249: Wirgins and Wampires

Hi, I'm Adam Green, the director of Hatchet, and you're listening to Movie Meltdown. Good evening. The following feature has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America. It is intended for mature audiences and parental discretion is advised. Our nuclear reactor pumping out one million kilowatts of power.

There are worse things than chastity, Mr. Shannon. Yes, lunacy and death. Boys and girls of every age, wouldn't you like to see something strange? Come with us and you will see, this our town of Halloween.

This is Halloween, this is Halloween, won't you stay with the dead all night? This is Halloween, everybody be safe, don't cheat on the game, it's gonna die right. This our town of Halloween. What's up, and welcome to Movie Meltdown. I am Brian, and we are coming to you live via digital recording from the Alley Theater.

Sterling's here with me. Greetings. We are here for Meltdown Macabre. Listen to the crowd roar. Look at you guys.

Listen to the roar. There's some rabble-rousing in there, too, I sense. Anyways, yeah, so we are a dedicated little group of movie watchers who are going to get together and watch one perhaps awesome movie with Allison Scagliotti. Oh, hi. Hi.

Yes. Again, someone else here. Oh, I know. And we're going to watch one potentially awesome movie with Allison Scagliotti of Warehouse 13 fame. Copyright.

And then we're going to watch one decidedly... Well, it may inspire awe, but it won't be because of its awesomeness. It's called Mama Dracula, and we will be commenting on both of those in time. The odd thing is I... I didn't piece together exactly what a good double feature it becomes.

Once you watch both of them, you're like, oh, it does have a lot of weird ties that I did not expect. Excellent. On opposite ends of the spectrum, mind you. They dovetail you, mind you. No offense to you at Chastity Bites.

So with that, I did want to say a big thanks to Lottie and John Knowles, who actually are responsible for Chastity Bites. And I have been working with them for probably about a year or so now, trying to put together something. I saw this early on online and was a big fan of Allison. And because of that, just kind of started talking to him and like, you know, being the geek I am. I was like, this sounds cool.

Is there a trailer? And they're like, no, we haven't made one yet. So calm down. But I stuck with it. And as they finished the project, I mean, they've actually been in post-production and trying to get it out there through a lot of different film fests and going through the horrible rigmarole probably is to get your film distributed these days so um my my condolences on that for them but uh i did want to say thank you for working with us and they put together a good movie so i'm kind of glad we could help them out and uh put together our showing here tonight so i think with that we should roll into chastity bite let's make it happen.

I don't want to deceive you. Though I just might believe you. I will walk beside you. When you say to ride you. I don't need a saviour.

You're my very hand killer. I am my own motion. I think not for what I've become, have to go, while I still know how to be to be free from the fire. Popcorn freshly popped and buttered. Look good?

Sure it looks good and it tastes even better. Get some now. There have been copies. There have been imitators. But no one, no thing can take the place of Dracula.

And now he's back, terrorizing today's cities in his frenzied lust for young, Red blood. Dracula, A.D. 1972. Then, watch an unsuspecting girl become a pawn of death in a game of murder and madness in Crescendo. For lovers of the occult, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing star in Dracula, A.D.

1972. For lovers of the macabre, James Olsen and Stephanie Power star in Crescendo. Both from Warner Brothers, rated PG. Parental guidance suggested. Take a look at me now.

Standing tall, standing proud. You don't need to escape it. Though it's hard to shake it. I would love to snake you. But I cannot drag you.

You don't need to break the bone. Don't do as you please. Well, speaking of Lottie and John, we have them right. Here with us. Say hello, guys.

Hello. Hello. So you two are responsible for the main feature of our Meltdown Macabre Festival this year, the movie Chastity Bites. Thanks for showing us. No, no problem.

I was glad to have you guys there. Lottie, you are the writer and producer of the film. John, you're the director. And I was telling the crowd and the listeners how long I've been interested in the film and I'd been bugging you guys about setting up a showing. But I'm pretty sure for you, it's been a much longer process.

So I guess give everybody a little bit of history as to how Chastity Bites came about and how it all started for you. Okay. Well, I wrote the first draft of the script nine years ago, so it's definitely been a very long journey. John had challenged me about a year after we got to L.A., and I hadn't really written anything yet, to come up with a script in time for a deadline for a horror screenplay contest. And I was just sort of thinking about, you know, I'm a lifelong horror nerd, and I've always wanted to make my own horror movie.

And I just kind of started thinking about what some of my particular obsessions were. And I've always had liked the legend of Countess Elizabeth Bathory because it's just such a bloody, you know, morbid tale of this female serial killer from Eastern Europe in the 1600s. And she and Vlad the Impaler were so inspirational to so many of the vampire stories that came along. And somehow also sort of in my depressed haze of the George W. Bush administration... thinking about abstinence education, the idea just kind of coalesced of Elizabeth Bathory still alive, still needs virgin blood, and how does she get it?

Well, she sets up abstinence education programs around red state America and, you know, finds her crop of Botox that way. Well, I guess I was going to ask you, Latia, as far as in the writing, how strong do you feel your, like, I guess artistic and personal influences are as they come through in your writing is it is it i mean to me some of it comes through pretty simply but uh yeah how much is it something that you that you work in purposefully. Uh yeah let's just say that if you boil lottie down and infuse the screenplay with the essence of lottie There'll never be another movie that's more me than this one. It's just really me. I mean, it's got all of my horror obsessions in it.

It's got a lot of my political and feminist, you know, obsessions or leanings in there. My sense of humor that can range from, you know, kind of highbrow to very silly and campy. And yeah, so I think this movie, God bless John for helping me. And I mean, it's him too. It's very much him as well.

But it's definitely, you know, there'll never be a movie, I don't think, more me than this one, even if hopefully we're lucky to make more in the future. Sure. If you want to if you want a window into lovey's mind it's pretty much it's this movie you're like you're like you're you're looking right in there so so true i think. It's relatively balanced with all of that stuff um I was going to say, I mean, there definitely is a very strong feminist vein running through it, and the feminist ideals are strong throughout the movie. Was there ever a point where you felt like you had to sort of even it out a little, or you need to back off and focus more on just the action or the horror or something else that not let that overshadow what was going on in the story itself?

Well, you know, that's an interesting question. I think that you know, I wanted it to be well-balanced, and luckily I have found that a lot of guys have responded to the movie, too. A lot of fanboys, especially, have really liked the combo because, you know, the combination, it is a strange animal, and it has been actually a tough sell from the beginning when we were trying to find originally other people to produce it than when we wanted to make it ourselves to finance it. And now, you know, we're very lucky we have distribution because, The hybrid of all these ideas has made a lot of people not really want to touch it, where they're like, how in the hell do we market this? But I just was on a mission with this, and I feel very strongly that there's just not enough representation of strong female characters and of kind of flipping the traditional gender roles on their ear.

So I did really go for it this time, and I know not everybody's going to like it, but no matter what you do, that's the case. So I felt like, you know what, I'm going to go balls out, as it were, feminist. And, you know, there'll be people out there who are hungry for that, and that's, you know, that's the credit. And then there's other people who'll just appreciate it on the other levels of horror comedy. We've already had great response, though, from girls, young women who have come up to us after screenings at various festivals and just said, thank you.

Thank you for making something that makes me feel good about how I feel as a woman, as a young girl, with my sexuality, with my attitude towards feminism and everything. And so I think that kind of hit the target. you know, with that segment of people who are just very, very hungry to see these kinds of characters up on the screen. Yeah, and just a movie that really focuses on women, and, you know, of course we have some guys in there, we have one great guy, but he doesn't get to be the hero, you know, and ultimately the most important relationship isn't even the guy and the girl, it's the two girls and their strong friendship, and, you know, that's really important for a lot of women, it's their girlfriends, and I wanted to celebrate that too, so.

Yeah, it is an underrepresented area there. There's still as many strong female actresses as we have out there. We still have very few strong female roles that are being offered to them. So it is something that needs to happen more often. And I do like the balance.

And I do like the balance that there is a guy there and that even if he doesn't get to be the hero, in a way, he is in his own way just because he's there for her and he's there to help her. regardless of her being a woman he's just there because he cares about her you know. So absolutely and he aids in her character arc because you know our heroine is really strong and we wanted to celebrate that but we also you know wanted her to have an arc where she gets to show more vulnerability as well so I totally agree I think he's a very very important character and um straight girls who've seen the movie and gay guys who've seen the movie have really liked him just because he's super cute, too. And, you know, he's kind of like the perfect boyfriend, at least for our lead character.

So, yeah, I think I'm glad that you found that, too, that it wasn't totally one-sided. Yeah, and I think that's important and that's, I think, something that sort of gets overlooked in a lot of the feminist ideas that are put out there is that it it always seems kind of sad because the very hardcore feminist idea also usually means you're alone, which I like the balance that you had that just because she is a strong female doesn't mean she has to be by herself all the time. You know, she can have a relationship of whatever, you know, be it, be it that she has friends or that she has a guy or girl or whoever, you know, it does kind of give a decent balance there. And that touches on a good point that we've been talking about lately, where that's one of the things that she has to overcome, her character has to overcome throughout the movie, is coming to terms with her relationships with other people.

Which, at the beginning of the movie, she's very closed off. She has one really good friend, but for the most part, she kind of keeps the world at arm's length. And I think she feels like she needs to do that, versus being open... to having more relationships and it's something as simple as like you know why does she not need her glasses anymore after she has sex you know that came up at a film festival and we were talking about it last night and it's like you know she probably didn't need them in the first place spoiler alert but you know it's this thing of you know she doesn't need the glasses but she wears them anyway because it gives her a certain look it kind of neuters her sexuality in a way and so she doesn't want to be noticed she just wants to kind of do her own thing and there's nothing wrong you know by the end of the movie is something nothing wrong with kind of coming to terms with your sexuality and the way you put yourself out there and kind of it's all these layers of armor that she realizes she can shed and still be a strong person you know.

Yeah definitely well we've gone into more of the writing in john from your end of it i mean do you approach i guess all projects but specifically this one with like a specific vision of how you wanted to shoot specific scenes or the overall kind of feel of it. And then since she wrote it, do you then sort of check in with Lottie and see if that sort of matches what she originally had in her concept of? Yeah, yeah. Well, we have a very good working relationship together in that we support each other, we compliment each other, we give each other notes, but we also... we don't stick our noses too far into each other's business in terms of being a writer and director. I gave notes on the script, for example, but I wasn't pushing, like, you have to change this, you have to do that, it has to be this thing.

And it was the same thing with Lottie and my directing. For a good chunk of the production, she kind of just let me do my thing. We obviously talked about the movie every day. We talked about it a lot in pre-production. I knew what her vision was, and.

I put my spin on that, and that's what we went with. And there were only certain key scenes where she was there. We collaborated a little more closely on those, but for the most part, she let me run with it, which is great. And I still think, and I think hopefully you'll say this, honey, is that it came out very close to what you initially envisioned. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. I trusted you as the director, and, you know, it's good for the movie and good for the marriage, since we have, like, the dual relationship happening. You know, to let, you know, once you know you've found that right director and the director understands what your intention is, you know, to have that trust to just let that person do his job, regardless of the personal relationship. Right. And, you know, if something was going horribly askew, then I would have said, oh, wait a minute, but, you know, . . . and how to balance the tone.

