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| Gage Sheridan |
This first appeared in the book "World Gone Wild: A Survivor's Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Movies" released April 28th, 2014 by Schiffer Publishing, Ltd. A beautiful "coffee-table" book, with 10 full-color pictures spread over 5 pages. Reprinted here by permission of the author.
What david j. says in his interview is a big part of the impetus to release the film through my MCE Releasing International company on BluRay myself. coming this spring. I basically learned how to do it after being forced to "do it myself" for The Steve Canyon TV series DVD releases.
Many of the pictures originally appearing with the interview in his book (on pages 342 through 346) have been replaced here with actual frames from the upcoming widescreen release.
Now ONWARD with revelations about the Alien SuperScience movie you've never seen, which predicted the pandemic, global warming, and big trouble/bad doin's from that fascist, well... that guy.
INTERVIEW:
by david j. moore
with
John Ellis - Producer/Director of
Twilight Of The Dogs
Shot in 1993, and barely released onto VHS in 1997 by the fledgling distribution company Raven Pictures International, John Ellis’s Twilight of the Dogs is a fairly strong and competent effort in the post-apocalyptic genre. I’d compare it to Steve Barkett’s The Aftermath because of its homegrown, independent sensibilities and stalwart themes of a man surviving after a nuclear holocaust. The film is notable for giving the hero a bovine sidekick and an alien love interest. Unfortunately, an official copy of Twilight of the Dogs is nearly impossible to track down, but it has been bootlegged in several countries, most notably in Germany, where the English language track has been dubbed over. Ellis, a veteran of special-effects work in films, promises to restore the film and release it onto DVD and Blu-Ray sometime in the near future.
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| Director John Ellis |
Twilight of the Dogs is such a rare film. The first time I saw it was when I got ahold of a German-dubbed bootleg of it. Why has the distribution for this movie been so spotty?
I had initially made a deal with a friend to release it. He had a one-man distribution company, and he was going to release the film. He really wasn’t able to do much with it, and he transferred it to Raven Pictures International. They apparently carried the film, and I say “apparently” because they really didn’t do anything with it for ten years. The rights were tied up with them until recently. I got the film back. Apparently, they made deals in foreign countries that they didn’t tell us about. That’s why you were able to find a copy from Germany. I have yet to track down who these people are that bought the film in these other countries. I know the people who were involved with Raven Pictures. What goes on with independent films is that they just don’t report what their sales are. The only way I hear about some of these things is if people track me down and tell me they saw the film in another country, or if someone wants me to autograph a copy of the video. Then you find out, sometimes years later.
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| Tim Sullivan and Ted Chalmers |
Has Twilight of the Dogs ever been officially publicly screened or made available in the United States?
We did screenings in the Washington D.C. area where we made the film. This was in the winter of 1996. We also screened the film at some Science Fiction Conventions. We shot the film in 16mm, but some of the effects shots were shot in 35mm.
So, basically, this is a lost film.
Yeah, basically. Although, I intend to polish and release it sometime down the road, as soon as I can make the proper deal.
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| 35mm Visual effects footage |
The first time we spoke you mentioned to me that you screened it for Roger Corman and that he had an issue with the fact that the hero of the movie has a sidekick that happens to be a cow. Tell that story.
Actually, it was Menahem Golan. I screened a section of the film, about 40 minutes of the film for him. We had been partners with him on Invader, which was a 21st Century film. I brought the film for him and showed him a portion, and he didn’t understand what the cow was doing in the film, and he said that it was comical. He didn’t get it, which just goes to show you that just because people make films, sometimes make films all their lives, anybody that says, “Just show me the section of film you brought, don’t worry – I’ll get it. It doesn’t matter that it’s not the whole film, I’ve seen unfinished films before.” Yeah, well, they don’t get it. It doesn’t matter who they are, if things are missing, if music is missing, if dialogue is missing, they still see it as an unfinished film.
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| Tim Sullivan, Gage Sheridan, Donna Abrahms & Bambi the cow |
You’ve had a long career in special effects, but Twilight of the Dogs is the only film you’re credited for as a director. Is that correct?
Yes. Although, I’ve directed a lot of TV spots over the years. Most of those are animated.
Tell me a little bit about how you came to direct this film.
Tim Sullivan, the science fiction author, and I made the film. He has appeared in other films and has written and directed other films. After I worked on the film Invader, that film sort of languished. I was going through a divorce, and I lived in northern Virginia. I wanted to get something going, and Tim and I talked about making what we called “a real science fiction movie.” Something that was about ideas. There’s a little bit of conceit there to think that we could actually pull that off.
