Editorials
[Set Visit] Covered in Blood on the Set of Joe Begos’ ‘VFW’
Article contributed by Cinestate’s Preston Fassel.
Spoiler warning. It’s a place out of time, a nexus where the memories and aesthetics of different eras collide in ways both striking and nostalgic. The walls are wood-paneled 70s teak, the sort you’d find in a basement rec-room or the kind of bowling alley where the sound of organ music never stops. The lights washing over it all are all 80s neon new-wave, phosphorescent purples and blues and magentas washing over it all in cascading waves. The awards decorating the walls are timeless- plaques honoring the service and sacrifice of men and women from Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm. And in the center of it is a man who is very much of the now, a hipster beard and retro t-shirt bedecking his lithe body as he ducks and weaves with a dancer’s grace, camera in his hands, capturing a scene that would be surreal even if it weren’t for the incongruous clash of eras and aesthetics here: Men in stocking hats and undershirts and suits and fatigue jackets watch over a terrified girl as what appear to be hordes of the undead—are they zombies, mutants, some Lovecraftian abominations?—lay siege to the place. The man with the camera bobs and weaves, a cinematographic ballet, his feet nimble and sure, slipping around debris and detritus without ever looking down, never faltering as the men swing bats and axes and clubs at their attackers, besting them all. At last, the final nemesis hits the floor; the men breathe heavily, their battle done—for now.
“Cut!” Someone yells.
Watching from the sidelines, transfixed by the scene, is writer/director Laura Moss, the auteur behind the smash short film Fry Day. Today, she’s here as a visitor, an observer, casting her professional eye on the production of VFW, FANGORIA’s latest tale of blood, men, monsters, in which an aging group of war veterans decide to wage one final battle against a ruthless drug lord intent on silencing a girl who knows too much.
“The cameraman is spectacular,” Moss says to me. “But where’s his director?”
I’ve got the pleasure of telling her: That was the director.
VFW is the kind of movie only FANGORIA could make in 2019: A throwback horror that dispenses with any of the niceties of contemporary studio filmmaking for an unapologetically bloody, transgressive romp that pits an army of drugged-up, feral punk-psychos against literal army veterans ready to die with honor. Shot on location between a real VFW in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (specifically post 2494, home of the most welcoming crawfish boil in the DFW) and the abandoned Forest Theater, which has stood vacant since the early 90s, it’s a film that wears its odes to the past on its sleeve. The ethos is pure grindhouse—find the right locations, the right names to put on the poster, amp up the violence to 11 and have at it. Having at it is Joe Begos, perhaps the perfect choice to helm such a project. Having cut his teeth on low-budget genre flicks Almost Human and The Mind’s Eye, he’s a director with a sensibility firmly rooted in the filmmaking ethos of 42nd Street, when a director was also cameraman, cinematographer, and whatever else the production needed him to be. And while he’s got DP Mike Testin on hand to keep things on an even keel, to watch his dancer’s approach to shooting you almost get the impression he’s ready to take this on single-handedly.
Adding to the grindhouse ambiance is the cast, a rogue’s gallery of rough-and-tumbles with legitimate horror and exploitation cred, from Black Godfather himself Fred Williamson to David Patrick “Warriors come out at play-aayyy” Kelly to Stephen Lang, terrifying today’s audiences with his turn as a blind death machine in the Don’t Breathe franchise. Even George “Norm” Wendt is here, simultaneously throwing more horror experience into the mix and giving the film that extra 80s vibe. They’re a group of guys who’ve seen it all and done it all—particularly Williamson, who, when queried about his thoughts on the film, took a pull from his stogie and politely told me, “I can’t tell you anything. They’ll kill me. I know where the bodies are buried.” To see them in action is a revelation: the 83-year-old Williamson lifting extras playing “hypers”— the marauding, drugged-out, 28 Days Later-esque fiends who comprise most of the film’s baddies—up in the air by their shoulders and flinging them across a barroom; Lang rampaging across set with a prop axe like a high school linebacker; Martin Kove and William Sadler getting into the action with a pair of prop weapons, Kove a hockey stick, Sadler a foam baseball bat studded with nails, pounding away at a couple of extras. Not that they aren’t gentlemanly about it.
“I’m not really gonna hit you with this thing,” Sadler says. “Just gonna swing it like this.”
But I don’t want him to just “swing it like this”—because today I’ve slipped into the role of a hyper myself for an unexpectedly blood-soaked sequence in which a quintet of hypers breach the perimeter of the VFW and run afoul of a particularly gruesome booby trap.
