Here it is: the final CHEAP SCARES "deleted scene." For those who are interested, I'll continue to blog about making low budget horror films, but in real time, on SLIME CITY MASSACRE, rather than looking back.

I wrote the screenplay for SLIME CITY in the summer of 1983, after my only year of film school. From the beginning, I intended to make the film with my friends Peter Clark and Robert Sabin. Peter was my classmate at New York City's School of Visual Arts, and he'd shot my student films. Robert was a theatre major at NYU, and he'd starred in my first narrative short. Peter and I studied film production under Roy Frumkes, who'd directed DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD with a student crew, and our classmate, Jim Muro, had worked on Frank Henenlotter's BASKET CASE, which was packing in midnight crowds at the Waverly Twin on West 4th Street. We lived in the SVA dorm, a YMCA called Sloane House, on 34th Street and 9th Avenue, a hop, skip, and a jump from the grind houses on 42nd Street, the Deuce. It was a wonderful introduction to the sleazy world of exploitation films.

Peter and I decided one year of SVA was enough because we wanted to make features, not Super-8 shorts. Both THE DEADLY SPAWN and THE EVIL DEAD played at a Times Square theatre where I worked as an usher. Like BASKET CASE, they'd been shot on 16m and were blown up to 35m for theatrical exhibition. It occurred to us that with enough persistence, we could bring a horror film of our own to the big screen (or at least to the Waverly) without logging in three more years of film school.

All I knew when I wrote SLIME CITY was that it would be an urban take on THE EVIL DEAD ("urban" had a different connotation back then); that the heroine would chop her possessed boyfriend into little pieces; and that those pieces would keep coming after her. I wrote the lead role of Alex, who is possessed by the spirit of an evil occultist named Zachary, for Robert, my Bruce Campbell. I didn't own an electric typewriter, let alone a computer, so I banged out the screenplay in marathon sessions on my Olivetti manual. Whenever I finished a draft, my fingertips were bruised and bloody. I bled for my craft, damn it!

None of us knew the first thing about raising money or shooting a feature, so one year later, all three of us quit our jobs to work for free on John Michaels's horror spoof, I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE. We didn't learn everything that we needed to know about producing a low budget feature, but we were satisfied that we'd learned more than we would have if we'd remained at school. For example, I learned that the sound term M.O.S. stands for "Mit Out Sound"--a term popularized when German filmmakers fled Nazi Germany. Of course, the guy I learned that from actually graduated from film school...

The follow ing summer, in 1985, we decided we were ready to make our epic, and we hooked up with a couple of Wall Street wizards who wanted to break into the film biz with a horror project. They loved the script for SLIME CITY, and offered us $150,000.00 to shoot the film. To us, this seemed like Cecil B. DeMille money.

Two special makeup effects artists, Scott Coulter and Tom Lauten, who had worked on such Troma films as THE TOXIC AVENGER and CLASS OF NUKE 'EM HIGH, agreed to do SLIME CITY on a $7,000.00 SFX budget. Since Robert was about to leave for an extended tour of Europe, Peter and I paid for Scott and Tom to do a full head cast of him so they could design the prosthetic appliances he needed to wear to become Zachary. The excitement I felt during that makeup session was palpable; I'd wanted to do something like that ever since the fourth grade, when I'd seen footage of John Chambers making up Roddy McDowell for PLANET OF THE APES. There's nothing quite like the intoxicating smell of latex in a basement studio. Robert departed with a scheduled return date, and Peter and I dove into pre-production.

One of our Wall Street Wunderkinds took me to lunch and said he wanted to bring in another writer to "punch up" my script. You know: the script that he and his partner loved so much. They didn't want Alex/Zachary to kill Alex's best friend, Jerry, whom they considered the most likable character in the script. I explained that it was necessary for Alex to kill Jerry to show far had he had fallen. Besides, this was a horror film, and likable people suffer nasty deaths in horror films! They also didn't want Lori to chop up Alex at the end; they wanted Alex to live, and for love to save the day as it had in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE. I argued that FREDDY'S REVENGE sucked! "It made more money than the first one did," my soon-to-be-ex-executive producer said. "You can't argue with success." As he paid the check, I vowed to remain an independent filmmaker--which is partly why I'm now featured in a book about obscure horror films. The worst aspect of the film's collapse was that I had no way to reach Robert, who was due to return from Europe expecting to make a horror film.