Horror comedies are really, really hard. It's a difficult hybrid to pull off. You don't want the comedy to overshadow the horror. You still want it to be a little scary in places, and at the same time, you don't want the horror to completely overwhelm the funny bits. You don't want it to be too gory or too sad.

So that was what I worked really hard to try and balance that out throughout the picture and have the little throwbacks to. old horror movies and things that we love. Things like, you know, whenever the lightning would flash through the window and things like that, which kind of remind me of an old classic horror movie. And another thing was the building of a sense of dread. You know, we have this bright, sunny, kind of obnoxious high school setting at the beginning that's a little reminiscent of something like Mean Girls. And, you know, and it's in the southwest town.

There's always constant sunshine. It's hot. It's dry. And the minute this weird, strange woman comes to town, it starts getting cooler. and darker, and a little cloudier, and the weather shifts completely until by the end of the movie, like, there's this big storm brewing, and it's cold, and it just kind of, that was something we worked really hard on, you know, and it was how to pace the movie out so those things were happening, and we actually did a lot with the color correction, where we basically took the saturation of the film and just slowly decreased it over time, and we also made a point to keep the color red, out of the film for as long as possible, because that's obviously tied in with the blood, and we wanted all that to happen kind of in the finale.

I don't want to spoil anything, but you see a lot of red by the end of the movie, but not so much in the beginning. That way, when it does show up and it does happen, it really pops. It really vibrates on screen. Very cool. Very cool well you were talking balance within the movie itself i did want to ask as as you mentioned you two are married uh how how is that balance i was gonna say you know between work and home life but then With, I mean, knowing the way most people work in their own little artistic industry, you know, you don't have much of a home life, do you?

Do you feel like you even have a home life when you're working so much on these projects? Well, sure we do. You know, and hey, obviously, hey, we're still married, so obviously nothing, you know, nothing went horribly with you. But, you know, but we do. I mean, the only time we didn't was when we were, like, in heavy pre-production and when we were shooting.

And then, especially when we were shooting, we were like two ships passing in the night a lot of the time because he would go into set very early and start setting up shots with the crew and cinematographer. And as the producer, you know, at that point they would occasionally call on me as a writer to explain something, you know, if one of the actors had a question. But usually at that point I was just kind of overseeing and sprinkling fairy dust around the set or handling crises as they came up in the producer role. So, you know, that was the only time I would say it was like, oh, my God, we haven't seen each other. And it's funny, too, because we wrapped most of the shoot, like, the day before Christmas Eve.

And so Christmas 2011, like, didn't even exist. Like, we literally were asleep for the entire, I think we woke up for, like, two hours to eat, carry out Chinese food, and then go back to sleep. But, you know, that's kind of the sacrifice you make. And a lot of people out there with different careers, you know, they have other sacrifices they have to make. And in some ways we're really lucky because, you know, collaborating on a project like this, we get to spend a lot of time together.

And, you know, when we have other projects that we work on separately at other times, So, you know, you just find a balance if you want it to be healthy. And this has been so much fun working on it together because we're both just so geeky about it. And, you know, and again, it sort of fulfills a lot of stuff in the movie itself that we're already geeky about, too. You know, when you love what you're doing, it doesn't feel like work. Yeah.

So that helped a lot. I mean, every day on set, despite the stress, there was still this feeling of like, wow, we are making a movie. This is really cool. And so, and then we would just have those magical days, like when Stuart Gordon had a cameo. And we were both like, we can't believe this guy's here.

We can't believe he's in our movie. And I'm getting, you know, I was getting to direct this famous director. It was kind of, it was surreal, you know. And those are the days you really, you live for. They're really fun.

Oh, I'll admit it. I totally cried when he left us that day, because I was so happy. It's like, because, you know, I'd grown up watching... I mean, so many different things, but, like, Re-Animator was one of my all-time favorites in high school and from beyond. And then to have him there, like, yeah, it was magical.

So, yeah, I mean, that's the thing, too. When you're shooting, it's, like, the most terrifying time and the most happy, exhilarating time, you know, simultaneously because, you know, we're working on such a tight budget, tight schedule. And there's constantly this feeling of the movie circling the drain, like you can't have anything too big go wrong or the whole thing is going to implode. But at the same time, like John said, it's so thrilling when your whole life you've wanted to do this and you're coming to a set with trailers and all this stuff that you didn't even think you could afford. But we had such an amazing crew that helped make it happen.

I mean, really, we were very, very blessed overall. Well, I did notice Stuart in there. Was that just something you guys sort of reach out to him and offer that, or did you know someone? Yeah, through a friend, through a friend who knew him. You know, we wanted a couple of classic horror movie cameos in the movie, just so we could give, you know, that really concrete nod to the movies we love and enjoy.

And so he was very sweet about that. And actually, one of the same friends is also friendly with PJ Souls from Halloween and Carrie and so many other movies. And she has a really, really brief voiceover cameo as Leah, the heroine's mother, when she's talking to her on the phone. So that was another amazing day. Like, well into post-production, we just went.

Her boyfriend is a musician. and sound engineer, and they've got a recording studio. So we just went to the recording studio and hung out with her and laid down her voice over track and took a photo. And, oh, my God, I love PJ. Yeah. Yeah, I have to second that.

We had her on for a segment, and she's possibly the nicest woman ever. She's amazing. Oh, she's so sweet. And you know what? Just a side note.

So she has written a couple songs for this band that her boyfriend and her I guess it's her daughter's boyfriend or fiance. But anyway, it's a band that they have. And she's an amazing songwriter, just random side note. But yeah, but she is a super, super sweetheart. And we were really, really lucky to have her and Stuart, you know, to give us that. that little bit of geek, you know, cred, like, hey, you know, we got those guys in here.

Totally. Well, and Allison, too. How did she get involved? Because she's definitely got a geek following these days. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, it's huge. You know, I knew of her from Warehouse 13. You know, a lot of you started watching Warehouse 13. Somebody mentioned her in relation to the script, and we actually had a mutual friend at the Sci-Fi Channel who was able to get the script directly to Allison's. And we heard that she loved it, and she wanted to meet with us.

And that all happened a couple years before we actually shot the movie, I think. Yeah, and her executive producer credit as well on the movie, because she was really with us and stuck with us while we were raising the money. And it took a while, and I kept... praying, like, oh, please don't let her lose interest. But luckily, you know, there wasn't a lot of communication. It was just sort of like, okay, we're still working on it.

You know, we'd update her until we finally were ready to go. And then she was still on board, luckily, because when I saw her on Warehouse 13, I just was like, wow, this is exactly who I want for this character. you know, like for John and me, we were like love at first sight, you know, in terms of that filmmaker thing when you just know that person is right for your character. You're like, that is Leah. You're just watching her going, that is what I've been writing, and she didn't even know it. Yeah, I mean, of course, my subsequent rewrites, then I was having the Allison voice in my head. you know, to make it even more right for her.

But she was pretty much, you know, even with what I had, you know, ready to go in terms of, you know, what I'd hoped for in terms of that kind of actor. Yeah, and she is, but she is a very strong, I think, role model for a lot of people, especially young girls. You know, she has a great Twitter following. She has people who really, you know, she's a huge hit every year. She's at Comic-Con when she's, like, on a warehouse panel and stuff.

And so we felt really lucky to have someone like that really, you know, want to be in the film and champion the film for us. And also, you know, I think actors really respond to material work, give them a chance to stretch, and they're not playing the same old thing. You know, Leah is not like Claudia, her character on Warehouse 13. There are some similarities, but she's still playing a very different person. It was the same thing with Francie Reza, who played her best friend, Catherine.

You know, because on her show, she's kind of a snotty, popular girl. Right. When she came into audition, she's like, I am so ready to do something completely different from that. And her role as Catherine was so 180. She did it on television, especially with the zits and the dowdy clothes and the whole thing like that.

It's not her at all. And she really, really wanted to kind of take the leap and stretch and do this role. And we really responded to it. It was a great audition, and we had a lot of fun working with her as well. Yeah, the whole cast we actually love.

Like, we just feel completely blasted. by all of them, you know, and everybody except Allison just came into auditions and blew us away, you know, and that, God, that just makes your job so much easier when you don't have money for a lot of rehearsals, you know, you don't have a lot of time to do multiple takes. You have to find those people who really can deliver that role, you know, right when, you know, you get on set and, boy, I just feel like we lucked out with everybody. Definitely. So Louise Griffiths just sort of came. In on her own?

Oh my god, yeah. That's such perfect casting. She just owns that role. She really does. We love her so much.

And we were like, well, she's great, but is she too nice? But John just said to her at the table read, you know, just really embrace that inner bitch. And boy, she just enjoyed it. I mean, who wouldn't? You know what I mean?

Playing somebody... That evil, but God, yeah, she's another one where we just feel phenomenally lucky because I can't imagine anybody else in that role now. Yeah. Yeah, she's really, she really embodied it, and she was like the perfect combination of, you know, the right age where she has the gravitas of someone who is much, much older than she appears to be, and yet she's young enough that her skin and her looks are very... very healthy as you would expect with someone who was bathing in virgin blood. Like it happens.

Yeah, exactly. That's you do. As you do. And it was just perfect. And the fact that she's English, so she had an accent already, that was already great.

That gives her a whole different. Elegance. Elegance to it, yeah. Elegance, yeah. That was really, really fun.

I'm thankful you went with the elegant European version versus the other movie we'll get to later. At least yours doesn't constantly refer to virgins. And. That's in our other feature where there's just horrible accents the old times. Oh, no.

Thankfully, you guys held off on that. Well, you know, again, when you talk about balance, I mean, when you want to make a little bit of campy, but, you know, you don't want it to go so far that it's unbelievable. You know, I mean, we did want to make a movie that, while being fun, people could... you know, commit to believing in that world we created without constantly being taken out of it by us winking at them. That's, you know, another thing that was really important that we didn't want to go, you know, completely over the top. Although there's a couple moments that do, but I hope, hopefully they're just those moments that, you know, make it fun for people rather than taking them completely out of the story.

Yeah, we don't want anyone to kind of wink and nod at the audience and kind of break the wall and be like, hey. Isn't this a fun, cheesy. Thing we're making? We wanted to play it pretty serious. Yeah, that's where comedy goes wrong so often is being too cutesy about it and being too self-aware of what they're doing.

Yeah, you almost need to play it straight for it to work to some extent. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, in terms of accents, it's funny you mention that because we have a lot of people in the movie... doing accents that aren't their natural speaking accents, and they came out great. You know, one of the popular mean girls, Kelly, who's the one blonde who has the same boyfriend, I won't spoil it, she's actually English as well. Nice.

And she has a flawless American accent. And the girl who is Liz's servant, Alona, who is kind of our little nod to that kind of, you know, Romanian pick accent or whatever, she's... that's her heritage, but she speaks normally. And in the audition, she came in and just started speaking in that accent. We actually thought like she was fresh off the boat from like... Yeah.