“Hit me,” I tell him. “I got a hard head. Right here, on the bald spot. Won’t feel a thing.” Sadler swings like Barry Bonds after a day at the doctor’s office. I don’t feel it. Neither, it seems, does the female hyper beside me, similarly encouraging Kove not to pull any punches. You don’t sign up to die at the hands of Kobra Kai and The Grim Reaper and not want to get hit.
“Good,” Sadler says. “You’re pros. We understand one another.”
“Can I pretend to choke you?” I ask.
“Yeah, choke me, hit me, let’s make it look good.”
With hitting comes blood though. Lots and lots of blood. In fact, you could say that, perhaps next to Stephen Lang, “blood” deserves second billing. After getting into position, my fellow hypers and I are outfitted with blood tubes running beneath our shirts that’ll activate on “action;” as they’re being taped to our torsos, Sierra Russel—she of modern SFX legends Josh and Sierra Russel, himself outside getting an exploding head gag ready—is filling out mouths with blood to spit once the cameras roll. And, once everything is in place, Sierra is on the floor between our legs with a blood canon at the ready, augmenting not just the tubes or the mouth stuff but an additional set of hoses attached to the top of a beer keg that plays an integral role in the scene. Joe, squatting now like a modern dancer feeling the earth, holds his camera at the ready. We’re about to get pummeled. And we’re about to get very, very wet.
“Action.”
And there’s swinging. So much swinging. And blood. So very much blood. So very, very much blood. It flows down our chins. It flows out of our chests in great, tidal spurts, like the gushing of a dozen arteries, dousing the fronts of our shirts, our jeans, soaking our boots in great thunderstorm puddles. Sierra activates the canon and the world turns red, filling our eyes, the camera lens, the room.
By the time it’s all done, we make Cécile de France at the end of Haute Tension look like she got a smudge on her cheek.
Once under a showerhead, though, the water quickly streaks pink and it’s amazing how quickly it takes to get clean. Some fake blood stains the skin, requires the use of shaving cream and special shampoos and loofahs caked in toothpaste to remove. Not VFW’s blood, though. For as much as Joe Begos has innovated in the realm of camera work, so have Josh and Sierra Russel innovated in the realm of fake blood, inventing their own special concoction especially for this shoot, in addition to working with Begos to design the hypers’ unique, veined-out look.
“Normally we go to Smart and Final,” Josh tells me, referring to a food supply chain in Cali. “We buy imitation syrup like McDonald’s uses by the gallon. But not for this shoot. There was going to be so much blood we were worried about stickiness.” So it was that Josh and Sierra innovated their own type of fake blood that uses as one of its primary ingredients something simultaneously simple and genius: Dishwashing soap.
“As soon as water hits it, it activates it,” Sierra says.
“We used lots of hot tub anti-foam to prevent sudsing,” Josh tells me. Once the water strikes it, though, Russel FX blood does indeed activate—one moment you look like you’ve just been gutted alive, the next you haven’t got any red on you. That means not a lot of downtime spent getting cleaned up in between takes—leaving more time to soak up the unique ambiance around VFW post-2494. Outside the facility is a playground similarly out of time, with sturdy old picnic tables and an antique merry go round (DO NOT Touch Merry Go Round says a perpetually weather-ravaged sign), and while practical effects shots are being readied—like the pool table getting set to explode—the cast lounge around on swingsets, in the doors of trailers, on tabletops. It’s time for rumination, or smoking, or, in the case of Travis Hammer and Dora Madison, who play the film’s primary baddies, working out on a pair of Olympic rings set up for them by the crew. Hey—a pair of scantily clad, ripped drug lords gotta stay looking ripped. The old pros of VFW are a contemplative lot, though. Williamson and Sadler discuss the CAA crisis. David Patrick Kelly is eager to discuss German opera. A group of actual veterans shows up—they’re holding an outdoor meeting while we shoot inside—and they knock back Sam Adams and discuss plans and minutes in the ochre light of the setting Spring sun. The man hosting the meeting is a veteran of Iraq; at the head of a picnic table is a vet in a WWII cap. Some of the extras drift over to shake their hands; they’re appreciative. They’re glad we’re all here. It isn’t often your VFW hall plays host to a horror movie. They’d like to attend the premier. Conversely, we’re welcome to the next crawfish boil.
I sit for a moment with George Wendt and ask him if there’s a role he would like to define his legacy, rather than the barfly for which he’s best known. He smiles tenderly, like a man wholly at peace with his legacy.
“No,” he tells me. “I’m Norm.”