We didn't give up. Independent filmmakers never do. Peter and I spent the next year saving every dime we could. I took a night class in Poduction Management at SVA, and Roy Frumkes, my former teacher, was now a classmate. Roy and Jim Muro were prepping STREET TRASH, based on Jimmy's short film. Jimmy later did some Steadicam work on SLIME CITY for free, which of course led to him becoming one of the top Steadicam operators in Hollywood...

Peter and I became friends with Frank Henenlotter, who put me in touch with Edgar Ivans, his producer. Edgar generously explained the business side of things to me and showed me how to put together a modest proposal. Peter and I decided to raise $35,000.00--less than a Hollywood film spent in a single day back then. For that much, we knew we could get through production and rough-cut editing. We brought in Marc Makowski, a horror buff and regular customer at the video store where we worked, as a co-producer, and friends and family members invested the balance.

In 1986, I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and when I got in touch with Scott and Tom again regarding our special effects, I learned that they lived about a mile away, in a house they had rented to double as their apartment and laboratory. They'd just finished working under Jennifer Aspinell on STREET TRASH and were excited to head up a project of their own. Scott was in charge of designing the facial appliances for Zachary, and Tom was in charge of the mechanical SFX, like Robert's severed head and crawling brain.

With my star "in country," my SFX artists a bike ride away, and money in the bank, I cast the film. In those days, a single ad in Backstage netted a producer 1,000 resumes from actors hungry for experience--a good thing since we weren't paying anyone, except for a minor stipend for Robert. Since we weren't asking for anyone to perform nudity--another reason why I'm featured in a book about obscure horror films--we got double that amount. As soon as I saw her headshot, I knew Mary Huner was the ideal choice to play Lori Swan, Alex's virginal girlfriend. Dick Biel had played the wheelchair-bound killer priest in SPLATTER UNIVERSITY, and I cast him as a police detective. For Jerry, whom our former producers had hoped to save, I cast my college roommate, T. J. Merrick. This started a trend: I tried to kill all of my roommates in subsequent productions. The one role I had trouble casting was Nicole, the gothic femme fatale who lures Alex to the dark side. The part didn't require nudity, just outgoing sexuality. Actress after actress turned down the role, and we had to start without a bad girl.

Our first day of shooting was in an apartment in Alphabet City, aka lower Manhattan. The day got off to a great start when I had to race back to Brooklyn because I'd forgotten to bring the film. On our way home, a Cadillac flipped over at an intersection. We hopped out of our production van, tore out the caddy's windshield, and pulled four bloody, but only dazed, passengers out of the vehicle. We took off before the cops arrived, humming the theme song to TV's THE A-TEAM.

We transformed my three-bedroom apartment in a two-family house into a production headquarters-studio-hotel. For the climactic sequence in which Alex's decapitated noggin continues to taunt Lori, Robert had to sit on the floor with his head sticking through a hole in a false, elevated floor. When it wasn't being used, this set took up the entire living room. After a 16-hour day, I'd see unidentifiable bodies sleeping under it, on it, and beside it, like vampires hiding from sunlight. Bonnie Brinkley, our production designer, turned the front porch into her office/bedroom. Ivy turned one bedroom into her wardrobe department/bedroom. And I kicked my roommate Nelson Wakefield (whom I later "killed" in NAKED FEAR!) out of the house so we could use his room for storage.

Although we were shooting 16-hour days, Peter and I would stay up an extra 2 hours after everyone else crashed so we could mix up the slime for the next day's shoot because Scott and Tom had so much work to do. Our slime--methylcellulose--is used as book-binding glue--and as a thickening agent in milkshakes at fast food restaurants!

On SFX days, Robert arrived at Scott and Tom's before sunrise, and they'd go through the grueling ritual of gluing Zachary's face onto his own. Then he'd put in his full shooting day, and then the makeup would come off. Scott and Tom were great at keeping Robert calm throughout the process, and they admired his easygoing attitude. The only time he ever lost his cool was when he wore a false latex stomach from which sausage-like intestines needed to spill out when Lori guts Alex. The slime inside the prosthetic was cold and...slimy...and when we had the shot he yelled, "Somebody get me the hell out of this!" Robert recalls that as the days grew longer, the time allotted for makeup removal grew shorter--and more painful.

