK-O-RAMA you directed her parodying herself. You probably shepherded a big part of her career, even though if you look at the quantity of films she's done, it's only a small percentage.

A tiny percentage, a tiny percentage. The part in SHOCK-O-RAMA was obviously written for her, not just in the sense that it relates to her career and everything, but one of the things she was always complaining about, and I don't blame her because I feel the same way, is how much time you spend on a set just sitting around doing nothing, even on a small movie like this. I'm busy all the time, but not all the actors are. They have to wait there turn. So I wrote it with her in virtually every scene, so there's be no down time for her. So it was really tailored to her in many different senses.

Did you shoot THE SCREAMING DEAD as well as direct it?

I was the cameraman on all of them. We had five DPs on SHOCK-O-RAMA.

Erika Smith was very funny in BITE ME!

Erika was very funny. I like the cast in that movie. The only thing I'm not so happy with, and I'm not going to complain because it worked anyway, was the way that John Fedele took his character. It happens, or at least it happens to me, a lot on a movie like this, that you pretty much take what the actors give you. And John was fine, he just wasn't what I had in mind: not the look or anything. But this is what he presented me with on the first day of shooting and I just said, "Okay, John, we'll go with that."

Justin (Wingenfeld, who directed SKIN CRAWL) was very funny in that as the pothead at the beginning. It was my first time seeing him act after spending time with him at the POP convention tables.

Justin's a very good actor.

It's easy to be an armchair critic, and if you're an armchair critic armed with a degree you feel compelled to pontificate.

What's really annoying now is that you have the internet, so we have armchair critics who can't spell. You have armchair critics who write an article trashing your movie, and the reviews look like they were written by a 10-year-old. These are people who can't construct a sentence, but they can criticize your ability to construct a movie.

I'm sure you've had this same experience that I have; you take enough knocks on some of these, but eventually you get feedback from people who actually like them, and you realize that there is an audience for your work.

Absolutely. Most people would not like my movies. I finally realized that. Maybe something like BITE ME!, because you have some nice looking girls who take their clothes off, something like that. But the average person would look at my movie, mentally compare it to an $80 billion Hollywood movie, and say my movie's bad. You know, they give you one of the standard lines, "What, did you spend $1.50 on this?" Yeah, something like that. I appeal to a minority audience, that's all there is to it. I appeal to a small, enlightened audience (laughs).

That's pretty much the case with everyone in this book, believe me. We're all making the movies we can, when we can, with the budgets we can muster.

That's why I read books like yours and I don't read books about Spielberg or Scorsese, talented as they are. I'm not interested in hearing what it was like making a mega-budget movie with the finest talent and technicians around. That's bores me. I don't care. If you fail on a movie like that you deserve to be run out of town, or forced tow ear bells around your neck. You have no excuse for failing with a production like that.

I think some of us are at the age now when we know TITANIC is never going to happen for us, and it's easier to enjoy these productions, making them as well as seeing the finished products, than it was when we were younger and starting out. At least that's the case with me.

That's true, although I resigned myself years go to the fact that I was never going to make a big Hollywood movie. I could make movies on the level I am now and that would suit me just fine. I'd like them to be better, but that's just a matter of me getting better at my job.

It's saying a lot that you've been able to make a living at it.

Well, I didn't really make a decent living until I got to E.I. I didn't make a great living there, but I made a living.

The one time I met you in person, albeit briefly, was at the big complex, 10 Park Place. Paige Davis had just started there and she gave me and one of my partners a little tour of the place. You were off to one side in your little shop, painting one of your creature models, and we got to see the spaceship set with the big brain creature from SHOCK-O-RAMA. It was very exciting, just like being at EMI. I don't know if that was during pre-production or post-production, but that's certainly what everyone in the office was cued to discuss when we came in, possibly because you were there for show and tell.

That's certainly ironic, because Mike hated that we had all that stuff in there. Mike Raso likes a nice, neat studio with no signs that anybody's making a movie there. We used every square inch of space in that studio for that movie. My production designer, Christina, barely a production designer--she was the only person I ever worked with who's learned how to do these things right. She could step onto a Hollywood set and know what she was doing; nobody else could, including me. And she sat down with this big floor plan and said, "Okay, if we build this set here, and this one there, and this one around the corner, and the back of this set becomes the front of the other set..." She mapped it all out, and there was just one tiny path that led through the studio for the people who had to get through to the edit rooms.