But her parents are Romanian, so she just talked, you know, had like an hour-long conversation with them before to get that accent really in her head. You know, but then she came in and did, yeah, even when she was talking to us out of character, she was using the accent, so we just thought, oh, okay, well, she's actually... She's actually foreign, but nope. So, yeah, it was kind of cool. What I did want to ask is, and usually if I'm talking to somebody who's sort of created their own project and is working in, especially with the independent film industry as it is today, what your take has been on finishing the film and then how do you get it out there and what do you do as far as the marketing and distributing and the back half, which becomes probably way more work than the shooting was.

Yeah, sure. In some degree, yeah, to some extent it has been. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know, how has that been? The process, I guess, is a little different for each filmmaker.

So how has that been for you guys? Well, I think, you know, the post-process, that was about, you know, that was about a year or a little more. And it was pretty smooth, but it's just more when you don't have, you know, an enormous amount of money to work with. You have to, you know, not try to edit or... complete for, say, a festival deadline. You know what I mean?

You have to just kind of go with the flow in terms of, you know, if we want to do this right, it's going to take the time it takes. But one thing that that allowed us to keep doing is to keep building some grassroots support on social media, which, of course, is so important. And filmmakers who say, oh, I'm scared of it, I don't want to do it. Well, you know what? If you really want people to see your movie, you better get comfortable with it because you know, unless you are super lucky and you get picked up by somebody like a Lionsgate that has a big marketing juggernaut behind it, you know, even if you get distribution, a lot of the onus of marketing your movie and finding that audience is going to be on the filmmaking team.

So either you need somebody on the team who's good at it or you need to become good at it. And luckily, I should take in a couple of great, seminars that really talked about how independent filmmakers can, you know, use the internet to reach their audience directly. I mean, you know, Brian, we've been following each other on Twitter for God knows how long, and I just kind of have been using, let's use Twitter as an example, you know, kind of it's like my personal account, but to sort of build an awareness of not just the movie, but who we are as filmmakers. What are our obsessions that are going to be part of what you can expect as an audience member when you see the movie? So, you know, I'd live tweet like an old funny horror movie, you know, some cheesy, like, you know, zombie movie or vampire movie or whatever.

I'd talk about horror with other horror fans. And I'd talk about feminist and women's rights issues. with the people who are interested in that. And it's a very long, slow process, but at the same time, it's very rewarding. And we've actually had a couple cool experiences at festivals where we have met people we've tweeted with for maybe a year or two more, but had never, you know, known them in person. And now, you know, we met them and kind of became friends because they came to a screening. and they, you know, had been waiting all this time for, well, what is this movie that, you know, we've been tweeting about other stuff with this person.

But, you know, I think that that's the thing. If you target, even before you start shooting, and you almost have to do this, too, when you're raising independent financing because you have to tell those people how are you going to get their money back to them. And it's a big risk that they're already taking because independent films never know right now, you know, what is the bottom line going to be But you have to at least show, hey, you know what, I know who the people are who are probably, hopefully going to like this movie. And here's my plan for how I'm going to reach out. So, yeah, you have to have that sort of, you know, business and marketing cap that you wear as one of your many caps as an independent filmmaker.

And it can actually be kind of fun. It's just a lot of work, but what is it, you know? And in terms of distribution, in terms of actually getting the film out there, you know, the landscape has changed a lot over the last few years. Definitely. And I'm sure you've seen, you know, that there's kind of like the middle has completely fallen out.

You know, no one's making a ton of movies over, you know, and they're kind of like in that gap between like 10 million and like 100 million. You know, everyone's either making, you know, Insidious 2 or they're making The Avengers, and there's very little in between. So, and a lot of the independent boutique arms of the studios have closed. So there's not a lot of people out there that are buying, you know, movies, you know, and, you know, there's like Lionsgate, maybe a couple of others. So if you are not in the lucky few who, you know, go to a big festival and get acquired by the few distributors that are left, you're kind of left on your own.

But at the same time, There's tremendous opportunity because social media and the Internet and all of the new direct to all the new digital distribution platforms have opened up the process to where you can, without anyone's assistance, basically put your movie out there for everyone to see. You can get it on iTunes. You can get it on Amazon. You can get it on Netflix. You can probably do it through YouTube, I think, yourself as a rental.

So it's opened it up, and the Internet and social media have allowed you to kind of really find your hardcore audience. You know, you don't have to do a giant splashy ad and kind of shotgun approach it and hope someone sees it like in the newspaper. You know, those days are gone. You now can just find your people online wherever they are and market directly to them. And let's also remember, too, I mean, there's platforms like Tug that are fairly new where you can even do a theatrical run if you really, really want to. but it's a little bit more targeted, you know, where you find, like, okay, where's the city where I have most of my followers, you know, and get someone there who's been a big supporter to, you know, try to schedule a screening through something like tug.com.

And there are, you know, also great distributors out there who are hungry for content and will help you. Like, you know, with our VOD release, we're with a company called Gravitas, and they really, really know that VOD landscape. We're really lucky to be with them. You know, but they do expect that we're going to work in conjunction with them to market our movie. You know, that's not going to be a big part of their job.

They're going to do their best to get us on the VOD platform, get us great placement, but we have to really go after that audience. And in some ways, you know, if you're up for it, it can be a really fun collaboration, and you're with your your baby, your movie, you know, from very beginning to very end. You're not just turning it over to somebody else and hoping they know what to do with it. You know, you're kind of steering the destiny of the movie. Which in a way is better, yeah, as an independent, you know, producer, filmmaker, whatever you you get a little more control over your movie and instead of having them do something horrible with it yeah.

Sure exactly yeah yeah you see some movies out there you know that good or bad maybe they're they're buried by a studio that they're with you know or they're not given a chance you know, they come out one weekend and then they're gone if nobody cares or they're marketed poorly. You know, so at least we, you know, it's kind of like, you know, win or lose, it's on us to a point, but at least we'll know we've done, you know, our best in terms of telling the world what we are and why they should check us out. Yeah, but there's definitely, I think, the stigma of not getting a theatrical release is fading away. pretty quickly, especially when the fans hear about your movie and they see that they don't have to wait, you know, half a year for it to premiere in their market or something that they can, you know, in a few weeks you can literally just watch it on your Apple TV or, you know, on your laptop or wherever and it's more accessible.

So, and hopefully that's just going to continue to grow that people are going to be able to find the movies that they love really, really quickly on all these different platforms and that filmmakers can still make a decent amount of money putting it on there. They don't have to put it in 4,000 theaters in the country and hope that they at least break even. It's a different world than I was thinking just in the span since you started this. Since nine years ago, it's become an entirely different world that you put this movie into. Absolutely.

Yeah, we have seen the landscape change and we have kept just staying flexible and changing with it because You know, and that was everything from the budget we made the movie for, which kept going down, down, down, until, you know, we finally hit a place that we could, you know, raise that money and make it happen. And, you know, and even so, we go to film festivals where people have made great movies for a lot less than we made ours, and they'll have a faster journey to making their money back. But, you know, everybody, every movie is different and kind of requires different care and feeding, and. But I think that it's good to stay. If you want to make movies, you just stay flexible and you look at what the realities are and be on top of what is happening in the industry now and realize that for better or worse, it's not the same as when most of us were growing up.

You know, like, those days are gone, so embrace what's happening now. Yeah, I don't think there's any way it could ever go back to the way it was. So, yeah, you might as well just go with it. Yeah, exactly. And we all, we kind of, I really miss the days of, and granted I was a baby when this happened, but, you know, of when you could put a movie like Halloween in theaters and the word of mouth would grow.

And it would stay in the theater. It would be in the theater for like a year, and the lines would grow and grow and grow around the block. You know, those days are gone. Even a huge blockbuster movie is only in theaters now for maybe two, three weeks, depending on how it's doing. But, you know, I feel like that kind of crowd, word-of-mouth buzz movement, has now shifted to these other platforms where, you know, suddenly it's on Netflix and all your friends are like, hey, did you watch this thing?

You need to go and watch this thing tonight. And, you know, it could be on the top ten list for, like, you know, two, three years or something. So it's pretty cool. Well, that is what you have to do now, so I will let you do that. We, the lucky ones enough to attend Meltdown Macabre, have already seen it.

But for the rest of the people out there, where should they go to see Chastity Bites? Well, on November 1st, we are going to have our VOD released, and that's going to be on most of the major cable-on-demand platforms in the U.S. and Canada, and then also on the Internet, VOD platforms like iTunes, Vudu, Amazon Video, Xbox, PlayStation, that sort of thing. It'll be Google Play as well. Oh, yeah, and a certain kind of YouTube. I guess this is a new one to us, but I guess there's YouTube that you actually pay for, so...

It's out there, too, or will be on November 1st. And then the DVD will be out and to be announced where you can find that in February, which is Women in Horror Month, so that kind of works out nicely. But if you like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, or sign up on our email list on our website, we can keep you up to date about the different places you're going to be able to find it and any other updates about if it's going to be screening near you or if it's going to be on cable or whatever may come for it in the future. Sounds good. Again, we had a lot of fun with it.

I think it's so much fun and also just sort of well put together from both ends, from writing and directing. So you guys have done a good job and I want to help get it out there to people and let them know to go look for it and check out your movie. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, word of mouth is our type of movie's best friend.

It's not like there's advertising budget, so just getting people to champion it, and then they tell two friends and so on and so on, that's how we may actually be able to someday pay our investors back and maybe make another movie in the future, but we really appreciate it. Well, thank you for letting us show it, and I guess... We'll head into the break here, and when we come back, we'll be discussing the lesser feature of our double feature this week, the much lesser feature. So we will be back with that. We'll be right back.

Remember the girl who moved to California and weren't as. Sexy as me? Her collective name. Was the voice that she loved, and she was cockier. Than you could be.

You want to pretend that you are a celebrity, but our tune does not make. You a celebrity. Thank you. Man, you ain't it. It's going wild on the internet.

It's blowing up. It's the squared circle of knowledge. Uratedpodcast.com makes it easy to stream. You can start an argument in the comments. I'd rather send a nasty email to urated at gmail.com.

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Out of town. Out of town. Out of town. Out of town. This painting, the work of celebrated Austro-Hungarian artist Bellagio Trocci, hangs today in the museum at Kiev.

The features it portrays are those of Countess Dracula. In this period, the Countess held sway over all the provinces of Transylvania. Not only was she beautiful, rich, and powerful, she was also unspeakably cruel. Most notorious of her misdeeds was her custom of taking baths of blood. Today, the Bloody Countess lives still and continues to pursue her evil destiny.

It ain't easy to live like a chipset. Tell you honey how it feels. I've been dreaming, floating down the stream and losing. Touch with all the dreams. Whole earth lover, keeping.

Undercover, never knowing where you've been. You've been fading, always operating, keeping touch with my It ain't easy living like you want to. Man, it's so hard to. Find We're gin. We're gin.

We're gin. We're gins. We're gins. That's what this movie was all about. We're gins and we're gins.

We're gins and we're gins. We're gins and we're gins. We're gins and we're gins. We're gins and we're gins. We're gins and we're gins.