Halfway through the shoot, I still didn't have my Nicole. Desperate, I offered Mary the chance to play dual roles, one good and the other bad, and she jumped at the opportunity. With the help of a black wig and Ivy's outrageous costumes (previously used in various Troma flicks), she became Nicole. That's the kind of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants decision you have to make on low budget shoots, and everyone was thrilled with the end result, which added a layer of depth to Alex's sexual frustration with Lori and obsession over Nicole.

I cast Eva Lee as the prostitute that Alex/Zachary brings home and murders. I later learned that a few months earlier, Eva had exploded at a Troma casting session: "Why do you guys think that Asian women can only play hookers?" Oops. I guess I won her over with my charm. I don't think Eva believed me when I told her that no nudity was required, because she arrived for her shoot with a bodyguard named Anthony, who resembled Meatloaf. Anthony didn't watch over Eva, because he was too busy devouring all of the food in our kitchen; he literally left us with crumbs.

We spent 5 days shooting the climax, and the heat in my apartment was brutal. Mary remembers me waking her up in the middle of the night, shoving a meat cleaver in her hand, and calling "Action!" When Robert gently threw her on top of an art easel that doubled as Alex's dining room table, the easel collapsed and Mary went down hard. Our mechanical head split open on cue, but when it came time for Tom to operate the rod puppet/crawling brain, the methylcellulose dissolved the brain's alginate skin, and he had to stick it into the freezer. Exhausted crewmembers passed out on the floor, and we covered them with plastic to protect them from the slime; those of us still conscious cracked up when one of them ruined a sound take with his snoring.

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We'd been editing for a couple of weeks when we got a frantic call from Scott, who was handling the SFX on anther low budget opus, PLUTONIUM BABY. The NYU film crew had walked off the Connecticut location with their equipment, leaving the director, producer, writer, and cast with no way to complete the film. The Slime Guys--Peter, A.C. and editor Britton Petrucelly, Sound Recordist Joe Warda, and me--boarded Amtrack with the same equipment we'd just used on SLIME CITY.

PLUTONIUM BABY was a 10-day shoot, and we were hired to work the final 5 or 6. The producer, Ray Hirschman, had rented no lights, obliging the director, Billy Szarka (SOUTH BRONX HERO) to shoot entirely in daylight, in wooded property owned by the Rockefellers (without the Rockefellers' permission, of course). This left our nights free, and we partied in the hotel like we were in ANIMAL HOUSE. This was our first paying gig, and the script was being written as we shot it.

We knew we were in Ed Wood territory on our first day of shooting: sleeping campers are attacked by--a radioactive bunny rabbit! The hand puppet that Scott used for close-ups was pretty effective, but the "mobile" bunny was pulled into the bushes on a string. It didn't hop, it zoomed! Two of the main characters, an old man and his grandson, were supposed to live in a cabin. Unfortunately, the location manager was only able to find a children's playhouse on the Rockefeller property, about the size of an outhouse. So in every shot of the cabin, you only see one corner of it. The other characters, hapless campers, are supposedly lost miles from civilization, but in more than one shot, cars are visible driving in the background. The low point for us came when a radioactive monster came stumbling out of the woods-- wearing Robert's face from SLIME CITY! On the last day of shooting, I told Billy that he didn't have enough footage for a feature, and we volunteered to stay on for an extra day for free, but he said no, he was tired and wanted to go home...

The producer hired Briton--my editor--to cut the film, so SLIME CITY went on the backburner. Brit's cut came in at 47 minutes, so they hired us for additional shooting the following month--without Billy's participation--further delaying work on SLIME CITY. We only took the assignment because they agreed to double our rate. These additional shoots were even more hilarious than the originals. Billy was cut out for delivering only half a film, and the star--twelve-year-old Danny Guerra--was a friend of his and refused to return. So screenwriter Wayne Behar concocted the second half of the film as a sequel to the first half. "Danny" is now all grown up, so that another actor can play him--but the cast members who did return hadn't aged a day! We couldn't afford to return to the Rockefellers' backyard and shoot in New York City, so we shot some pickup scenes for the first half of the film in Central Park At least the cars passing in the background matched those from the previous footage...

