B-MOVIE AVENGERS: FROM HELL'S KITCHEN TO HOLLYWOOD
by Jonathan Field
Years ago I had a pal named Oscar, a boy who lived with his widowed mother
and grandmother in an apartment that smelled of rotting onions. Like half my
neighborhood, filled with refugees from war in the Caribbean or Eastern
Europe or survivors of the Holocaust, Oscar's apartment stunk of strong
food, leaking gas ovens, and excess rage. A lot of yelling went on in those rent-controlled buildings, cramped quarters where terminal upset seemed
part of the basic utilities.
Oscar's mother and grandmother, perpetually dressed in all-black, and
models of demure sweetness when you saw them in the elevator, were
dangerous women. And awfully sexy, at least his blond haired mother, the
erotic glow stemming from that crazy switch I knew went on from when she
left the public view and locked her apartment door. For years after they
moved away, she remained my pubescent fantasy, and I'd imagine her in
sheer panties raging to the heavens, then leering at me with an invitation
to come bite off her skimpy brassiere.
The truth was crueler. From the sounds in Oscar's apartment, every night
you'd think someone was getting killed. Specifically Oscar, whom was always
making both women extremely upset. He spent his afternoon catching pigeons, his evenings building them cages, his midnight hours sneaking out to push the
poor birds down the elevator shaft.
Oscar, God bless him, was a tortured soul (who isn't!) but let's forget that
and assume that he is today a happy millionaire, having turned his brutality
against helpless scavengers into a business, perhaps pest control or an agent
for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Anyway, the point is that his life was not completely joyless, and when
he wasn't beating up on pigeons and rats, or cheering for real-blood fist
fights on the Saturday morning Roller Derby TV shows, Oscar would steal
his mother's money and head down to Times Square, going to the monster
movies. Not the Hollywood horror flicks, but the special gories, splatter
jobs produced by guys on the lowest rungs of the cinematic totem pole.
Movies like Blood Beach, Killer Rats In Hell, or Chain Gang Psycho Dentist.
Actually, maybe today Oscar is directing his own horror pictures. If he isn't,
he should start. It may not be so difficult and it's awfully profitable. Take
Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz. Fresh out of college in 1974, possessing
no credit history, almost no money, and no knowledge of film making,
Kaufman and Herz created Troma Inc. to produce low budget gore.
"Troma has become a brand name in movies, something people know they'll
either like or not like but will always remember," boasts Kaufman, proudly
adding "we are the only studio that's been around 20-years and has never
had a hit."
But Kaufman's modesty belies his company's fate. After two decades as
a two-man operation producing 130 dirt-cheap sex and slasher flicks,
last March a major Swiss conglomerate bought a major stake in their
firm, telling reporters they considered Troma to have "100 million dollar
potential."
This the creation of shmoes who would genuinely appreciate Oscar's gory
obsessions, having sweat blood (real and less real) to make such classics
as Surf Nazis Must Die, The Toxic Avenger (parts one, two, and three), Class
of Nuke Em High, and Maniac Nurses. Basic melodramas from hell. But reeking with low-budget humor.
Listening to their movie trailers, you'd think you were suffering a bad dream, or maybe just a hilarious nightmare. "Nymphoid Barbarian In Dinosaur Hell, where the prehistoric meets the prepubescent," says Troma's gravel-voiced announcer.
As a skimpy bikini clad beauty named Linda Corwin runs through wetlands that look less like prehistoric wilds than the backyard of one of New York's airports, this ancient warrior is chased by a bunch of hairy hunks. "Not since Raquel Welch has one woman had to face so many reptiles," says the announcer.
In Vegas In Space, three astronauts land on a garishly-lit planet where
they are transformed into tackily-dressed women, then tortured with lectures
like "don't stop dancing," because "that's how you can best save the universe."
My own favorite is the Toxic Avenger, who is billed as "first one-eyed
superhero from New Jersey," a man whose whole gestalt is he'll rip your
eyes out but he's still nice to his grandmother.
Working in an industry that regularly spends over 25 million a picture,
hundreds of thousands of dollars on scripts alone, Troma's producers are
completely uninterested in refined plot lines. Or any lines, actually. With
their movies made for well under two million dollars, Troma's tales of
blood are designed to be shot quick and dirty.
"We didn't know how to make good movies so we decided to make bad ones,
" Kaufman says. "Anyone in our office can direct our films, even the guy
delivering lunch."
Dryly ludicrous in interviews, Kaufman claims Troma is "an ancient Latin
word for excellence in cinema," then admits that he and Herz are not looking
to make their mark reaching for lofty cinematic aesthetics.
"Originally we thought we could make movies and give them to distributors
and keep making movies," Kaufman says. "But we quickly ascertained that
we had no money, we had no education and we had no talent, so we'd better
set up our own movie studio."
Choosing to headquarter their operation far away from the big boys in
Hollywood, Troma located in a run-down section of Manhattan and proceeded
to produce over 130 movies, shooting in the local New York area with a
maximum of a four-week shooting schedule per film. Needless to say,
none of the talent earns Hollywood fees.
Still, major stars like Kevin Costner and Oliver Stone have graced movies
in the Troma library, the former playing a major role in Sizzle Beach and
Shadows Run Black, the latter directing Battle of Love's Return and Sugar
Cookies. As the names imply, Troma's success has depended upon a mixture
of sex and gore.
At the Cannes Film Festival, Kaufman and Herz have heightened their
profile by handing out Troma-label condoms rather than business cards.
But if Kaufman looks a bit like Mel Brooks, and shares the latter's wacked-out dead-pan delivery, he and his partner are not mere goof balls. Able to distill
the best (and worst) of their particular genre, their company has captured
world-wide attention.
They've been profiled by all the major newspapers. Belgian film scholars
have started work on a serious critical film study of their company. Both
Cinemax and Showtime have presented their own Troma festivals. The
American Film Institute and the British Film Institute both mounted major retrospectives of their work (AFI's naming theirs "Aroma Du Troma"). And
that's not even the money side of success.
Four years ago, Troma concluded distribution deals with Gage
Communications, one of Japan's largest entertainment companies. Since
then, they've expanded into producing their own brand-name toys and dolls
(including "Toxie," an offshoot from the movie Toxic Avenger), and now
partnered with the billion dollar Swiss holding company Cie. Financier
Richemont, Troma is poised to become the leader in shamelessly low-class entertainment.
Responding to questions about the new partnership, Kaufman explained
that until now Troma has been managed "like a corner-store bodega," but
"guarantees" the relationship with Richemont will not affect his company's
quality--or lack of--promising he will continue on as one of Troma's leading
mediocre directors.
And speaking on Troma's hilarious promotional video tape, Kaufman's wacky
cinematic philosophy seems to buttress his promise, a desire to eternally
remain an operation open to the spiritually possessed and materially
dispossessed.
"We're an office where a Vietnam vet with a hamster on his shoulder
comes up and tells us he wants to make a movie," Kaufman says. "And