We're gins and we're gins. We're gins and we're gins. Yeah I'm ready I was born ready to discuss this piece of. Shit what are you talking about sorry this immaculate shit. I don't understand what happened in that movie at all like I'm just really confused it.

Will all come to you all at once or just suddenly and it will be the most amazing aesthetic experience you've ever. Are you sure about that? One day you'll just be walking down the street and you'll go, I get it. Well, you know, after I watch a movie like this, that's what I want to believe. I want to believe that there's just some critical piece that I just missed somewhere along the way that at some point will fall into place and then I'll be like, oh, that's what it was.

What the hell are you saying? I'm not going to hold my breath for that. All right. We are back, having survived the second feature of the night, Mama Dracula. Let's do the official.

Rundown before we start our full-fledged attack. This week's Out of the Town, Meltdown Macabre's special presentation is Mama Dracula. The year is 1980. The director, Boris Zolzinger, is that, I guess, how we'll pronounce this thing? Let's go with that, yeah.

They plot, according to IMDb, if you can piece anything together, they say, a female vampire must bathe in the blood of virgins in order to stay alive. The trouble is that virgins are in short supply nowadays, and she is running into major problems finding one. Yeah, that sums it all up. Spoiler alert, we don't want to ruin this for you, so go seek it out now. Joke's on you.

Alright, so, where would you like to begin with Mama Dracula? Well, I'd like to begin with just, like, where I am psychologically at this moment. Sorry, sorry, could you mention for the audience, who are you? I'm Fred, and I feel that everyone here, it's like we've all survived, like, a plane wreck in the Andes. Ha!

And, you know... All just sitting around a fire trying to piece together what just happened. Trying to decide, like, if we have to resort to cannibalism to get through this, what's going to happen. I'm just going to eat some more popcorn. Yeah.

Well, I guess, yeah, we should bring in the rest of them here. Fred did show up just in time to see Mama Dracula. You lucky bastard. Marlena did come in. Luckily, you got to see both.

I guess the only other... Introduce yourself, sir. I'm Andrew Cooper. I'm a film professor at the University of Louisville. And so I write nonfiction about horror films.

And I also write horror fiction. So so horror is kind of my thing. And I've got to be honest, I've waded through so many horrible horror films, I wasn't that impressed by this one. No? By this one's badness.

It certainly had some zingers in there, but it was also clearly striving for comedy throughout. Yeah. And the premise is sort of the Carmilla lesbian vampire version of, I think a few years later, the movie Once Bitten. Yeah, actually I was thinking about that too. It had pretty much the exact same motivation for the main character.

Yeah, except for it's not Lauren Hutton, and again, it's got the lesbian overtones. Instead it's Louise Fletcher, who most of our listeners will know as Nurse Ratched. playing the lead Mama Dracula of the title. The frightening thing is it's not like this was after 20 years of hard times. This was five years after she got an Oscar. She turned up here.

She looked younger than in Cuckoo's Nest. Those are five hard years that led her to this outcome. It's blood, I guess. Yeah, it's obviously the blood. It's weird, though, where actors wind up.

A decade ago, we would have been like, oh, Paul Bettany? I know where he's going to be in a decade. He's going to be like, you know, has gotten a couple of other Oscar nods. He's been in a few more period pieces, and he will be commented upon for his highbrow film work, but I remember seeing Priest, though, in theaters a couple years ago. I was one of the 30 people that saw that movie in theaters.

31. Awesome. Give me some skin for that. All right. And, yeah, I love that movie.

But that and Legion and, like, you know, he's just been in bad B-movie after bad B-movie. And, you know, so it's surprising sometimes, like, how. How successful actors will make certain film choices. I don't want to pin it on any one thing, but yeah. Maybe it was her agent.

Maybe her agent was like, hey, there's this film being made in Europe. I think it's going to be a hit over here in the States. Her agent's a jeer. It was like, I don't know if anybody's familiar with this terrible 80s band called Army of Lovers, but it was like one long Army of Lovers music video. There was something very.

There was a very music 80s music video quality to it. And I'm no expert on 80s music videos, but the guy in it, the Professor Von Blood, I kept expecting him to say that she blinded me with science or something. Yes, he looked like it's the Dark Hair Thomas Dolby. Am I right? Yes.

I have a story to tell you. I have to get this out. It's real important. Okay, so last week. I went out with some work friends and some work customers to the mag bar and uh we sat in the back at a booth and i left my best friend unattended which was like a really bad decision apparently because this creepy extremely drunk guy like hovered over her and was like he was like trying to communicate with her but he was just like past the.

Point of being able to like function and he was like you lived and she's like i'm charmed i know but. The guy looked exactly like thomas dolby exactly like thomas dolby and i was like i made this hilarious on point joke i was like i guess you blinded him with science and everyone's like what. And my phone was broken. At the time so i couldn't like google a picture of thomas dolby and. You know next to the drunk guy's face.

Yeah it was it was like the worst the worst like fail ever. That's a genuine that's a genuine tragedy but speaking of genuine tragedies i think it might be helpful for us you know rather than attempting to discuss this movie as though its contents were known maybe we can attempt to sort of reconstruct the experience collectively. Good luck with that. I'll say this, is that part of the 80s music video thing is that, well, we had the... Mama Dracula, who was Louise Fletcher, and then her two kids, who were twins, who both looked like they were from a Queen cover band.

I don't know. I was getting a Michael Bolton vibe. It's just that wonderful hair they had. The flowing curly hair. And then we had Dr.

Von Blood, who was an American, who looked like the love child Harold Ramis and Harold Lloyd. Yeah, actually. That's what I kept seeing when I was watching. When heralds collide. Yeah, yeah.

When heralds collide. Soon we'll be famous. I can see it now. To Peter von Blood, a brilliant young scientist. His Majesty King Olaf IV of Sweden awards the Nobel Prize for research on artificial blood.

And throughout it all, it was so strange because with Mama Dracula, like, Louise Fletcher played it straight. Like, she had Nurse Ratched Face on hardcore the entire film. Never let it slip that she was ever kidding about anything. And then you had the two twins who were ostensibly her children who had accents that she did not. Yeah.

And they were being flamboyant and incredibly paw-y. They kept pawing at all the other characters that sort of came within range of them. And then you had Harold Lloyd, who was just kind of flailing around and being more comedic than any of them. And it's like, every time I saw clips of them... Oh, and let's not forget the transvestite troll that kept showing up and roaring at people.

That was my favorite part. He was my favorite character. So he was the chauffeur and also the mute maid. Yeah, and so we had a chauffeur slash maid who was actually a man... who every time the script called upon him to speak, he would just sort of rah, like whoever was within listening distance. Wait, could he speak when he was the chauffeur?

No, he just yelled at him. He still just kind of made noise. Okay, because there was this scene where the tree fell over in the road, and suddenly all the villagers appeared with pitchforks and stuff, and he went out and I guess he just yelled. It reminded me so much of when Jay Leno goes out to the He creates his audience. See, I was thinking Chewbacca.

Isn't that the same kind of awkwardness? That's true. See, no, I was thinking more like Chewbacca. Like, yeah, every time he said something, I felt like Mama Dracula turned around and was like, you said it, Chewie. I think that is Rosa.

I think Rosa is my favorite character in this. She was sweet. You know, the happy birthday shark. Well, I decided that Rosa is a mixture of Frankenstein's monster and Lassie. Because every few...

Jimmy fell in the well, girl, hold on. And mom would go after him. An Irma Vep thing, but what was the Asylum movie we watched that had the character that kept playing everybody? I kept expecting him to turn up and be another character and just keep going with it. They had the two twins...

Like Bob Chinsky and Dob Chinsky. The twin children. I don't know. I kept expecting something to come of that, but it was not really enough. I wouldn't say this was a cohesive movie.

No? No. Well, she did mention the birthday shark. Perhaps we could say a little bit more about the birthday shark. Like, I mean, don't you guys always get a birthday shark?

Just me? And so the professor... Von Blood. Von Blood, lest we forget. Is invited there, and he's trying to, like, create synthetic blood.

Yeah. Because virgins are in short supply, and apparently in this world, not a renewable resource. Yeah. So, it's based on that one joke. The one joke.

No virgins around. Okay, so we'll go with that. And she does her own accent, which has a little bit more Elmer Fudd than theirs. A little bit. A little bit.

Something like that. And he's there, and he's trying to... And did I get this right? He's trying to make blood, and he keeps accidentally creating gold bars. and. Throwing them to the side.

Was that what was going on there? Yeah, I think the idea is that he's working with alchemy, and he keeps getting the alchemy right and creating gold. Gold bars. He's trying to create gold. What a fool.

Yeah, no, for creating all that gold, what a fool. Doesn't he know what that will do to the world's gold supply? But I guess the weird thing is for me is that, okay. Okay, the weird thing. Yeah, yeah.

There's one. Yeah, I don't know. You mentioned before that this movie, it was so obviously a comedy that it enabled you to survive through its bad elements, or at least it seemed self-aware to some degree. There were times where I was like, okay, this is definitely a comedy, and then the very next scene I was like, or maybe this is just some really bad acting. I don't know.

There were scenes which I couldn't tell what was meant not to work and what just didn't work. You know, it all just bled together for me. And it wasn't helped by the fact that they... Part of the music video-ness of it was the fact that they opted almost invariably for this very surreal, smoke-filled, bright light, dark shadows, like, swirling cameras filming technique. So you never knew where you were.

Or, like, at one point he pulls the face off a clock and his twin, like, the twin vampires are like... playing hide-and-seek or something. That scene, I'm still not sure what the hell was going on. That's one of those, you're just like, what am I watching, and how did this come to be? That was like some film language made up between twins that nobody else speaks. Yeah, twin speak, yeah.

It was Nell playing that real time. I actually liked the scene where they did the mirroring. I thought that was maybe the cleverest thing that was in the movie. The two twin vampire guys who were weird enough already do an extended mirroring scene. And then I think the joke was that Professor Von Blood comes in and he has no reflection.

He doesn't get it. I'm not sure. It was almost a joke there. Yeah, they were trying. But it was all at the level of commitment that... of a skit and it just kept going at that level of commitment.

Yeah and it and it and and it had like those twins by the end of the film i was actually ready to say okay these guys they're rocking it like they have consistently brought more to this movie than like they are in every scene they are like going as far as they can with everything they're doing i kind of part of me was like you know if someone had made a better movie and stuck them in it, I could see them as like, as like having a bit role in some other, other comedy flick. Uh, that was conceivable to me. Yeah. I think, I think they're, they're, they're what, what for me sort of made the movie more acceptable as, as, as a comedy. I mean, I don't think it's a very successful comedy.

Um, but, but it reminds me of particularly there were there, there are moments that were so clearly choreographed as, as sort of absurd as tumor, um, reminding me of like the Magic Christian or Fearless Vampire Killers where there's not so much laugh out loud funny but sort of a pervasive surrealism that in those films happens to work in this film it happens not to work but I think the film tries to achieve that type of atmosphere and when that goes wrong the results aren't laugh out loud so bad it's good funny and it aren't funny in another way either, and it just sort of kind. Of is a dud. I mean, that's my response. Like, it's not even that it's so bad it's good. It's that it's just my entire response to the movie is like, how did this happen?