PLUTONIUM BABY is credited as "a Ray Hirschman Film," but Ray was only on set for one day that I recall--when we shot a nude scene. And Peter directed that, because he was an avid porn aficionado, and wasn't afraid to tell the actors what to do, which is what they need in that situation. Ironically, the editor hired for the second half of the film cut out all of the nudity--all we ever see in a long sex scene is the actress's back. I non-directed some of this stuff, and Ed Walloga, my Assistant Director from SLIME CITY, non-directed some as well. Much of the film consists of long, meandering shots of the radioactive villain, portrayed by Patrick Malloy, wandering Central Park and Manhattan while voice over narration fills us in on his long, meandering thoughts.

In my favorite scene, actress Mary Beth Pelshaw enters her character's enormous apartment with two bags of groceries--and we watch her put them away for five minutes while talking to her (off screen) cat before anything happens. I'm not sure if it was Ray the producer or Ray the director who felt it necessary to pad the film to such an "acceptable" running time. Ray the director did hire a competent stuntman to coordinate the fight scenes, but Ray the producer slowed the fights down in postproduction. There is one well-directed scene in the entire film, when a radioactive mother kills some punks threatening to rape our heroines. Scott Coulter directed this, and he achieved a claustrophobic, Tobe Hooper feel; unfortunately, a critical shot is missing, rendering it as incoherent as the rest of the film.

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Brit and I finished a rough cut of SLIME CITY just before the Slime Guys joined members of the BASKET CASE and STREET TRASH crews on Frank Henenlotter's BRAIN DAMAGE--which delayed post-production on SLIME CITY another 3 months. I made Kevin Bunce my post-production supervisor, and he handled all of the sound editing for me. In the summer of 1987--4 years after I first wrote the script--Kevin and I screened our rough cut for a representative of Vestron Video, the largest independent video label in the world. The rep loved the film, and the head of the label made an initial offer of $150,000.00 for the film--the same figure that our one time executive producers had discussed. That would have paid for the remaining post- production, repaid our investors, paid our cast and crew, and put us into profit. The weekend before we were supposed to receive contracts, Vestron Pictures--which had released one theatrical dud after another--opened DIRTY DANCING to record grosses. Word came down from above: Vestron Video would acquire no more low budget horror films. Several months later, to complete our film, we signed an unfavorable deal with foreign sales rep Alexander Beck, who sold SLIME CITY around the world and kept most of the money. When I think of '80s horror, I can't help but think of Patrick Swayze.

SLIME CITY premiered at the Waverly Twin, where BASKET CASE and I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE had played, then settled into a 5-week run as a midnight movie at the Bleecker Street Cinemas. We packed the house for four weekends--I still meet people at conventions who saw it there--before RAMBO III killed us. I don't bear Sly Stallone any ill will, just Swayze. A couple of years later, the Bleecker Street Cinemas closed and Kim's Underground video store opened in its place--and I managed Kim's Underground a few years after that. It's gone now, too.

Camp Home Video released SLIME CITY on VHS in 1989. They sold a respectable 2,500 units, and just when we were poised to see net profits beyond the initial advance, they folded under mysterious circumstances. I have no idea what really happened, but I heard rumors that the head of the company got into trouble with the mob, and either went into hiding, or never got the chance to hide. In any case, he owed money to his warehouse, and the warehouse sold his entire inventory to various sub-distributors around the world, without paying us a cent for them. The last paperwork I received from Camp led me to conclude that another 2,500 pieces were sold for which we never saw royalties.

Ten years later, EI Cinema, the company that released my second film, UNDYING LOVE, on VHS as NEW YORK VAMPIRE, re-released SLIME CITY on tape. I trimmed some footage, and shot a featurette, MAKING SLIME, which incorporated behind the scenes footage. EI did a nice job packaging it, but DVD had just exploded, and there wasn't a whole lot of demand for a second VHS release of a low budget film that had already sold 5,000 units.
POST SCRIPT:

It took two years to get the slime stains out of the carpet in my Brooklyn apartment. Then we just ripped it up to make the place look different for my second film, UNDYING LOVE.