Is it a coincidence that SHOCK-O-RAMA was the title of the original version of your anthology film and that ended up being the name of the label, or did you give them the idea?

It was a total coincidence. There was no Shock-O-Rama Studios when I wrote the first script, and a lot of people don't believe this, I don't know why. I've had people contradict me on facts about my own movie more than once, and I don't know where they get these ideas. Somebody told me THE SCREAMING DEAD was called that because of HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, and this guy informed me that I had stolen my title from Rob Zombie. And I said, "No, I'd never heard of Rob Zombie's movie until it came out and I wrote the script six months earlier," and he said, "No, you didn't." It's so much fun talking to people who know more about your movie than you do. I can prove that I had the title SHOCK-O-RAMA because I actually found the original script a little while ago and there was the copyright date, 1985 or whatever it was.

It's a hilarious coincidence, though.

Oh, yeah, it is. Although I guess it is a pretty obvious name to come up with: Shock-O-Rama, Techno-Rama, that kind of thing.

Did it happen that you were sitting around with Mike over one of those lunches that he spends so much time worrying about what to order that it becomes a big part of the day, and you said, "Oh, I have this script called SHOCK-O-RAMA..." And a light bulb went off and someone said, "Oh, what a coincidence! We've got to make that..."

We were having dinner at a Chinese restaurant up on the top of the hill, Mike and Jeff Faoro and their legal guy at the time, Mike Weiss, and Mike was saying, "So, you got any idea?" I said, "A long time ago I had an idea for an anthology movie called SHOCK-O-RAMA. And everybody laughed and he said, "Do you still have the script? Can we re-use the episode you shot?" And I said, "You know, I think there are legal problems with that. I don't think we can. I'll write three new episodes." That's basically how it came to be.

I was impressed with A.J. Khan's performance in SHOCK-O-RAMA.

Yeah, and I'll tell you something: she wasn't supposed to play that part; Mike originally pitched to me the idea of Misty being in all three parts. And then we decided that was spreading her a little thin; maybe just two, and then finally it became just the one written for her. A.J. played that part on two days' notice and showed up for her first scene, which had a ton of dialogue, and nailed it. We did her entire scene in two takes, a wide shot and a close up, and she was letter perfect and had only gotten the script two days before.

What was your post schedule on that, with all those effects?

We didn't have a schedule. It was just a matter of it was going to take as long as it took. There was nothing we could do about it and it took a long time, off the top of my head about nine months, but maybe that's just because it was like going through a pregnancy, you know? Waiting to give birth to this thing.

Were you doing a lot of other in-house projects at the same time?

No, not by then. I was working exclusively on SHOCK-O-RAMA. There was so much work to do. During BITE ME! they hired me to do some dinosaurs for BIKINI GIRLS ON DINOSAUR PLANET or something. That was the only thing I did up until SHOCK-O-RAMA was finished, because I really didn't have time to be working on anything else.

It sounds like it was a great setup as far as you being able to do the effects you wanted and writing and directing your own films. I don't know if you were given a list of all the various elements that they wanted or if it was just obvious to you what goes into their marketing.

It was pretty obvious, yeah. I had written THE SCREAMING DEAD on spec on my own, but with all the others I knew what elements they wanted. The funny thing is, Mike kept getting me to pull back. "Do you really need this much nudity? Do you really need this much T & A?" So I kept cutting it down, which I though was ironic.

I think there was a brief period when they found out some of their markets were more interested in monsters than sexploitation, which was good for me.

Yeah, there was that and I think they liked the idea of getting away from the stuff they were known for.

It's ironic that she left E.I. to disassociate herself from the "Misty Mundae" name, but she continues to work on films that they end up distributing.

I think she's credited as Erin Brown in SPLATTER BEACH, and they were the ones who hired her for the project. She was not part of the Polonias' original deal. They hired her and Erika and me to go out there and work on it. And Joe Kolvac, who is one of the editors at E.I., went out too, so there were actually four E.I. people on that movie, and Mike brought us all onto the project.

You edited SKIN CRAWL and KINKY KONG--

I didn't edit KINKY KONG. I edited the effects clips in KINKY KONG, that's all I did. I shot the effects and as soon as the effects went in, I edited them.

