Flesh Freaks / Kill Them and Eat Them
Two feature-length films I made in high school & college. Both are available on a single BluRay from Saturn’s Core Audio & Video in partnership with OCN Distribution & Vinegar Syndrome, and are available at VinegarSyndrome.com.
The blurb from the previous disc release from Gold Ninja Video sums up the projects pretty well:
In 1998, a teenage film fanatic named Conall Pendergast followed his parents to Belize to document their participation in an archeological dig. Stranded in a remote animal-filled jungle, the aspiring writer/director realized he had a great location on his hands and a camera at his disposal, so why not make a zombie film? The end result became FLESH FREAKS, a micro-budget wonder shot in South America and Toronto that harkens back to the madness of Peter Jackson’s BAD TASTE and the exotic locales of HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD - but with way more high-schoolers stabbing undead monstrosities in the face.
Conall followed up his directorial debut with the blood-soaked creature feature KILL THEM AND EAT THEM which charts the adventures of Dr. Gore and his army of bloodthirsty mutants. It’s part THE GUYVER, part MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND and all monster mashing mayhem. Gold Ninja Video is proud to present both films for the first time on Blu-ray along with a gut pile new extras produced exclusively for this release.
The cover for the Japanese release was perhaps a bit grandiose. Flesh Freaks does not contain a burning car.
My Liner Notes from the Flesh Freaks BluRay
II snatched the TV guide from the Saturday paper as soon as Dad put it on the kitchen table, then scoured it - my weekly ritual - poring over the names. Title. Year. Genre. Looking for ‘Horror,’ of course, or maybe, oddly, something that sounded horrorish but was identified as otherwise (Batmen of Africa, Adventure, 1936. One for the maybe column?). I was 8 and I didn’t trust that screwy VCR. Sure, you could ‘time tape’ and set it to record something in the middle of the night when all the good stuff was on, but most of the time the show would start late or run long and you’d end up with bits and pieces, or often you’d wake up and it hadn’t taped at all because, oh yeah, Tuesday at 2am was actually Wednesday - Why couldn’t I remember that?
Ok - Curse of the Werewolf, Horror, 1962. Thursday at 4am. Right on! Forget the VCR, I’ll set the alarm and wake up so I’m guaranteed not to miss it. My great aunt Sissi, presumably certain that I was up to no good, insisted on getting up with me and soon fell back to sleep. How could she, I wondered, when the movie was so riveting? Well, okay, not much werewolf stuff in the middle part, but the end, wow! Just the kind of gruesome monster-rama the title promised! After that I was off to the races: The Green Slime, Vampire Bat, Lake of Dracula and endless late-night-but-really-early-morning Planet of the Apes marathons I’d drift in and out of until the drifting got too much and my habit of nearly falling asleep in school convinced my Dad to put a justified end to my nocturnal cinephilia!
Enough of that anyway - it was time to make movies. 9 now, with Mom and Dad’s VHS camcorder, making a five alarm mess of a class project called The Radioactive Killer about a hapless soldier caught on a south sea island during an atomic bomb test who mutates into a murdering monster! A little high concept for a movie made by three kids with a rubber monster mask, yes, and it made my teacher so mad he turned it off and yelled at me in front of class, and I broke my grandmother’s VCR when I tried to mess up the tape to make it look like an aged old film … so as debuts go it was inauspicious as all get out, true, but maybe I was just headstrong or oblivious or plain dumb enough to keep on stabbing at the screaming corpse of cinema until it yielded more horrific atrocities! I planned the epics Bugman, War of the Weird People, and the deranged Rippers from Saturn with an army of aliens to be played by people wearing gas masks and painting suits with monstrous claw-hands made from rakes! What with its scenes of widespread panic, I realized that one was just a notch beyond my reach, so I made it a comic book instead. My Dad would read it to my brother before bed!
This handsome stunner was perhaps the grossest of the Flesh Freaks.