I still occasionally manage movie theatres (but gave up on video stores), and Robert Sabin has quit waiting tables, but we're both pursuing writing careers. I've published two award winning novels, Personal Demons and Johnny Gruesome, and he's written some of the best un-produced screenplays out there, as well as co-created the cool website 5minutehorror.com.. We plan to work together on a new film this summer.

Scott Coulter and TomLauten have successful careers as special effects artists. Scott runs the biggest digital effects company in Bulgaria, and Tom subcontracted work on Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS films and KING KONG remake.

Mary Huner got married and has a son. I ask her if she ever wears her "Nicole" wig, and she reminds me that Ivy kept the wig. She joined me and Robert and composer Robert Tomaro for two 20th anniversary screenings of SLIME CITY at the Beloit International Film Festival last year, and I expect to see her again this summer.

Sloane House went the way of the Deuce. When some SVA alumni/SLIME CITY vets had a small reunion, we visited our old dormitory, which had been converted into deluxe condominiums.

Some of the people I worked with on horror films in the '80s found religion--in their own way. Formerly one of the top Steadicam operators in Hollywood, and now a talented Director of Photography, Jim Muro became a Born Again Christian. Someone told me that on the set of U-TURN, he got down on his hands and knees and prayed for God to save Oliver Stone's soul. I don't know if that's a true story, but it's a good one. John Michaels became a monk, vow of silence and all. Last I heard, he was shooting recruiting videos for his order--M.O.S., I presume. And I heard that Ivy Rosovsky married a Catholic Priest. God bless them all.

Peter Clark died from heart complications on New Year's Eve, 2000. We'd had a falling out during the post-production of BRAIN DAMAGE, and I was glad that we got together for drinks just before I shot UNDYING LOVE. I still miss him.

In 2005, Mike Raso, the head of EI cinema, arranged for me to spend three days at Ascent Media in New Jersey, supervising the telecine transfer of SLIME CITY to High Definition video for a major DVD release under EI's (now POP Cinema) Retro-Shock-O-Rama banner. Once again, I made a few minor cuts. By letterboxing the film, we achieved the framing for the film Peter and I had desired back when we'd composed our shots for a 35mm blowup. Although we worked from an existing 16m film print instead of the negative for the new transfer, the results were startling. Details I'd never seen before were brought out, and colors enriched; the film never looked so good. It was packaged as a double feature with NAKED FEAR, my third feature, which co-starred Robert Sabin and Tommy Sweeney (the star of UNDYING LOVE), and which had never been released. Robert, Tommy and I recorded commentary tracks, and I threw MAKING SLIME into the mix. In a brilliant marketing move, Raso packaged the DVD in a bright green case.

I've screened the final cut of SLIME CITY at numerous horror conventions, like Horrorfind and Twisted Nightmare Weekend, as well as many film festivals, including the Great Lakes Film Festival in Erie, Pa, and the Halloween Horror Picture Show in Tampa, Florida. Response from fans was terrific, and the reviews were much better than they were when the film was first released. I credit this to a growing interest in '80s horror films, thanks to DVD and the Internet, and a successful marketing campaign by POP Cinema, spearheaded by Paige Davis. Numerous websites, magazines, and podcasts interviewed me in connection with the film, and Best Buy, one of the biggest DVD retail chains in the United States, sold it across the country--our biggest release yet.

In 2008, I celebrated the 20th anniversary of SLIME CITY with the film's stars and crew memmbers. In various combinations, we screened the film at Beloit, Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors, Rue Morgue's Festival of Fear, and the Buffalo-Niagara Film Festival. I even screened it for Roy Frumkes's horror filmmaking class at SVA. Rob Tomaro and I released a Re-Mastered CD of the film's soundtrack, featuring a "Slime City" tribute song by Milwaukee's Holy Mary Motor Club. And there is a lot more SLIME to come.

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(c) 2009 Gregory Lamberson

A version of this flashback appeared in the book Gods in Spandex.