What effects did you do on that film?

Brian McNulty edited that film. Brian McNulty did a huge amount of work on that. He actually did the first edit on SKIN CRAWL also, but I did a radical change of that. On KINKY KONG I made the crappy ape suit, or let's say I modified an ape suit. It wasn't the way I wanted it to look, but what the hell. Zach Snyg directed that, and he's not communicative, it's very hard to get out of him what he wants, and you finally have to kind of take a wild stab at it. I would have done an ape suit like something out of KING KONG VS. GODZILLA. The frustrating thing on that movie was that it wasn't even a mask, it was a gelatin appliance that I applied to the guy's face. And it was frustrating for two reasons: one, he kept leaving, so if you look at it it's cockeyed, because he wouldn't stand still when I was putting it on him; and the other thing is that even though it was an appliance, and he could do all kinds of facial appliances, he didn't bother--so it looked like a mask. And it's funny, because in the behind the scenes stuff he's clowning around and you can see how expressive it is. But on film, it's just the same face all the time. Basically I did the ape, I did all the miniatures, Skull Island, the wall, that type of thing. I was there when they did the green screen and I did a lot of the compositing, to put Kong in the background, and then I did the stop motion of the goofy looking T-Rex.

I was quite shocked to see that on one of the HBO channels at about 1:00 AM the other night--

That's how they make money.

I watched about eight minutes. I wasn't even upset that it was just one sex scene after another, it was the low brow humor in between those scenes that made me give upon it. So I didn't even get to see your effects.

That's very funny. It's ironic, too, because I find the lowbrow humor the only thing that makes the movie bearable.

I just don't find stupidity for the sake of being stupid entertaining. I saw one of Zach's other movies and I thought it was funny. I'm just not into the spoofs very much. Satire is the easiest thing to do.

It should have been much more than that. They were planning that movie for a year and then they finally shot it at the last minute. Originally I was going to have a huge job on that; I was going to do miniatures and it was going to be an effects intensive movie, sort of like E.I.'s version of FLESH GORDON, where you put all this time and effort into making it look good. That was the original plan, and then at the last minute that all went out the window.

Did that happen because they realized Jackson's film wasn't going to be the colossal hit everyone predicted it would be?

I don't know why that happened, to be perfectly honest. The original plan was to release it at the same time that Jackson's movie came out but even that didn't work because they waited too long.

It seems like anytime they try to attempt something ambitious, like the epic TITanic--

Which is a funnier movie...

Things tend to go to the wayside buy the time they actually get around to making them.

Yeah, they admit that TITanic came out like a year too late, so I don't know how well it did for them. They just really drag their feet on these things. I think the only reason that I made as many movies as I did there--and I don't mean this to sound self congratulatory--is that I was basically a self starter. They just said, "You want to make a movie about bugs?" I just said, "Sure," and a month later I'd be making a movie about bugs, because once I got an okay I didn't need anybody's help. But movies like KINKY KONG, which were done sort of in a more normal way, meaning you had to hire a person to do this and a person to do that and have a meeting and all that, took forever.

One thing I like about POP as opposed to Troma is that when Troma makes a movie, things get very hectic and people get on each other's nerves, and it's a lot less friendly than what I think happens on the E.I. films. But it's also the same thing where it takes forever for their films to get released, which is strange to me because it's a distribution company with a production arm; you'd think the advantage would be that you could make them and get them out there really fast and not have to spend a year building buzz, if you can call it that.

From what I understand, it just takes them a long time to finish the damned movies, they're in post forever. And sometimes, what I heard, is that a movie like SGT. KABUKIMAN would literally sit on a shelf for years before they finally tinkered it into shape and released it. And then it's a piece of crap anyway.

You'll get no argument from me...

When I got to E.I., they were in the process of finishing SPIDER BABE. It had just finished shooting. That was when I was doing preproduction on THE SCREAMING DEAD. And I finished THE SCREAMING DEAD before SPIDER BABE was done. By the way, I worked on SPIDER BABE for one evening. There was an effect that the guy couldn't figure out how to pull off, so when he left at the end of the day he asked if I would tinker with it, so I went over to his station and worked on that all night. I got a courtesy credit in there somewhere.

The only movies I've seen starring Erin were directed by Brett Piper. I have not seen SPIDER BABE ...