The end of the day finds me chatting with another Sierra—McCormick, the former child star playing against type as a rough-living teen too well versed in the underworld. She’s been in horror movies before, sure, including VFW producer Dallas Sonnier’s own Some Kind of Hate, but, those were a far cry from this bacchanal. Is she out of her element here? No, she is not. “Do you like horror movies?” is like a secret code phrase, and suddenly she’s telling me stories of watching Salo and Serbian Film on Christmas morning, and we’re swapping recommendations of the gnarliest grindhouse movies we know. It’s a special experience—the horror fan in the horror movie, contributing to the genre they love. It’s appropriate in its own unique way—her character is, after all, the heart of the film, the unifying soul that brings these aging warriors together. What better than to have the actress playing the heart of a horror movie be such a fan herself? If there are better omens, I don’t know them.
It’s my final day on set and we’ve made encampment at the historic Forest Theater in Dallas, a once grand place gone to ruin. “It smells like the most antique antique store,” an extra comments, and it’s a perfect summation. If the VFW was a place that was timeless, the Forest has been lost to time, the interior gutted, desiccated wooden staircases seeming to lead to nowhere. It’s appropriate—this is Hyper Headquarters, a filthy, rotting drug den where the dregs and desperate of society congregate to give themselves over body and soul to their addictions without looking back, so it only makes sense it should stand in contrast to the homey VFW as a place defined by rot. The Russels set up shop in the old food court, extras lining up to get their hyper makeup and grime applied. Tonight Begos will be filming a Blob-like shot of the ravenous hordes charging out of the theater and towards the building across the street, which is being used for the exteriors of the VFW (the outside of 2494 is too sweet looking to occupy an urban hellscape). Rain is in the forecast. Do any extras want to go home? Should we wait to shoot? Fuck no. This is FANGORIA, and this is horror, and a little rain never stopped FANGORIA or horror.
The hypers are in their makeup. Cameras are at the ready—due to the nature of the shot, Begos has had to augment his handheld with a crane, though he’s going to be there in the quick of the action, too. Forty-plus men and women congregate in the doors of the Forest. Rain is coming down in great, sweeping sheets, stinging to the touch, the rain so hard as to almost blow it sideways. But for the lights of the theater, it’s pitch black. Is everybody ready?
This is Joe Begos. This is FANGORIA. This is VFW—the bloodiest, most insane horror movie you’re going to see this year. Of course, everyone is ready.
In the rainswept black of a Dallas night in April, the hordes charge.
College kids, strippers and vampires—those were Donald P. Borchers’ only requirements when he approached Richard Wenk about writing and directing a movie for New World Pictures. As requested, Wenk cooked up Vamp (1986), a tailor-made blend of the decade’s teen movie craze as well as its horror boom.
Grim and earnest stories were still very much a part of the ’80s horror landscape, yet Vamp is something of a comedy. One difference between it and, say, Saturday the 14th, though, is the former avoids using schtick. Wenk’s movie proves that horror comedies also don’t have to subtract thrills from their recipes. Of course, it takes a minute before reaching that point; college antics and culture shocks preface this one macabre misadventure.
Vamp‘s initial setup is apt for a typical college-set, sex-driven comedy; to bribe their way into a fraternity house, two pledges (Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler) go looking for some adult entertainment. Without wasting time on any further exposition, the characters embark on an all-in-one-night trip that quickly detours into terror.
To procure their elusive MacGuffin—a stripper willing to gyrate for some frat boys—Keith (Makepeace) and AJ (Rusler), plus a third wheel named Duncan (Gedee Watanabe), trade the safety of their remote college campus for the seediness of some unnamed city. The setting is recognizably L.A. by day, but as soon as night falls, downtown, along with the characters, slips into a kind of surreal universe. Director of photography Elliot Davis gave this early entry on his prolific résumé an unusual yet distinctive look; that Mario Bava-esque, magenta-green lighting is omnipresent, so much so that it’s almost its own character.
Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler in Vamp
The faint comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours are merited, although not just because of Vamp’s distinguishing nighttime aesthetic. Save for the primary characters, the supporting roles in Wenk’s movie are also quite colorful and transactional in their behavior. The difference here, though, is the additional urge to ruin Keith and his friends at every turn. Some of that harm is humorous and tolerable enough, whereas the moment Vamp dishes out its first fatality, it’s abundantly clear how this movie qualifies as horror.
Vamp falls into that category of horror movie that reveals its genre with a scream rather than a series of whispers. The opening scene can function as a hint of what lies ahead—things are not at all what they appear to be—but otherwise, Wenk is more than happy to hold off on the horror. When that time does come, though, it catches the viewer off guard. In addition to the pure shock value is that sudden decision to upend the movie’s foremost feature. Or so it would seem.
If afraid of major spoilage, those new to Vamp would be wise to stop reading here. There’s just no skirting around the fact that the central fellowship in this buddy movie hits a serious snag when AJ is killed. That development causes the story to become more of a “long, bad night” journey for Keith and his romantic interest. So while Wenk scores points for subverting expectations, there is also a touch of sadness in his decision. Because if Vamp does anything well, it’s making the characters likable.
