Interviews
[Interview] ‘Masked Mutilator’ Screenwriters Give Us a Peek Behind the Mask
On May 14th, InterVision Pictures will release Masked Mutilator and it looks to have all the makings of a cult film that will please the late night exploitation crowd. It’s a slasher about wrestling which should be a sub-genre all its own, but for some reason isn’t. Maybe Masked Mutilator will start a trend.
The film is the story of a professional wrestler that accidentally kills an opponent in the ring. This terrible tragedy leads to him taking a job at a group home for youth offenders. Unfortunately, a psychopath wearing a wrestling mask begins to butcher the teenage residents and this rehab center becomes a no-holds-barred battled for survival.
So how in the world did this wacky idea come to be? Co-writers Dale Schneck and Ed Polgardy were more than happy to share the behind-the-scenes scoop with Bloody Disgusting.
“Co-screenwriter Dale Schneck (who also managed my acting career back in the ’80s) and I collaborated on a number of screenplays over the years, and most of them were designed as a way to give the actors he represented a way to appear in various film projects that we generated. Roles were written with specific actors from Dale’s stable in mind, so it would be an easy sell to any producers who wanted to fund the movies,” Polgardy says when asked how Masked Mutilator came to be.
“I was a big horror fan and Dale had an inside knowledge of pro wrestling, so we decided to mix the wrestling and slasher genres to create a hybrid movie involving wrestling-action and horror. In fact, the Steve Carson role was originally written for me, but by the time we put everything together to make the movie, I was in the middle of editing comic books for BIG Entertainment, and I couldn’t break away from my job in Boca Raton, Florida for the number of days they would need me to act in the move, which was being shot back in Pennsylvania. So I became one of the producers and Brick Bronsky, who directed the picture, took over as Steve Carson.”
“In the late ‘80s I was the personal manager of a number of pro wrestlers who wanted to get into movies and television,” Schneck tells us. “One of those wrestlers was Jeff Beltzner aka Brick Bronsky. I submitted him to Lloyd Kaufman at Troma Pictures, and Brick landed his first feature role for them in Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD. Because Lloyd liked Brick so much, he then cast him in Class of Nuke ‘em High II & III in the lead roles.
“While my clients took me to wrestling shows, I became fascinated by this sub-culture of pretend violence. I also realized the physical risks they took, applying holds that if actually applied with real power could kill someone.
“Ed and I had written a serious drama set in the world of pro wrestling titled Hammerlock, which was optioned by a few companies but never got made. I think that’s when Ed and I wrote Masked Mutilator thinking a low-budget horror film night be fun with a wrestling villain. However, Ed and I always wanted to write a solid plot-line that made sense. We didn’t want to do just another horror/slasher film where a group of young adults go off to a camp and get slaughtered one by one without a clever motivation behind the murders. Ed and I wanted the audience to empathize with the juveniles in the group home. The kids had to be much more than simply fodder for horrific murders,” recalls Schneck.
“There were a few producers with money to spend who were interested in Masked Mutilator right off the bat, but when those deals didn’t work out, we decided to forge ahead and finance the project ourselves. Four or five of us kicked in some money, with Dale putting up the lion’s share of the cash to fund the production,” Poldgardy continues.
The film began production in 1994, but then hit a bit of a roadblock and was delayed for two years. In 1996, they got back at but still weren’t able to get a finished film in the can. Complications that often arise with indie filmmaking left Schneck, Polgardy and the rest of the cast and crew with a film that was nearly complete. And then it just sat there and sat there and sat there. Until now.
“I had all the film elements stored in my home basement,” Schneck says. “And it bugged me that all the work and effort and money we put into this project never saw completion or release. I felt sorry for all the cast and crew who worked on the project and couldn’t at least show a completed film to their family and friends. (I also felt a bit sorry for my wallet.)
“As a former film critic, I was used to meeting press deadlines and completing articles on time. But with Masked Mutilator, the work was still in pieces and unfinished. That haunted me for over 20 years.”
“The way the picture was shot with a lot of improvisation on the set left some holes in the storyline that needed to be fixed for the movie to work,” Polgardy says. “We were 80% there for years, but couldn’t figure out how to glue it all together. And all of us were determined to fix the problems, so everyone who put their blood, sweat and tears into the original production could finally see something cool onscreen. We were constantly trying to come up new scenes to make everything gel, but none of them seemed to be working, until, about a year ago, when we thought of using a contemporary wraparound sequence to tie everything together, and once we had that wraparound shot and edited into the movie, we finally had something we could take to potential distributors. I knew David Gregory over at Severin Films, and I thought it would be a great regional horror film for him to release through his Intervision label, and, luckily, he agreed!”
Getting a film back on track and finished 25 years after production first began is no easy feat, especially when it requires writing and filming new footage. You need much of the original cast and crew to be on board. In the case of Masked Mutilator they had a star that was more than willing to do his part.
“Tom Taylor was always involved as an actor and producer on Masked Mutilator. He’s been one of the driving forces behind getting everything finished since day 1, so he was completely ready and available to be in the wraparound scenes,” says Polgardy.
“A bit of trivia: Tom and I had our feature film acting debut together in Bill Lustig’s Maniac Cop. We have the opening lines in the move. When screenwriter Larry Cohen’s daughter, Jill Gatsby, is leaving a bar, we both try to pick her up, but she doesn’t want anything to do with us. Then she goes outside and gets murdered by the Maniac Cop. Goes to show you what happens when you don’t say yes to a date with Big E or Big T!”
“I have been working with Tom all these years,” Schneck tells us. “In fact, I have been developing a reality series again set in the world of independent pro wrestling, and Tom Taylor is one of the stars of that project. Tom also worked with former wrestler Doug Yasinsky (Carl the cook in our film) as Doug’s heel manager at wrestling shows.”
While Taylor has continued to be active in the wrestling community and work as a promoter in Pennsylvania, he’s not the only member of Masked Mutilator’s production to remain busy. A number of the people responsible for this indie wrestling slasher have gone on to develop extremely impressive resumes. The fact that they worked with such high-level talent isn’t lost on Schneck and Polgardy.
“I think it’s amazing how lucky we were to find these talented people for their first time in front of a camera,” says Schneck.
“It’s an incredible feeling to see people you grew up within the movie business go on to have successful careers,” says Polgardy. “I love it. In fact, I pinch myself every day when I think about all of the adventures I’ve had producing movies and working with famous people I only read about when I was just a fanboy living in Pennsylvania. Just incredible.”
Some of those talented people include Glenn Hetrick, a makeup artist that has worked on everything from Star Trek to The Hunger Games all while serving as a judge on SyFy’s Face Off, and actor James DeBello.
“I was also a high school journalism teacher, and Glenn Hetrick was in my yearbook class at Saucon Valley High School. I knew he was creative and so easy to work with. Glenn was always highly motivated and artistically gifted, so that made him terrific in front of the camera as well as super valuable creating special effects with Paul Sutt for our film.
“James DeBello was only 14 when he auditioned for our film. Obviously, his parents were supportive and once we cast him, they had to bring him to the set for his one day of shooting. I recall that he was rather shy, but so polite and respectful. Years later when he starred in Paramount’s Detroit Rock City, and then followed up with Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, and others, I was glad we gave just a little helping hand to the successful career he accomplished.”
On May 14th, we can all step into the ring with Taylor, Hetrick, DeBello and the rest of the Masked Mutilator crew as this long-lost film finally comes home to DVD and Blu-ray, courtesy of InterVision Pictures.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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