So we said, “Let’s do it.” I pulled some investors together, and so that was how the film came about. In a period of a week, I had seen The Day the Earth Stood Still, which is one of my favorite movies, and an episode of the TV series Combat! where Dennis Weaver was trying to save a cow from being killed from the platoon there in France, and the other movie I saw that week was Sahara with Humphrey Bogart.
Tim and I just started talking and started working on the story, and Tim began working on the treatment of the story. It escalated from there. It revolved around a cow and a plague in the future. You have to understand at that time there was a flesh-eating virus going on in the news, also AIDS, and also David Koresh. One of Tim’s friends was the father of one of the people in Koresh’s compound in Waco.
Did you have any cinematic references while you were making this film?
When we were making it, we watched The Omega Man, Redneck Zombies, and other films with apocalyptic things, and we would discuss them. Part of the reason Sam is in that blue flight suit is because of The Omega Man. Also, many of Mario Bava’s films. I tried to channel Bava in my own way.
How difficult was it to make this film happen?
We did the best we could at the time, but unfortunately, I was fighting battles on various fronts at the same time. We had an investor that promised to give us essentially the money to make the film, and he told us to go ahead and start shooting, and he disappeared. I was raising money while I was shooting the film. I ended up producing and directing the film which is really not the thing to do on something as complicated as Twilight of the Dogs. The film had children, animals, firearms, explosives, stunts … everything you don’t want to have on a film you’re producing and directing for the first time.
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| Billy "Butch" Frank doing a stunt in the film |
Well, I’ve seen a lot of post-apocalyptic movies, and yours is the only one with a sidekick cow. It’s amazing.
We thought it was unusual.
You had a working tank in the film. Where did you guys get it?
The number one question! There was a place in Virginia that rented out military vehicles. I wanted to have a real tank instead of a miniature. They’d just gotten a BMP1, a Soviet tank. It was phenomenal. This place had provided tanks for Mars Attacks! Every time we wanted to use it at a different location, it cost $250 because it had to be put on this truck and moved.
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| John Ellis directing the Soviet BMP1 armored personnel carrier |
This movie has some interesting special effects. There’s even some stop-motion effects, which is really radical considering that stop-motion had seen its last day in the early 1980’s.
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| Kent Burton animating a giant black-widow spider |
I hear what you’re saying. Some of the people who saw it at the screenings told me that the film felt like it had been made in the 1960’s. They weren’t being derogatory about it in their comments, they were saying that it was kind of neat. My business partner and I split, and he was supposed to do the film, and we had had a disagreement that ended with him quitting in a huff. Therefore, I didn’t have the benefit of the partnership that I’d had on Invader and Beyond the Rising Moon.
Using my resources and doing so many things at the same time, it made things very difficult. Some of the things we were trying to do with special effects were very difficult. We had to use an optical printer, and with 16mm that’s not always the best solution. So, I brought in Kent Burton to animate the giant spiders, and we shot all of that in his studios in Hesperia, California. He used traditional stop-motion techniques. He went on to be one of the animators on Coraline, James and the Giant Peach, and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. He’s one of the best stop motion animators there ever was. We’ve been friends ever since I Go Pogo: The Movie in 1979. I brought in Ron Miller, who painted some matte shots fore us. Bill Dempsey did some animation of the nuclear detonation.
Tim Sullivan, who co-wrote the film with you, also stars as the hero, Sam Asgarde. How do you think he fares in the film?
Well, it depends on when you ask me. Many times, I think he did a good job, and other times, I cringe. I feel the same way about other films I’ve worked on. It just depends on what side of the bed I wake up on.
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| Gage Sheridan and Tim Sullivan |
I thought Gage Sheridan, who played the female alien Karuy, did a nice job. She outclassed your lead actor.
Yes. Tim played the part well. He did his job. He wasn’t supposed to be Rambo. Yes, Gage was a gift to us. As far as I’m concerned, she fell from the sky. She helped make it a better film. I could never see anyone else in that part.
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| Gage Sheridan |
How about Ralph Bluemke as the evil Reverend Zerk?
He and I have been friends since 1972. He was a filmmaker that I’d read about in magazines. We met by chance in Florida, and we became lifelong friends. He acted in his own films in those days. He was a terrific filmmaker, and I’d really wanted to work with him. He played a role in Invader. I brought him in to play the role of Zerk. It was just another part for him. He had no problem playing that role. Zerk and Asgarde are two sides of the same coin. We were trying to play them that way.
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| Ralph Bluemke and John Ellis |
Talk a little bit about Zerk’s character. How does he measure up to any other villain or warlord in any number of other post-apocalyptic films?