Meanwhile I begged every weekend to be dragged to Mr Video, which generously gifted a free bag of popcorn with every three rentals. Fiend without a Face, The Crawling Eye, Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster and a menagerie of their rotten peers quickly filled our kitchen shelves with bag after bag of packing material-grade neon yellow snack food. Having exhausted Mr Video’s back catalogue we moved further down the street to Major Video (which a few years later would tragically succumb to becoming a Blockbuster) and then, around a corner and down an alley, the fabled Budget Videos! 5 movies for 5 days for 5 dollars! It was an ungodly bunker stocked to the ceiling with weird stuff sticking out in every direction and presumably organized according to some mystical runic alphabet, with many tapes in beaten up old big boxes with cover paintings only tangentially related to the films themselves. Sorry box, but I’d been fooled too many times to think the cool creature on the front of Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake was anything like the monster who eventually showed up in the movie! The Wasp Woman depicted a giant wasp with a woman’s face, but in the movie itself she was a woman with a none-too-convincing wasp mask, and The Beast with a Million Eyes was not the vaguely dog-like multi-orbed critter on the poster but an energy being that could inhabit any animal and therefore metaphorically had a ‘million eyes.’ Honestly, did these people hate kids?
Octaman - there was a head-scratcher: How could a movie about an octopus man, pretty much the greatest premise of all time, be so soul-crushingly boringly bad? I must have missed something — I figured I’d better rent it again and pay closer attention next time. Then of course there was a rogue’s gallery of winners, too: Spider Baby, The Pit and the Pendulum, A Bucket of Blood, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Black Sabbath, Carnival of Souls, Planet of the Vampires, and the amazing X-The Man with the X-Ray Eyes!
When at length I emerged from this psychotronic delirium and blundered into making features, horror was of course the only way to go. For Flesh Freaks I spent every free hour in the basement, weird seventeen year old that I was, making myself woozy from latex and other assorted chemicals while trying to figure out how to put together mask after mask after mask. I knew I was supposed to ‘use in a well-ventilated area’ but I didn’t have a well-ventilated area to use!
My high school basement was one of the main shooting locations and the janitors helpfully lent us a mop to clean up all the fake blood. Not so my Dad’s workplace, which I left in quite a red-tinged mess which must have really shocked someone come Monday morning. I’d use the masks in class projects too, including a video in which we dug up the corpse of William Lyon Mackenzie King for an interview. My friend’s mother wasn’t too thrilled by the incredibly gruesome mask and banned me from their house (this was a woman who wore a t-shirt with tiny twinkling stars that formed the face of Elvis -- even now I can see his starry face mocking me!).
Flesh Freaks was kind of a piecemeal affair but with a lot of help from parents and friends it was actually finished and actually released and actually reviewed like a real actual movie. And in storied company too - Micro-Film magazine reviewed it and featured a review of Kiarostami’s Close-Up on the opposite page! So what to do but strike again with Kill Them and Eat Them? This time we kept the basement window open (ventilation) as friends came over to help me paint the wilder, brighter, Paul Blaisdell-inspired masks that attempted to follow in the memorably creative footsteps of his monsters from Invasion of the Saucer Men, It! The Terror from Beyond Space, The Day the World Ended, and the king of them all, the mean-eyed turnip from It Conquered the World.
Kill Them and Eat Them was packed with more monsters and more wonky gruesomeness, and unlike Flesh Freaks it had a couple of actual film festival screenings so it could be seen by a real live audience! The world premiere was at the fun and friendly Baltimore MicroCineFest, right after Matt Farley’s hilarious Druid Gladiator Clone, which was so clever and funny, with its own groovy monster menagerie, that I was nervous to follow it!
Then, alas, came the skull-crushing purgatory of, sigh, film school, where I was quickly abused of the notion that everything I was doing was completely wrong, and then several more years beyond, when I forgot as much of what I learned there as possible while churning out an increasingly demented brood of cinematic oddities, many of which lie in wait on this very BluRay!
So go, dear and gentle viewer, and if you care to dare to, please sample the strange delights on offer, and maybe picture in your mind the never-completed dream-sequel Flesh Force, which would have tied both films into the same cinematic universe! It wouldn’t stop there, either: Flesh Factor, Flesh Fury, Flesh Frenzy, Flesh Fandango, Flesh Fricassee … one sequel with the original cast, one without, one made up of stock footage from previous entries, one ‘dark horse’ entry from a different production team with a style totally inconsistent from the rest of the franchise but loved by certain fans, one that wasn’t made as part of the series but was retitled by a sleazy distributor … the whole motley bunch that, perhaps in some alternate universe, are searing someone’s eyeballs right now!