How is it this comes to be on film and or I'm watching it now? I don't understand. That should be like an actual profession because they have what they call forensic engineers, and when there's a disaster... They can go there and calculate how the fire started, and they find the window over here. And so there was so much force in the explosion.

There should be guys who go and, like, can watch a movie and figure out what form of mental insanity. I think that's our job, Fred. That's our job. I was trying to duck the responsibility by creating somebody else. Well.

Who is responsible. If Hollywood had that office, so many directors that are well-connected would suddenly come under fire and be blacklisted. Michael Bay would have to run for his life. There'd be a lot of trouble. David Lynch would only get to do the weather from now on.

I'd be okay with it. By the way, David Lynch doing the weather sounds like a terrifying TV show. I would totally watch that. It's the only time I've ever watched the weather, but oh my God. I think he should direct all commercials.

All of them. Is your VCR not watching? If you want to have a commercial, you go through David Lynch. It's either him with a Barbie doll in his hands or something. That would change the landscape of people's minds.

This movie had that That Star Wars Christmas special level of. That's actually pretty close. Specialness. At places where. There's a great ex-KCD comic where, like, they're like...

Where, you know, the main characters are all like, Woohoo! This is gonna be so terrible! It's gonna be funny! And blah, blah, blah. And then it cuts to, like, you know, 30 minutes later and they're just sitting around a table drinking.

Like... Like, holding their heads in their hands and just like, Oh, my God. What has just happened to me? Like. Yeah, that's like when you get this great idea for a road trip with your friends when you're in your teens or twenties, and then like a couple hours into it, you're just like, oh my.

God, what are we thinking? And this movie, I mean, I usually hate to give this excuse because I feel like it is an excuse rather than any kind of meaningful explanation, but drugs like i looked at this movie and i looked at that last scene especially where suddenly they just started singing a blood song and like stomping their feet and it's reached some sort of climax for all these insurance adjusters and and angry villagers have appeared in this in this auditorium to like you know watch a fashion show and wow making this movie sound like much more awesome than it is but it's but but at that moment i was just like looking at their faces i was like Did you guys even remember making this movie? Was this one of those situations where in 1981 everyone sort of came to and was like, what the fuck?

Did we just spend our lives? I think that's the thing. I mean, if you try to describe it, you inevitably make it sound more awesome than it really is. And that's what must have sold it. Oh, and then we'll have this scene, there's a fashion show and all these insurance adjusters show up and they sing a song about blood and people are like...

Yeah, maybe. Sounds good. Did we mention the naked girl? Because we have a naked girl in a couple of the scenes. There are lots of naked girls.

There's like a parade of naked girls because the M.O. Is to kidnap them from the dressing room. My favorite part about that is that, you know, he comes out. One of them scares the girl and they always pass out. And the other guy goes, virgin?

Right before they lose consciousness, they ask. Them, virgin? And they're like, yes. I really would have liked if every girl went, what? What are you saying?

I can't understand you. This, by the way, back in the day when, say what you will, rape humor was widely, apparently, much more acceptable than today. Or perhaps people just didn't really realize that that's what it was. But yeah, it was a series of sequences where one guy makes a girl pass out so his brother can drag her out of the dressing room into the dark shadows after asking her if she's a virgin. Excuse me, a virgin.

Because they're vampires. And only. What. Was the name of their little fashion shop? Wamp.

It was not what. The sign said on the building, but that's what they called it. It was a wamp. And then apparently Banksy would show up and add ire to it. That bastard.

No, while we're on that. Vampire. Where did they live, Fred? Where did they live? What was the big building that they lived in?

Oh, wait. A castle of some kind? Yeah, the. The castle? The castle.

They every damn time would pronounce it castle. Yeah. She did. The vampires with the weird shit in the castle. The castle.

I was really confused about the scenery in this movie anyway. Like, I never... Even though they were in. Different places, you can watch a movie and know that you have a landscape in your mind of where things are. The house is here.

The school is here. The grocery store is here. Not in this movie. Nothing else is. They're in different places, but I'm just like, where the fuck are they?

I think the confusion begins when Professor Von Blood starts out, and there are the three musicians there. and then he goes somewhere, and then they're there, too. Wasn't that the. Same three guys? Yeah, it was the same three guys, and they kept showing up in the background, too, here and there. I think that was supposed to be like.

A running joke. Shortage of people willing to participate. And actually check the credits to see if they had a continuity error. I'm going to guess no. But yeah, there may not have been one, because not only were there sort of macro problems with continuity, but there were several...

Well, we could be kind and call them jump cuts, but I don't think they were deliberate jump cuts. They were just people appearing from one side of the room to another. Teleportations, yeah. And then when they tried to do that. They did a.

No, but they did mention that the vampires are very fast. Yeah, and then when they tried to demonstrate it, they did one of the worst jump cuts. No! It's like they kind of showed up eventually like they got up out of their chair. And walked over.

So are you inhumanly fast? Beat. Yeah, sure. Really fast. We're going to walk outside of the frame and then reappear in the frame in order to demonstrate how.

Fast we are. The best part was the first thing you saw were their capes. They're preceded everywhere by their caves. How do you mess that up? That's just.

The easiest thing to do in film. Boom, there's people there. No, it took a while. While we're on the spatial relations, on the same thing as the castle, like... Trapped in a gay bar.

Then when they're like... They're kidnapping the girls and they take them back to the castle. And then, like, the one gets stuck, so then it's back to the shop, and they ride for, like, how long on that motorcycle? I was really confused, and then she was in the shop. And then she gets out of where she was at the castle and runs upstairs in the shop.

Yeah, that's what I was really confused about. That's why I had a problem, like, spatially with this movie. And it wasn't helped by the fact that the film, okay, I'm going to say again, like, the film had some pretty cool locations. Like, here and there, like, a few of the rooms, like, the fact that the girl... who was inexplicably held hostage, even though I had no idea who the hell she was, because the first time she shows up is when they catch a guy having sex ostensibly with his wife in a graveyard. Like you do.

And she's just there, and then she's again in another scene. I got the impression that she was supposed to be investigating. She's a cop and an actress? Yeah. She was a cop.

She was a cop. And an actress. So she was a cop having sex with her husband. No, no, no. She was the woman standing off to the side.

Busting them. And wasn't she the girl from the band Heart? I kept thinking she was going to sing Barracuda. Was it really her? It's not, because that's the other legit actress.

She's in Last Tango in Paris. Oh, yeah. I mean, again, they got two real... Like, she's... Yeah.

And her hair was. She was a lot cuter in Last Tango. Yeah, and she's really a bad actress, according to this. Yeah, I know. But she.

But anyway, she shows up and she's some sort of cop and says as much, even though they always refer to her as this actress. And they capture her and they put her in this room, which is Beauty and the Beast style. Looks like it's in a turret, but it's surrounded by gold bars. She's in a giant birdcage. And it was actually a really cool room.

But it was one of those things of you didn't understand which room led to which room. Because I remember a scene where Went straight from that room into what looked like Vermeer's foyer. And then again went straight from that room into what looked like an abandoned attic with all this junk in it where we had this scene of the junk cut chase, you know, where one of the vampires is chasing her around and then suddenly she attacks him gently. No, yeah, doesn't even attack him. Like she just, they both stop running.

And then they go the other direction. And she chases him for no good reason. Like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Yeah, it was like in a Bugs Bunny thing. It had a very, you know, she was Elmer Fudd.

But there was a very Bugs Bunny thing. Like when they were arguing over how many. Virgins he would get. He's like, I need ten. And she goes, three.

He's like, eight. Three. Two. Two. Three.

Yeah. Yeah, the same. And again, Nurse Ratched has no idea that anyone's joking. So, like, you know, she just, her face doesn't change. Stoic.

But yeah, very stoic. But I gotta say, again, it was like, watching this scene, or watching this film was like, during those sequences, I remember thinking, because... there'd be entire sequences which didn't seem to advance the plot at all. It just involved people rubbing themselves against the scenery. Like, when he first finds his laboratory, he spends, like, a while just sliding down the giant, like... Yes, he's very happy.

Whatever the hell those are. That was the other... It looks like. He's going to start making meth. They look like gigantic beer things that you'd find at the Hofbrauhaus.

I think that's what it was. They found him like a brew pub somewhere. They're going to be blood vats. That's the idea. They had a friend who owned a brewery basically.

Can we borrow that for a minute? Microbrew hadn't really hit it big. Well back in those days either you were microbrew in which case you were just competing with Budweiser. You know. Or I guess this is Europe, so, you know, it's Germany.

Like, throw a rock, you hit a brew pub. Or not Germany. Did we decide where? Actually, I looked it up I think it was in Romania. Actually, I looked it up.

Apparently, the film was made in Belgium. Yeah, the director is... Because that's what I was going to say. The director is Belgian, but then it's listed as, like, a Belgian-French production. Which means what?

I don't know. What the hell would that be? Which probably just means they had some French financing. Yeah, French money. But that's the other thing.

They had some francs in there. That was my other alternative excuse was like you were going with drugs is the reason behind it. But I'm almost thinking France. Have you seen the movie sitcom? The more I thought about it.

Brian, that's racist. Could be France. Could be drugs. That is the most American thing you've said all night. It could be France.

It could be drugs or it could be France. I blame France. The baguettes and all the defeat. Like it's just i mean it goes the way they. Leave the cheese sitting out all day that gets to you it's.

Not the fault of the french i'm standing up for my five years of french class here you know like that was your mistake but no i mean it's something equally racist if i'm like well screw you if i'm taking spanish. It to me it falls into that same category of like we don't even understand why they like jerry lewis But they like Jerry Lewis. I didn't notice until watching this again, yes, I have to say I've watched this more than once now, how much, not even just the physical comedy of rubbing yourself on there, but how many times they fall down. Oh, yeah. Just ridiculous stuff.

What the hell was that? All this overly done physical comedy. Then I'm like, maybe that just works better. Somewhere. Not here.

But we'll blame France. But maybe it's not even France. Maybe there's just whatever area they were at or whoever funded them. Some of this is working. Maybe it's like that head trauma that makes you speak with a French accent.

And everyone in this room. Have you ever heard of that? There's like a brain injury you get and then you speak with a French accent after. That. I didn't make it up. um the other thing is i don't know the film quality it's just so it's like red but not like a real red red it's not it's like sort of a brownish dull oh no there.

Was that one scene shot at twilight where you can't see it yeah like it was a scene where i saw a window. At the end they're taking a photo and they make a joke about everything the photo being too red and i'm like I. Thought they couldn't appear in mirrors also. I was very confused about that. Or on 35mm film.

Yeah, I mean, Super 8 was a better filming technique than this. Better camera than this. It was very hard to understand what was going on in the movie just because it was so difficult to see. We might need to blame the DVD transfer as opposed to the actual production. I'm not sure.

I assumed that until they started making a joke about. It in the movie. Where they're taking a picture of people and it's too red. I think that's just a bad blood joke. I don't know.

What was the production company that released this? Mill Creek. It sounds like someone who would make cheap wine. Oh, they do. I think they make good wine.

