LUCIDMEDIA

Making Merry Macabre with Smash Cut's Lee Demarbre

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Thursday, 15 October 2009 10:48

Smash Cut, one of the toasts of Montreal Fantasia this past summer, makes its bow in Toronto Thursday at the Bloor Cinema for a One Night Only show. And word to the wise: it’s not for the easily squeamish, just as director Lee Demarbre intended when he set out to make it.

“We knew we wanted to make a movie about a failed filmmaker that ended up killing people and resorted to using their blood and guts in his next movie,” says Demarbre proudly from his home in Ottawa. “It was sort of a dream project for a long, long time.”

Initially one might imagine that this is one of those knowing, self-referential movies that allow filmmakers to vent some frustration with certain aspects of the industry (which it is, more on that later). But more than that, Smash Cut is a loving tribute to one of Demarbre’s key influences, cult filmmaker and inventor of movie gore, Herschell Gordon Lewis.

“Bottom line, [it’s] the pure exploitation of them all,” Demarbre explains as to why Lewis’ work appeals to him. Lewis made such important genre entries as Blood Feast and The Wizard of Gore, and is credited by many as being the man that made blood and guts an art form in movie making. Lewis started out making so-called “nudie-cuties” in the 50s, a kind of prototypical predecessor to what we now consider adult cinema that merely featured naked people without any actual sex. Lewis, bored when his art form found too many imitators, turned his sights and his talents to horror.

“With Blood Feast he invented a new genre,” explains Demarbre, who discovered Lewis while browsing the local video store shelves in his teens with friends. “Being young teenagers, we were renting horror movies as if they were some sort of porno. We were renting them without telling our parents, and bringing them into our houses and into our basements and putting them in out VCRs. It’s was like we were bringing filth into the house, it was really exciting.”

Later, Demarbre found a fellow Lewis fan in screenwriter Ian Driscoll. The two have collaborated on all kinds of projects over the years, but the filmmaker admits that unintentional homage to Lewis in many of their films got the pair thinking of a more direct tribute to their favourite horror director.

Further, there was the fact that the work of Lewis did not find itself immune to the horror remake fever that’s swept Hollywood the last several years, with new versions of Wizard of Gore and Two Thousand Maniacs among them. Both Demarbre and Driscoll felt that the remakes of Lewis’ work either took themselves too seriously or missed the point the filmmaker was trying to make in his original.
“The only thing I can say about these remakes is that they’re now making classics out of the originals,” says Demarbre with a sigh. “Last House on the Left is now officially a classic horror film because it’s being remade lousily.”

The idea for Smash Cut occurred to Demarbre in 1999; three years later he met his hero Lewis for the first time and stated talking to the director about getting him involved. The original idea was to have Lewis cameo as a radio voice, as he did in his own film Blood Feast. Lewis even recorded dialogue with Demarbre at the time. But as the year’s progressed, and the budget increased, Lewis was able to appear in the film, in the flesh. For added homage value, Lewis regular Ray Sager, who now makes his home in Toronto where he’s a successful film and television producer, also appears in Smash Cut.

But even though Lewis was only physically on the film’s Ottawa set for one day, Demarbre says that his influence cast a long shadow over the entire 20 day production, and Demarbre welcomed it. “I would always think how Herschell would make his decision and allowed that to make my decision making. I was never afraid to say ‘Done in one. Let’s move on.’”

The cast is led by another familiar face to the horror genre, actor David Hess. Hess was actually, Demarbre’s second choice for the murderous filmmaker Able Whitman having originally approached David Cronenberg for the part, but he had to turn it down due a scheduling conflict directing the stage version of The Fly in London, England. Hess was a natural choice in the end though says Demarbre, thanks to the intensity he brought to movies like the original Last House on the Left and House on the Edge of the Park.

The film’s other star, actress Sasha Grey, was another unconventional casting choice given that Smash Cut represented the first time she was cast in a mainstream film. Originally known for her work as an adult film star, Grey has since appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, but Smash Cut, having been filmed before that, counts as her first, non-porn film role.

Casting Grey, for Demarbre, made sense as an additional nod to both Lewis and the man who was originally going to be his film’s star, David Cronenberg; Cronenberg having cast Marilyn Chambers in his 1971 film Rabid. He also liked the idea of hiring Grey to play straight man in a movie filled with off-the-wall characters, and on a personal level, says Demarbre, she’s a knowledgeable and enthusiastic person to talk movies with. “You kind of forget that she does this really extreme kind of adult film stuff,” he says with a laugh.

Naturally, given the subject matter, one might wonder whether there’s bit of autobiography in Smash Cut. “I can’t say that what critics have said about my movies ever made me want to kill anyone, but all the stuff that went into the movie about making movies” is real, says Demarbre.

In other words, the 10 years of development benefited the film it terms of material collected by Demarbre and Driscoll from their real life interaction with professionals in the film business. “That scene where the producer’s trying to convince Able Whitman to make a movie with a 9-year-old karate champion, that actually happened,” remembers Demarbre. The film, which would have been filmed in Jamaica, was intended by Demarbre to be a kind of blaxploitation James Bond called “Black Kissinger.” But the producers, says Demarbre, wanted Cop and a Half.

“It was really heart-breaking and really frustrating and lots of years and lots of money went by,” he continues. “I said to Ian, the best thing I can say is take all that frustration and put that into the script for Smash Cut. So a lot of the characters are based on real producers, real investors and real scenarios we got ourselves into with not making that movie.

“[So] there is some truth behind some of it,” adds Demarbre, “aside from the murders.”

With his loving tribute to Herschell Gordon Lewis now complete, Demarbre is now moving on to other projects, but still there’s one area of horror that he won’t be touching anytime soon. “If Obama wants to earn his Nobel Peace Prize, he should put a ban on zombie filmmaking for 10 years,” he says.

Everybody’s a critic.