I believed he was successful as a character in our film. He’s not as iconic as Lord Humungous, say, but Humungous is a hard act to follow. The thing with Zerk is that you know he’s full of himself. He’s a liar. He doesn’t follow his own doctrine. He takes everything he can get. When he’s acting like he’s getting a spiritual message, you know by the look on his face that he’s making it up. We wanted to have a moment where Zerk passes the point of no return. That scene is where he shoots the deacon. That was one of my favorite scenes to shoot.
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| Charlyn Miller and Ralph Bluemke |
The theme of cannibalasm is prevalent in your film. Do you have any comments about that?
Well, one of the things that bugged me that in the effort to try to finish the film, some things fell by the wayside. If I ever get around to polishing the film, I want to explain better that most of the edible plant life died, and what was left was poisoned, and therefore, even though there’s a lot of greenery around, it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to find anything really edible that’s not buried in cans. So the food that’s around is just not in abundance. Therefore, these guys have stooped to the lowest level. I wanted the film to be a little shocking. Were you surprised by it?
I was surprised, but pleasantly surprised. I wasn’t shocked, though.
I wanted the butchers to not be skinny.
Talk about the title. It’s a cool title. The Dogs of the title, I assume, are the plague-ridden people living in the wasteland. Tell me how you came up with the title.
I came up with the title. I actually thought it was an original title. Someone later reminded me that a Richard Corben comic book had the same title. It was probably bouncing around my subconscious. The “dogs” were the scavenger people in the wasteland.
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| The Scavenger Dogs |
What was the final budget for the film?
It ended up costing around $180,000. We were short $95,000 because of...treachery. With all of the locations, the extras, and the tank, it cost a lot to make it. We shot for 35 days in the summer of 1993. We did three pick-up days in 1994. We literally ran out of film in July of '93 and had to just stop until May of '94. There was literally no money to finish it.
There’s an interesting moment in the film where Karuy, the alien, taps Asgarde into some kind of a device that allows him to see certain moments in the past, and one thing he witnesses is Christ’s crucifixion, which in the context of the scene is meant to signify that Jesus was an alien. Would you like to comment about this scene?
Right. The idea was that a lot of leaders, primarily religious leaders in the past who were trying to shape the path of humanity on our planet were from alien stock and they had a purpose for being here, and many of them had their memories stored in this device. That’s why she updates it at the end with her own memories. There was a scene in the script of Buddha and a number of others too, but I had to let them go because of the budget.
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| Cast & crew of TWILIGHT OF THE DOGS |
You ended the movie with Karuy coming back to life. Why bring her back to life?
Well, yeah. If you’re a fan of anime, they would do that sort of thing. I had actually intended for her to be transparent, but we just decided to let her be the way she was. I just wanted that to sort of be enigmatic. In the German-dubbed pirated version, they completely dropped the song with the children singing “Ring Around the Rosie.” That was there for a reason.
That song is from the black-plague era. The “ring around the rosie” is the sores on people’s faces, and “pocket full of posies” is for when they would put flowers in their pockets when they started smelling bad from all the death. “Ashes, ashes,” is because they would burn people, and “we all fall down,” is because everybody died. I gotta tell you that we recorded that song in my living room. I had three lady friends sing it as if they were children. So the thieving German’s didn’t leave the song in there.
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| Ellen Hart and Andrew Martineau |
I think this movie would have an audience if it’s only made available to see or purchase. Who do you think the audience for this movie is?
I would like to think that’s true. The audience for this movie is an older audience rather than a younger audience. People that grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s like me. Those who have the same sensibilities as I do.
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| Tim Sullivan |
People are going to read my review for your movie, and they’re going to want to know how to find your movie. What advice do you have for them?
I will be personally offering the film for sale at some point.
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John, if the world were to end as it does in the film you made, and you happened to be a survivor in that world, do you think you’d last long in that environment?
I’d like to think so. I sort of put myself in that place when I made the movie. Making a movie is as far from reality as you can get sometimes. You’re trying to solve problems all the time. It’s all about making something that people can understand. Frequently, it has nothing to do with reality.
I came from the 1960’s, and I’d been concerned that we were going to have a nuclear holocaust at the time. I still don’t doubt that something will happen eventually. I’d read a civil defense book that I had gotten when I was a teenager. I read it cover to cover. It was about the theory of surviving, which is pretty much just a theory. If that’s gonna happen, it’s gonna wipe out pretty much everybody. I would like to think that I would be smart enough to survive.
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| Gage Sheridan and John Ellis |
Beauty and the Beast...do I look tired? Taken the last all-nighter of shooting, on July 11, 1993.
Great article! Looking forward to seeing the film again when it's officially released :-)
ReplyDeleteThank you, me too! ;)
ReplyDelete