It's so ineptly made from a technical sense, I hate to say that but it really was. One of the problems with the situation at E.I. is the director does everything. They call you a director and they hire you as a director, but you know you're going to sit down and physically edit the movie, you're going to do the sound mix, you're going to do all this stuff, you're going to shoot any pickup scenes that need to be shot, so if the guy who's directing it is just a director he's lost. And that's what happened on SPIDER BABE. The guy was only a director. I don't even know if he was a new director because I wasn't there. But he couldn't do the sound mix, he wasn't a very good editor, technically he wasn't up to the job.

BACTERIUM seems like a sci-fi/horror hybrid from the 50s--

Yes, that's very much what it is. It's like QUATERMASS or THE BLOB or that type of thing, although not as intelligent as QUATERMASS.

Was it your idea to attempt science fiction, or a group concept?

It was my idea, prompted by Raso. He had gotten this idea, I think it was from the Sci-Fi Channel, that you should do a movie with monsters but they needed to be monsters people could identify with, and by that he meant like a giant bear, or giant spiders. I was just going through all sorts of things in my mind, trying to think of something familiar that I hadn't seen very often. So I thought, "How about giant bacterium? Germs. Giant germs." And it sort of morphed into more of a blob than a germ, but that's where it came from.

And was that another protracted post production period?

It was a fairly long post production because I had painted myself into a corner I didn't anticipate. I thought they were just going to be blobs, not giant blobs, they were going to be like three or four feet. They were going to be like the monsters in that movie Island of Terror with Peter Cushing. It had this little weird, blobby looking monsters on an island off the coast of Scotland. Originally I had the same idea, all I had to do was build three or four bloody, blobby monsters and I wouldn't have any post to worry about. But the "live" blobs didn't work. I couldn't get them to do anything. So we shot the whole movie with no blobs. They all had to be added in post, and that took forever. I had to deal with three different types of blobs, depending what stage they were at, and I had to build miniature buildings and all kinds of things.

It looks like a different cast than usual, and a different cast than I'm used to seeing in your films.

All of the leads were new people. I brought Rob back just for the hell of it. The first time you see Rob he's in bed with a woman, and I thought it would be hilarious if it was Caitlin, like they'd somehow made up after SHOCK-O-RAMA. I even gave Rob's character the same name, so he's Jedd Callahan in both movies. But he only came down for a day. I think it was deliberately planned to have all new people in it because it was kind of becoming obvious to everybody that you can only retread the same actress so many times and then everyone was going to get sick of it.

The funny thing is that because of the distribution a machine that was in place and the promotion that there was, you've definitely got a fan base now.

Oh, I hope so. I don't know.

I don't think there's any question about it.

Well I don't know, because I don't get any feedback or that type of thing. It's not like I get fan mail and stuff like that. I have no idea.

Trust me, set up "brettpiper.com" or Brett Piper's My Space, and they will find you. It's refreshing to get an e-mail once a month or once a week from someone saying they've watched your film 50 times.

One of the problems is that distribution is getting that much harder. SHOCK-O-RAMA got very little distribution and we're not sure what BACTERIUM's going to get. SHOCK-O-RAMA went way the hell over budget, too. It shouldn't have, but it was just a really confused situation at the studio at that time, and nobody was really in charge, and nobody really knew that nobody was in charge because the person who was actually supposed to be in charge had one foot out the door and wasn't telling anyone. So it was just chaos, and money was being spent just to make up for stupid errors or people not watching what they were doing and stuff. The guy who was brought in to be the producer after the nominal producer left, was spending E.I.'s money on sort of sweetheart deals that had nothing to do with the movie.

If BACTERIUM takes off and they decide that the next trend is science fiction, two heartbeats later they'll realize that means special effects and you'll get that phone call.


Yeah, maybe. I'm not worried about it because I was there for a while and I can stand to do something else, you know what I mean? I think also that one more reason why they let me go was because I'd been here for so long that I'd gotten overly familiar; I was just somebody who was there. If I'd been a new guy, they would have seen more potential in me. But since I was someone they saw every day, somehow I wasn't that impressive anymore.

The old furniture...

Exactly, exactly. And it's mutual. I got along fine with everybody there, but it's time to move on.

You're a jack of all trades.

And a master of none!

(c)Gregory Lamberson