We produce low quality DVDs and nice wine. Here's 60 bad movies and a jug of wine. You're going to need this wine. That is a marketing. Oh, there you go.

Let's open a business. I think they mostly. Produce things or distribute things that are in the public domain or that they can acquire extremely cheaply. Or that they find in a friend's garage. And therefore we see things that look like they could have actually been playing in Grindhouse movie theaters circa 1980.

As we were watching, I was like, this has not been remastered. I was like, I'm not joking. This is the worst print that's ever existed. And they're not going to fix it or go look for a real copy because they don't have but four dollars. so i mean you know. This is they're not in the business of producing like the quality reprint of mama dracula this.

Is not the criterion edition of mama dracula this is the here's 50 movies for four dollars So I blame the transfer, and it's like a copy of a copy of a copy. But at the same time, I still blame the French. Well, that's a good fallback for any argument, really. Can we just speak in a French accent for the rest of this podcast, please? You can.

I've gotten pretty decent at pronouncing my French R's, and I don't want to brag. Go for it. I want to stick with the. We might actually get more listeners if we have a female with a French accent. I'm just always glad whenever geeks get together, if we have any females, it just makes me feel better about the whole situation.

I feel like we've got more than pretty much any show out there as a running thing. I'm pretty proud of our balance. I'm proud of it, too. It's a good thing to. i gotta say it's it's also it's i i sympathize with that especially since um it's weird back in the days when i i played even more dungeons and dragons i actually had the weird experience of often uh dming tables with more women than men oh wow and i remember just sitting there being like this i'm like the first person that this has ever happened oh yeah my friends are like hey let's play dungeons and dragons i'm like Okay. That's crazy.

I won't say no, but I'm worried about the cosmic balance and what this will do to it. Man, that's like a setup for a porn. Funny you should mention that because one of my favorite blogs that I read is in fact called D & D with Porn Stars. Yeah. No, I'm not even kidding.

There's a great... Well, sure. There's a guy out there named Zach Sabbath who does a blog called D & D with Porn Stars where. It's legit. He just talks about D & D, but he happens to be a porn star, and all of his friends are porn stars, and that's what they do when they're off-duty.

They just hang out. Off-duty, is that how it is? Yep. They work shifts. They work shifts.

That's also a title that they produce. Yeah. Are you kidding? That's in, like, its 16th sequel. But, yeah, no, no, no.

Oh, it definitely is. Yeah. So if porn stars are off-duty, are they sitting around eating sandwiches and then they get a call over the radio like Starsky and Hutch? I really want to believe that's how it goes. Then they drive into slutty cop outfits and run out there.

It's exactly like that, but it's a sandwich and a fluffer at the same time. You're never off-duty, really. And it's not so much Starsky and Hutch as it is Charlie's Angels. But they have French accents. Bad.

Or a French something. So by the way, I think we just conceived of a better movie than this movie. It wouldn't take much. Yeah, you know that's the mark of a bad movie when you can't talk about it without accidentally writing a better movie. So should we warn people about this film?

It's a little late now. Yeah, that's right. You're right. I'm assuming you've already watched it. Sucker.

Oh, I don't know. I was trying to See what else we need to address of the insanity that went on. I'll take partial. I guess if you enjoyed The Howling 2, your sister is a werewolf. You might love Mama Dracula.

Wow, it's like Netflix is talking to me. Wait, wait, wait. You mean Halloween 2 or Halloween? Howling. The Howling 2.

Your sister is a werewolf. Because I was thinking you meant Halloween 3, which is also a pretty terrible movie. Actually, Halloween 3 is a fine movie if you consider it outside of the context of the series. It's crazy, but it's very entertaining. I'm going to ask you to continue with your point.

Sorry, I don't want to get into the Halloween 3. Is that the Halloween-esque one? Yes. We've done an episode on that. Season of the Witch.

It's a creative premise. Witches. Witchcraft. I have a mustache. There's no place in that series.

It gets very crazy as time goes on, but it's a hell of an entertainment movie. And it has a jingle in it that will stay in your head forever. I remember watching it. How many days? No, I remember watching it in high school for the first time, and at the end of it, my friends and I were all just sitting around looking at each other going like, what the hell just happened?

Like, how did that movie end like that? It was pretty ballsy, I think. Anyways, okay, okay, okay. We're not talking about that movie. No, just movies that are so off the wall that there's just no way in hell they're ever going to work.

I would put Howling 2. Your Sister is a Werewolf, in the same category as Mama Dracula. And clearly there's an effort at camp. There's an effort at humor. There are some good people involved.

There are some classic monsters involved. And yet you sit there thinking, I'm never going to get this part of my life back. And I'm not sure how I'm going to turn this into a positive experience, even making fun of it. I'm not sure. Even beer was available during the filming.

Yeah. I used to have this one friend, like whenever we saw live theater that went wrong, like really wrong. And to me, usually movies you can kind of walk off a little bit more. Like you can come out of a bad movie and walk it up. But if you see live theater that goes really wrong.

I know about that. Oh, my God. You try to go out to dinner and forget it ever happened. But, you know, it just you find yourself like burying your head in your hands. But we had this one friend who moved to Louisville with us from Richmond.

And she could like turn it around. and she was just like funny and vicious and she could like turn that experience into something like i'm glad this happened to us those are those. Are valuable friends yeah i know. I feel like that's what we do like to me that's like this is the most entertaining thing i've gotten out of a lot of movies it's like after the fact. Yeah this basically we're like holocaust survivors we all. Just Got off a train.

Can we not offend the world? I don't know if there's anyone left. Because I mentioned my antipathy for the Spanish language. We'd have a full rave against the French. And now we're bringing in Holocaust survivors.

I was thinking it was like a support group. Yeah. It's bad too. I feel like it's a bad movie support group. We turned that trip to Dachau into a positive experience.

I'm disappointed because the movie didn't violate me more. See, I wanted to be more upset by this movie than I was. I wanted it to be more outrageously bad. I wasn't even upset by it. I was just in awe.

Well, that's what we were going to talk about. People gave them money. Yeah. And people put some effort into it. People threw their backs into trying to make this work.

One of the things I've really gotten from, instead of being a stage manager, but being an actual full-on production manager at a theater, is there is always some group of individuals who are just working their butts off constantly for all of these movies that this company, whoever they are putting out, whoever hired them, And it's like, on the one hand, you feel less bad for them because this is one movie out of probably like 30 they made that year. But at the same time, you're like, there are people out there who do just work really hard at these films and take them very seriously. It's one of the things that actually makes me curb myself a little bit whenever I want to talk bad about a lot of Hollywood films.

Because say what you will about some of the most awful, horrible Hollywood films, Michael Bay. You got to admit. I like Transformers. I hate you. But you have to admit that there are people out there who are under him and his team who are like, you know, working their butts off and doing a fantastic job.

They are making those camera angles, you know, excellent. Even in the worst Hollywood movie, there are like things that are amazing. Yeah. Like little details and stuff that. You don't even see that they spent like a month building oh no and and you can and that's one of the reasons i love listening to uh uh commentary track which unfortunately we do not have for mama oh god oh man but there's but i remember there's this uh i was watching the commentary track for this one independent film and and they're supposed to be at a train station and you see this train like leaving the windows the guys like going up to the to make a phone call, and then you hear the director on the voiceover going, woohoo, we got a train!

Like something no one else noticed, but he's looking and he's like, thank God we filmed this with a train, and that was the take we could use. That proves that they're at a train station, don't you see? Production value! I know. But yeah, this movie I don't think had very many moments like that.

But that's the thing. Just watching it, a lot of people showed up on set and they got these shots. Whether they go together and make any sense, obviously, is still arguable. But they showed up and made this movie. There's so many great ideas for movies that never see the light of day.

And yet, how many of these have we watched now that keep getting made? And then there are even those series that are working and have an audience. Mm-hmm. And then they just bail on them. It's like, you know, Deadwood, nah, well, we're going to let that go.

We're going to try some new crap that's going to be a train wreck and you'll never hear about again. But there, I don't know. I don't understand how that works. Well, you know, I mean, it's one of those things where it's so difficult to talk about the business end and the artistic end at the same time. Like, I mean, It's a common stereotype, I think, to say that, well, business doesn't understand art or something like that.

But the relationship is really, I think, a lot more complex. It's partly that business doesn't understand business. Because, no, I mean, we assume that we generally tend to think that business does the smart thing. But it really doesn't. Because if it did...

Most movies would be G and PG. That's where all the money is. But now they want something else. They don't do it by the numbers. We assume that's what business is trying to make money, but no.

It's people who are part of a culture. And that's why most movies are because they want to be taken seriously. They used to be. That's changing now. Is it?

Yeah, well. Well, look at how many bad, and a lot of this is because the computers are now involved, but look at how many bad knockoff kids movies there are now than in the 80s when it was just Disney putting out this multi-million dollar version. Whereas now, every couple of weeks, somebody knocks out another bad. Some of them just go straight to DVD now, but there's a lot of them in hit theaters that I don't think would have... In a different time where now it's like they keep making money.

Like no matter how many bad zoo animals when it keeps making money. Madagascar? Yeah. I mean, how many sequels of that have they made? And like, I don't know anybody who said.

It was good. Shark Boy and Lava Girl. Hey, that's Rodriguez. He's a genius. What's that one that looks like a cheap knockoff, but it was really somebody's dream that they tried for 20 years to make this masterpiece?

It's The Thief and the Cobbler. The title sounds familiar. I don't think I've seen it, though. Yeah, it looks like somebody made this. Is it animated?

Yeah, they tried. It looks like somebody, after Aladdin came out, tried to throw together something. There's a lot of this. But actually, it was somebody's brainchild, and they did like 50,000 times more frames of art than they needed to, just to lavish. And then.

They lost their funding and somebody else took over and like took what they had and, and made it into like a, a monstrous disaster of what, but like so much work and commitment had gone into it. And then you see it and it's like, Oh, somebody knocked. Out another one of those knockoffs. I got a, I got a question for people, um, related to this film. Uh, that's slightly, slightly skew from what we've been discussing.

I'm wondering about camp and horror and the relationship between the two. Just comedy and horror is a fine line. Like, that's hard to balance and get right. Yeah, but I wonder, like, because it's funny to me that when I feel like I, like, horror comedy is one thing, and that's something that people go for, but it seems to me like the fine line that people wind up crossing accidentally a lot of the time or that they try to play off of and often fail is camp. with horror like making a campy horror like a campy horror film being a bad horror film versus a horror film with camp elements or something you know what. I'm talking about is another one that's dangerous though because you but you you're usually very self-aware when you're doing yeah and that's what doesn't work most of the time it's like the reason we love a lot of the worst movies is because they have no idea they're making a terrible movie where when you're trying for camp that hard it's like you know what you're putting together and then it falls flat every time or rarely does it work in any.

I think the beginnings of camp for me and I'm not I haven't looked into it as a film history thing but I think for me it was the fly and you get to that help me it's like okay how seriously am I supposed to take this but that was sort of the beginning of horror camp for me The problem with Horror Camp in relation to this movie is in this movie, I was never scared of anything that happened to anybody. It just didn't matter. I was really frightened when the cop had to kiss one of the brothers. That was kind of creepy. That was unnerving, really.