Something that comes easily to Vamp—and other teen horror movies from this same era—is its ability to invent young characters worth caring about, or at the very least, are interesting and not so immediately off-putting. More impressive is how Wenk did all this without actually fleshing out those characters. Still and all, Keith and his kind are a grade above cookie-cutter, and in some cases, aren’t completely devoid of growth.
Grace Jones in Vamp
Vamp appeals with an assorted cast of characters. No two are the same, nor are they operating on the same wavelength. The cinematically extroverted AJ, whose actor conveyed charm and vulnerability in near equal amounts, comes alive when he’s at his most undead. Makepeace then makes the chronically cautious Keith a sympathetic fellow, even as he’s more and more affected by the night’s bizarre events. Meanwhile, Duncan is indeed the designated loser of the whole bunch, but Watanabe still manages to humanize him. As a bonus, the role didn’t require him to pull a Long Duk Dong.
As for Dedee Pfeiffer, she is plain adorable as the mysterious After Dark server nicknamed “Amaretto”. She spends all night fixing her dress strap while at the same time trying to get Keith to remember how he knows her. As their offbeat romance grows, it becomes another highlight of this movie. Whether or not Pfeiffer’s character is really a vampire also creates some welcome tension in the story.
Like a lot of its contemporaries, Vamp went on to become a bit of a cult classic. That current status is determined by several factors, but without a doubt, the casting of Grace Jones is the most considerable. The image of her writhing on that unique-looking chair, a Keith Haring original, springs to mind whenever this movie is brought up.
Chris Makepeace, Billy Drago and Paunita Nichols in Vamp
Prior to that first display of unequivocal horror, local vampire queen Katrina (Jones) took to the stage and delivered a strip show like no other. One would expect nothing less from that renowned model and performance artist. By now reports of Jones’ tardiness on set are no secret, yet it’s also hard to deny her commitment to the part of Katrina. It was, in fact, Jones who took charge of her character’s appearance—on top of Haring painting her body and that now-iconic chair, she had Andy Warhol handle her costuming. And not too many actors could seize a room’s attention without saying a single line of dialogue.
In 2022, Vamp received a retrospective novelization from Encyclopocalypse. This literary union of preexisting source material—Wenk’s original screenplay—and new ideas from author Christian Francis amounts to a more comprehensive visit to the After Dark Club. The basic story there is no different than what’s shown on screen; however, Francis gets creative with the characters’ origins and designs, and he enhances a number of key scenes.
The novelization expands on the urban and social decay of the main setting, and supplies a background for the After Dark Club. Sandy Baron’s character, Katrina’s emcee and familiar, is given ample motivation for sticking around; up until the fiery end, he is loyal to his friend and former business partner “Squeak”, who looks like he was “fed through a combine harvester, and left as nothing more than a heap of mangled remains”. Then there is Billy Drago’s character Snow, the leader of a street gang called The Dragons. His reason for menacing Keith and AJ is more altruistic than in the movie; he and his peers act tough to scare off any potential food for the vampires.
Lisa Lyon in Vamp
If not for all the backstories, Francis’ Vamp would be a hell of a lot shorter. Instead, this tie-in read dives into how AJ met Keith—the orphaned Anthony Joseph hailed from a broken home back in Brooklyn—and how their friendship flourished over the years. Keith’s archership is no longer just an assumed part of his entire being; it’s a confidence-building extracurricular for a boy who got picked on before coming into the protection of the new kid in town. These supplemental, in-depth looks at the protagonists, plus their close connection, are maybe unnecessary. The movie already did a fair and concise job of addressing their platonic intimacy without the need for flashbacks and insights, specifically in that scene where AJ lays it all out as he sacrifices himself.
Where the novelization gets off course is its approach to the minor characters. Intermittently backstorying the likes of Katrina’s indentured servants, Seko (Leila Hee Olsen) and Vlad (Brad Logan), ends up disturbing the flow of the writing. Was it absolutely essential that readers know Vlad was the Grand Duke of the House of Romanov, or how Snow’s accomplice Maven (Paunita Nichols) became so dentally challenged? No, not really. However, one’s mileage with these random biographies may vary.
The novelization is a more substantial experience, but for a movie like Vamp, less is more. And as plentiful as they are, it never simply coasts on its campy charms, either. The character work sits comfortably in that realm between cursory and meticulous, the script is sharper than first realized, and Greg Cannom’s vampire makeup is straightforward yet effective. Most of all, the movie didn’t squander its out-of-the-box concept. Richard Wenk made his vision of a “comic nightmare in which just about anything that can go wrong does” come true, and it is very enjoyable.
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