Those guys are just creepy. They're creepy. But funny. I don't know. It was one of those I hated them scenes.

But at the same time, by the end, I was just like, it's the only reason you're still watching, I think. They're the only thing carrying it to that level that keeps you involved. They added a little bit of life to it. Annoying, but life. I saw a stage production at U of K once.

I think it was Laurent. And it was just terrible. But there was one guy in it who had to light a candle in a scene. And he lit the match and got it to the candle and it blew out. And so he lit another and a wind just blew it out.

Then he tried another and it wouldn't light. Then he lit another, lit the candle and the candle blew out. And it was, it was the best thing in the play is watching this guy improvise, trying to deal with lighting a candle for five to 10 minutes. That guy's still around. I see him like sometimes around town.

He, This was at U of K years and years ago, but I remember nothing else of that play except for a guy trying to light. And that's what I think the twins added to this movie is like there's some little element of actual life in it. Because you can see That they're trying to do something. Well, for me, it's just the weirdness factor isn't on the screen. I'm like, they're just weird.

They're not following a script that says act weird here. They're just being themselves, I'm pretty sure. Well, how many twins act together? It's like, yes, we'll take this role. And they both commit at the same level.

It's not like one twin was like, I don't know. That was weird. what is it stuck on you situation. You had the the twin who was the actor and the the other one who was afflicted with. Stage fright yeah no neither of them had stage. Nor did they nor were they conjoined unfortunately it.

Might have been the only thing to make this a little more interesting. Um actually they were conjoined there was a lot of cgi in 1980. Um Yeah, so, yeah, but speaking of which, like, yeah, this, of course, had that wonderful ending where it turns out they both together married the heroine. It happens. Wound up with lots of little vampire chillins running around with their own little capes and fangs.

And those cheap Halloween wigs. Oh, yeah, yeah, they were great. That wasn't their real hair? Come on. Will someone please explain to me how that happened?

I'm really confused how we went from her being. It was the Bugs Bunny thing. It was the Bugs Bunny reverse. And then remember when he said, you wascally virgin, and then he hit her with a big mallet, and then birds. It.

Makes as much sense. And then Wile E. Coyote painted. Don't drag him into this. Not Wile E., damn it.

You actually were forbidden by his lawyer to mention him. There's been a falling out. Yeah. Yeah, something about the bird taking his. Anyway.

Taking his rights. But yeah, I know there were so many little moments in this film that were silly and goofy and they weren't like... The campy moments were... They stood apart. But it's like there were so many moments that just were goofy and I found myself sitting there being.

Like, what? Another one of them was definitely the intro image where you had, as you guys recall, the statue of liberty yeah this suddenly grows fangs like in the very beginning of the film and you're and and that to my mind it's like that's the kind of shot that's supposed to set a tone for a film what the hell is the. Tone that yeah and then there's the scenes within the scenes that also don't work like okay he's just introduced the fact that the cop is also an actress and And they're building this up like she's this great actress. Having worked in theater for quite a while now, was that not the most lackluster performance that she then turns around in the next scene like, Oh, you mean in the high school art show?

Yeah, like she was barely committed enough to get the words out. I was like, I thought we're supposed to be proving that she's not just... She's really an actress. But the on-screen audience loved her. Yeah.

So clearly she had some magic going on for them. In other scenes, she could almost pull off at least a normal half-ass. She was still pretty lackluster the whole movie. But I'm like... better when you're over here not acting acting within the movie and. Then there was one of the many perplexing interpretive dance scenes that followed that where uh she had the scimitar it was like a costume piece and then she started slowly walking towards mama dracula as though she intended to harm her stopped five feet away and then mama dracula just kind of like took the sword away from her just like grabbed it oh thanks for bringing that over to me like There were so many scenes that just seemed suffused with importance, and I feel like I just missed the undertone completely.

That one definitely had, like, they in their minds in making this, that had giant symbolism, and Mama taking it away really made a big difference where we were just like, what the hell is, why do we care? Yeah. It was like that Portlandia thing. This whole thing felt like a Portlandia thing. It does.

But there's a really, I think maybe my favorite Portlandia thing is just Fred Armisen in a canoe doing an interpretive dance with a paddle. And there are people sitting on the bank of the river in chairs watching. And there's no explanation for it before or after. It's just canoe interpretive dance. And these are the people who go see stuff like that.

They're out. And he really commits to it. He looks like he thinks he's doing something that is invested with some sort of meaning or artistic... I don't know. Well, and that's, I think, part of what kind of killed this movie was that when the twins were acting goofy, they looked like they were trying to act goofy.

Yeah. That's the thing. It was way too self-aware in the campiness. Yeah, a lot of the people looked like they were trying to be goofy, and then you had Nurse Ratched. Who was just being Nurse Ratched.

Deadpan. Deadpan's dick. With that accent. Yes. Wilmer Fudd, Nurse Ratched.

And then you had, who's ostensibly a vampire, and then you had Little Miss Half-Ass strolling in there at the end. So it was this weird, it was one of those like, okay guys, if you're going to make a movie like this, all you have to commit and act like you're doing this like semi-seriously or you all have to, I don't know, do this. It kind of felt like some of the cast maybe never met some of the other cast. Maybe they never spoke the same language. That might be true.

Well, that's what really threw things off for me is the one time in there where Louise Fletcher makes a joke. In fact, it's probably one of the funnier jokes in the whole thing. The horse, like, that was, like, if that was delivered by somebody else, the story about the gnarled old woman, if you remember correctly. Gnarled. She was gnarled, and she, like, her, like, even my horse was throwing up.

I'm like, okay, that's just a joke. Like, you're not telling a story. You put a zinger in there, and, like, you can't even deliver that. No, because I was actually imagining the horse throwing up. Yeah, no, it doesn't work.

That's how, like. deadpan shoot you can't. Be deadpan the entire movie and then try to work in somebody else's joke like oh my god that was that was so weird she can't pull that off it was almost as bad when she was like yes virgin that's what i said i'm like okay now you're really you're spelling out the joke we get it that it's a joke but when they yeah yeah. Uh she she definitely had a few check off moments in there as i as i said she. Was looking for nuclear whistles oh god. So where jim She invited all the villagers.

To the WAMP show. It never ceased to be ridiculous. No matter how many times, we're like an hour and a half in and I'm still laughing at it. It never is not ridiculous. Never.

And just a weird fact, I wanted to throw this out here. So the inspector, the other cop, the older guy. Oh yeah, there was another cop. Born in Terre Haute, Indiana. Has never made a movie in this country, but is huge in France.

Again, the in France thing holds true. He has a massive career, is super beloved there, and is always the cop or the American that shows up. He has a huge career, has never made an American movie. Born in Indiana. Fred, I see you corking your eyebrow.

It's not the fault of France. No i was blaming tara hote there you go another he. Blames france oh it's okay we can be racist against hoosiers that's most people yeah i didn't grow up in louisville so that was all new to me but my wife was from around here so i always found that i could like make her laugh with anti-hoosier stuff and i. Have no sense of it myself it. Surprised me too i you know uh Down in Mississippi, where I'm from, of course, there's a very different kind of racism that's quite apparent.

But yeah, this Hoosier, anti-Hoosier border patrols, I've never noticed before. It doesn't really make any sense. I mean, I am a Hoosier, but I went to the same things and did the same thing. I didn't grow up on an Amish farm and try to hang out with all. The cool kids in Louisville, but I mean, they treat me that way.

No. Um, but, uh, but yeah, no, I went up there for a job once and I was just like, oh yeah, this is just lots of factories. Pretty much what I expected. Okay. Uh, you know, Kentuckiana, it's, it's a thing.

Um, well, I kind of thought it was amusing when I first went out on the, the river walk, the new bridge thing and you, You get to the end of the bridge, and it looks like nobody's told Indiana about it yet. It's just, there's just a street and houses. Don't let them connect. And the bridge just stops there. Like, do they know this is coming?

I go there, and I look, and I go, hey, Marlena lived there. Yeah. Oh, yeah? My bedroom window would have been right beside the bridge. Really?

Yes. I moved. Actually, when I moved, I lived on the bottom floor. Yeah. But every morning at 7 like they were jackhammering with this huge machine into the earth and it would shake the house which was like.

This mansion this gigantic mansion built in 1868 and it's like shaking and I'm like it was horrible. See and I was hoping you moved just because like you got tired of like guys looking in your window walking out on the bridge. That was the construction workers they would like hang out in my yard around my door just because I mean they had an office in the front of the building and one day one guy was like. Hey I like eggs for breakfast and I was like you know like. That's really inappropriate since it's like morning time and you're standing on my porch like that's really creepy.

Sir I'm gonna go get my gun that's my fault Sir, there's going to be some frontier justice if you're not careful. One of them tried to steal my cat. Wow, these construction workers were really villainous. They were dicks, yeah. They were nice.

Brian, do we have anything else to cover with this film? There's a few odd random ones I was going to throw out. Let's see. Moments like the daughter trying to lose her virginity. That was a scene.

The other scene where she does. The beginning is just confusing enough when she has an echo in her bosom. That's the only logical thing I could come up with. I think the funniest, and I'm ashamed to say this, but the funniest part of the movie is when it's focusing on her boobs and he goes, you have beautiful eyes. Her name was Virginia.

Jenny for short. But it's Virginia. Yeah. And that was the guy who was like hardcore overdubbed because there were scenes where he was just like shouting and the words did not. Match at all.

It was a Godzilla movie level of that. The scene later when the inspector comes along and takes care of that. What the hell is all going on? Like why? She was waiting for that Mr.

Right to come along, but then it's okay for the entire bar to go? Yeah, I was really. Confused about that. And then an explosion? And, like, none of these steps will do it?

Like, I'm confused. I don't know. And then when it just exploded, I was like, well, I thought that would happen. I don't know. What?

I don't know. Nothing makes any sense anymore. No. That was like a family guy things randomly blow up in movies joke. That was.

Or the little girl with the underwear. That was disturbing. Somebody explain that. Why that needed to be there. Okay, so we have this scene, for those of us who have not seen the film, which I hope is everyone who is listening to this.

So the rapey scene has just happened where the montage of women being abducted. From the WAMP dressing rooms. Because WAMP is also not just a fashion show, but also the clothing store that the two vampire boys work at in broad daylight um and uh the and the wamp store we have all the uh the virgins being abducted from the dressing rooms the virgins uh and one of them is like a little and there's this one little girl who's getting changed in one of the rooms. She's an unattractive annie basically. Yeah basically uh annie was anyway uh so you have her she's like poking at the mirror and notices that it's a door and And, like, you know, it's a secret door, and so she pushes it open and, like, wanders into the darkness beyond, where then one of the vampires, like, unveils himself dramatically and campily in front of her with, like, full vampire fangs and whatnot.

And inexplicably, in, like, I gotta say, one of those shots that just makes me go, like, this is okay to film. Like, she reached down, picked up the hem of her dress, and showed the front of her panties, and on her crotch was a giant cross. And then he's just like, and then she turns around, lifts up the back of the dress, bends over, and you see that on her butt there is a Jewish star right there. Just to be sure we offend everybody. Yeah.

And at which point the vampire goes, and like runs away, as I recall, or something like that. He's deeply spooked by Judaism. Yeah. I don't know. Again, I don't know what to do with all of this.

Yeah, I mean, they had the thing earlier where they sort of like laughed off all the vampire, like the. State through the heart. The speedy child. The daylight. Not so speediness.

Well, I was trying to construct some logic on my own. I thought, well, maybe it's like when they sprayed DDT on mosquitoes and now all the mosquitoes are. Like DDT resistant. So maybe vampires can go out in the day, but like me, they just don't want to. Maybe it gives them a migraine, but the ones that have survived in the day are the ones who are like, yeah, we can deal with it as That's what I was thinking about, and all of a sudden Annie was showing her panties, and I was like, I'm not prepared for this.

So you're saying. That they're not used to Jewish holy symbols because they don't see that many Jews. I guess they haven't built the tolerance. Like, he had a tolerance for the cross. He could reach out and take the silverware and disassemble the cross, but maybe...

Star of David is just too much. It's like one of those complicated puzzle games. Well, no, the worst part about it was that the little girl had like this mischievous smile. On her face. She was having a good time.

I was just like, woohoo. It's okay, she got smacked for it. I get to be naked. For a stranger. That was beautiful.

Actually, it seemed like the actress going, I get to be naked in a film. Yeah. Sorry the 12 year old actress yeah like who are not even. 12 no she was i mean nine i i didn't think that was acting she just seemed to be having a great time. Yeah like getting undressed for this campy vampire guy yeah uh she is like he's gonna play me some of his queen cover songs on the acoustic later like you know uh maybe maybe together we'll go catch a rush show and they.

Maybe did. Speaking of him turning around with his giant, dorky-looking plastic fangs... God, they were terrible. Okay, she is their mother, right? She's also Dracula.

Why does she never... Are we to assume she's not a vampire? We see her drinking blood out of a little martini. Yeah. Through many moments.

They're vampires, but she's not a vampire. She never has fangs. Right. I feel like they couldn't commit as to whether she was like Elizabeth Bathory. Yeah.

Or like. They had both kind of going. Vlad, Dracula, you know. I think the real answer is probably just like that was in Louise's contract. She was like, those things hurt, I am not wearing them.

If you want me for this, that's fine. That's the sense I got too. She was like, I'm an Oscar winner. Screw you guys. It's bad enough I'm here making this movie.

I'm not wearing those damn plastic fangs. I'm pretty sure that's how it went down. They were like, oh no, we can't lose our star. Not for this film. We'll ride around it.

They didn't. They just went, just don't mention it. Oh, that would be actually interesting if they made a movie, but they didn't know if they were going to get Louise Fletcher in it or not. Because if you notice, she's in a lot of scenes just by herself. What if they just filmed a film and then at the zero hour they were like, oh, we got Louise Fletcher.

Awesome. And then filmed a bunch of scenes to stick her in it. So it's plan nine, isn't it? My Dennis kind of looks like Louise Fletcher. Let's see if we can make this work.

Isn't that how the cat, the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia do with Danny DeVito? Like they film everything and they add him in. He's not really there. No, I mean, he's really there, but he's only there for like a day. Danny DeVito-esque.

Yeah, there was one dude who showed up and was yelling all the time again. That was one of those scenes. I was like, why is he getting different direction than everyone else in the film? Why did Danny DeVito show up and start responding to everyone talking with yelling and then leave shortly after appearing? Her lawyer showed up.

And was yelling at everyone on set. She's filming. Well, pretend he's a psychiatrist. It's fine. That makes no sense too and it's not like it's explained or balances out with anyone else yelling for no good reason.

And then they have a narrator in the last three minutes of the. Movie and so 30 seconds of narrator at the beginning and then like they wrap up because they didn't know how else to do it I mean here just read. This yeah anytime you have narration it's a sure sign of you know really well told story um But, yeah, no, and they had that in the beginning and the end, I believe. In the beginning they showed the Louise Fletcher made up as Countess Elizabeth, Erzabeth Bathory, or in this film, Erzabeth Dracul, or Dracula. And then we have the exiting narration that says, and they lived happily ever after.

All the vampires with, sorry, the bigamist actress slash cop. The actress cop. Who married the two vampire twins and had lots of little vampire kids with fake... hair and whatnot. And then I guess we assume. And then the guy who makes gold and takes photos.

Just hangs out with You know, Mama Dracula. Yeah, but she never makes him a vampire. He just gets old, yeah. Yeah, or apparently makes any other use of him. He's just around to take pictures or something.

Honestly, I thought that was going to be the plot of the film was like this... this dorky scientist guy getting seduced. By nurse ratchet they set it up kind of like that and then they. Forget he was like a main character at first and then they're just like oh oh yeah we forgot you're still here. It really does it goes for like 20 or 30 minutes with like one scene with him and then he's just in the lab looking at a beaker and then they cut back to. The like you know you know harold lloyd isn't as interesting as we thought he was let's just cut back to the twins abducting women.

He probably got a real job he's like look i'm not gonna be here for these months so you can bring me back and wrap it up later. You're assuming it took months to film this. Yeah, because they would stop production And they have to scrape together some money. They only did it on weekends. It's just on weekends.

I would love that in this film if we noticed the main vampire's sideburns kept changing length. Well, I think by the end that he really is just that old. It took him that long to finish. They started it in 1947 and then it came out in the 80s. He really was that old.

That's a movie that would almost be tolerable to me is the idea of like, okay... goofy scientist like goes to land of vampire it actually excuse me that's the other parody vampire movie they made which was dracula dead and loving it did you recall with uh redfield he had a strong redfield vibe uh no this is wrong no this is wrong yes wrong me wrong me. Well and he was like set up to be like at first you think he's gonna be like the protagonist but then she's like i'll give you a million dollars he's like Let's kill everyone! Even he's the one like, what, do you want me to be a murderer? And then he's like, I need 30 women, like a few scenes later. And his body count keeps growing inexplicably.

We never know what he's doing, but he occasionally shows up and just starts demanding more, like 40 bodies. Three. You'll get three and like it. This movie was just so wrong. It didn't follow anything.

It didn't have a very concrete plot. But then again, it didn't follow traditional... like storytelling rules you know like you kind of have to have like a character who does this and you know it just it didn't have we hit. This one over the head enough I think the only thing to wrap it up this may have been the funniest thing in it you did get the old lady that he brings in at the end you did get her name right his I guess grandmother. Character I thought it was his mom. I don't know she's like the nanny or whatever like whatever she's supposed to be she's basically the grandmother like character in her He refers to her as Graham Stoker.

Oh, yeah. I didn't get that. Yeah, that's wrong. That's their most blatant... With the little dangling portrait thing.

Yeah, the portrait that was on a. It was supposed to be floating, I think, and it just looked like it was dangling on its wire. One of the vampire boys actually was dangling. They had it. Oh, that's right.

That's right. Oh, God. They were weirdly taunting him in the weird scene with the clock. But he didn't notice that they were right above his head and talking in their own horrible voices and not Graham Stoker's voice. Why she would be talking to him is a picture I don't know anyway.

Anyway, people, whoever's listening to this, take what we've discussed here and go online and make a webcomic that will be much funnier than this film ever was. It's two panels long. You can do it with the material we've given you. You have the technology. You can create something so much more worth people's time than this film.

Just reconstructing the madcap, psychedelic-fueled scenes. Psychedelic and cocaine-fueled scenes. And French. Yeah, that are in this film that we have regurgitated for you. So please, please do that instead of watching this film.

Yeah, I don't know what else to tell them. I'll thank you guys for showing up here and for attending this wonderful event. Halloween-themed event. I think it's a tribute to the human spirit. Us showing up and making it all the way through.

That this film exists and that we watched it and have discussed it. It's just... I feel like we've accomplished something. We have. I feel that way every time we record.

So is this our last thing that we're going to discuss for tonight? I believe so. Okay, well, I'm going to throw out some things for the alley, of course. We are recording, by the way, live via digital recording from the alley theater. and we just have a few events coming up that I want to let people know about we've got next week that's going to be October 19th we've got this will probably go up by that point actually so this will have already happened awesome we're actually going to have a show called Visual Ipecac and it's going to be a festival of art by Satan and his brother Devin two real people who are coming down from Chicago and joining. Us I believe Lindy is involved in that somehow.

Yeah, Lindy. Lindy Lou Who. Who was just on here. You heard her talking about her crazy cat paintings. Yeah, yeah.

That would be Lindy. That's going to be Lindy's thing. Anyway, that's going on at the Alley. And that's something I'm looking forward to hanging pictures for. We've also got...

I say that actually seriously. And we've also got on the 26th, we've got the Zombie Stampede coming up. That won't be taking place at the Alley, but it will be... You can go online to www.survivethestampede.com and learning all about the Louisville Zombie Stampede. It will be a terrifying event where you'll be chased around in the woods by zombies and enjoy delicious beverages at the end of your race for your life.

And lastly, we've got coming up in December, we've got All the Who's in Whoville. This is a show that's going to be our big blowout show for the end of the year. It's going to be a Christmas special featuring all of the doctors from Doctor Who. collectively telling a Dr. Seuss story. Hence, all the who's in Whoville.

Unless the Grinch steals your TARDIS, travels back in time, and steals your childhood joy, you should come see this show. And I guarantee that you'll have a good time. Anyway, looking forward to seeing people here, and thanks once again, Movie Meltdown, for joining us here at the Alley. Thanks for letting us come and take over and put together our first Halloween event. We'll see if we want to be together and do more in the future.

We'll find out. I think it was a lot of fun. The first movie was really enjoyable. The one we didn't talk about. The one we didn't talk about.

So the take home here is go watch Chastity Bites. Otherwise, I think that about does it. We will return next week. Same geek time, same geek fee. Thanks for listening.

How's that going? I said horrible. My French R's are so bad, but I'm working on it. They're wary, wary men. Wary, wary.

It saddens me very much. This movie. Oh, yeah. Every night when the moon shines bright, yes, I'm just a slave. Oh, yeah.

I'm just a zombie of love. Yes, I'll follow her to her grave. Oh, yeah. In the midnight hour when I'm. Supposed to be sleeping, Jacqueline will call me.

And I'll. She hypnotizes you when she talks. You know about the way she walks. And if you see. Her anywhere, then you better be there.

Hey, hey, hey, Dr. Lena. I'm in misery. Oh, yeah. Dr.

Lena. Now please set me free Now when the sun goes down Knock your door and throw. Away the key Oh yeah And whatever you do Don't go near that weeping. Willow tree Uh-huh. She's got shiny green eyes and jet black silky hair.

Yeah, yeah. And when she smiles. With those long white teeth, man, you better beware. Oh, yeah. You are fucking kidding me.

Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. You are fucking kidding me. They had many, many children. I hope you haven't taken my stories too seriously.

This episode is a production of Movie Meltdown. Produced and edited by The Oddity Studios. With opening music performed by The Empire. For more on how to sponsor or support the show, email producer at moviemeltdown.com. Talk hard!