Brian J. Quinn

Geretta Geretta Looks Back on ‘Demons’ at New Beverly Cinema

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

Geretta Geretta Demons photo

WRITER’S NOTE: This article was written in 2013 when this screening took place.

Actress Geretta Geretta (a.k.a. Geretta Giancarlo) was the Grindhouse Film Festival’s guest of honor at New Beverly Cinema where they were screening a very nice print of Lamberto Bava’s “Demons.” This Italian cult horror film from 1985 stars Geretta as Rosemary, one of several people attending a special screening of a horror film at a local theater. Before the screening starts, however, she ends up putting on this weird looking mask she finds in the lobby which ends up scratching her face. Eventually, the scratch infects the rest of her body and turns her into a bloodthirsty demon. In short, she is the character who dooms everybody else in this film. Way to go Rosemary!

Geretta was extremely excited to be seeing “Demons” with the sold-out audience at the New Beverly, and she even brought some bobblehead figures of her character Rosemary, created by Cult Collectibles, with her to sell. Before the film began, Geretta asked everyone if there were any “Demons” virgins (a.k.a. people who hadn’t seen the movie before), and it turns out there were quite a few. To this, she responded, “This is good! You guys are in for a treat!” She also rattled off in rapid succession a few things for everyone to keep in mind while watching this film.

Geretta Geretta: This is a movie, we did it in Italy. I’m American, I have an Italian name, my family is Italian, but I went there, I was a model, I made a bunch of Italian movies, this is one of them, I made ten. We sound funny and our lips are moving in funny directions but not mine because I am actually speaking English when we shot the movie.

Grindhouse Film Festival emcee, Brian J. Quinn, was quick to say how all the other movies Geretta did while she lived in Italy such as “Murder Rock: Dancing Death” and “Rats: Night of Terror” are all worth seeking out as they are “good and entertaining.”

After we finished watching “Demons,” Geretta came up front to talk about its making and took questions from the audience. She told Quinn that making this film wasn’t a lot of fun as there was a lot of work involved like on any other film, but the set was never unpleasant or difficult. She also pointed out while most horror movies made today with similar special effects are done on very low budgets, the budget for “Demons” was actually a million dollars. Only the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini could get a movie made for millions back then, so this made “Demons” a special picture in that regard.

Geretta talked about how she auditioned for Bava and Dario Argento who produced and co-wrote the movie, and she also described the differences between how movies are cast in Italy as opposed to in America.

GG: You don’t really go in and do something. First of all, they cast by picture because they go by look first. So if you look the part then that’s enough for them because they figure they can direct and can get you to do what they want you to do, and it’s very rare everyone would be speaking the same language on the set, so really what difference does it make your mumble?

Most of the exteriors in “Demons” were actually shot in Germany, and the movie theater where the majority of the action takes place was in the process of being destroyed. Geretta was working on a television series at the time, and it was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from that set to where “Demons” was being filmed.

Geretta also pointed out how you never see Rosemary die in “Demons” and, having seen the movie a couple of times, I can verify this to be true. She joked how she was plotting the whole time to make sure her character would not die so she could be cast in the sequel. But when the time came to make “Demons 2,” Geretta was unfortunately out of town.

One audience member asked about the vomit which comes out of the zombies’ mouths, and the vomit does look appropriately disgusting. Geretta described its ingredients in detail as well as what was in everybody’s hair.

GG: The vomit that comes out of any orifice or anybody’s mouth is food coloring, Alka-Seltzer, and some other liquid. The stuff that’s in our hair is yogurt, food coloring and milk, and these are serious folks (the filmmakers) so none of us could change any of our clothes the whole shoot.

The audience reacted loudly to this particular description and understandably so. You’re dealing with ingredients which not only have an expiration date, but which let you know when they have expired. Can you imagine how smelly the set became? Yuck! Geretta then went on to say the film crew had to redo her hair every single day so it would match with what she called “dead yogurt.”

“Demons” was shot in twenty days, and Geretta said she was on set for ten. But while many American actors have found shooting on Italian film sets to be very different and at times very distracting with the film crews yelling at each other back and forth, she said she had no problem adapting to the “Italian style.”

GG: I did come to like things that are done the Italian way. In the Italian way you have lunch on the set, and hey it’s Italy, so you’re gonna have your choice of red or white wine which would never happen on an American set. Things are very calm and it’s more like a family, so maybe if there is some yelling or something it’s just like a family in the background. You tend to work with the same people over and over and over, and it’s just great. I loved it. In America you’re as famous as your last picture, and in Italy you’re as famous as whatever made you famous. It doesn’t matter what you did and it doesn’t matter how long ago, you stay the same. There’s a real appreciation for what you did, so it’s nice.

Ever since she starred in “Demons,” Geretta Geretta has proven to the world just how multi-talented she is. In addition to acting, she has gone on to write, direct and produce her own movies, and her career has also taken her to many different countries such as Italy, Ireland, South Africa and Switzerland. She shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon, and it was great to see her at New Beverly Cinema. Many actors get sick of the movies they star in, but she made it clear how grateful she was that everyone showed up in droves to see “Demons” which she made so long ago. Just don’t ask her how long ago it was.

So Bad It’s Good: Ed Adlum on the Making of ‘Shriek of the Mutilated’

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

Shriek of the Mutilated movie poster

“The picture you are about to see… is not good.”

So said filmmaker Ed Adlum who introduced the screening of the 1974 cult horror movie he wrote and produced called “Shriek of the Mutilated.” This film played as part of a double feature along with another movie of his, “Invasion of the Blood Farmers,” for the Grindhouse Film Festival’s tribute to him at New Beverly Cinema back in September of 2012. Adlum also brought up a conversation his daughter Ingrid got involved in while she was a student at UC Irvine of what the worst movie ever made was. Ingrid said it was “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” but another student ended up saying:

“There’s one worse than that. It’s called ‘Shriek of the Mutilated.'”

“My father made that movie!” Ingrid said.

After Adlum’s introduction we watched “Shriek of the Mutilated,” and while it is far from brilliant to put it mildly, everyone in the audience had fun watching it. The movie even had the techno-pop song “Popcorn” by Hot Butter playing in a party scene, and listening to the song proved to be more exciting than the party. Brian J. Quinn, one of the programmers of the Grindhouse Film Festival, defended it by saying the worst movie ever made is a $100 million-dollar blockbuster which is a piece of crap, and “Shriek of the Mutilated” is certainly not that kind of movie.

“I don’t know about you but I had a ball,” Adlum told the audience after the movie had finished. “The thing isn’t as bad as I remember. The unintended laughs of which there were about 115 are really the best part of the picture. The things I can see that you can’t see like the guy wheeling Karen (Jennifer Stock’s character) into the room and banging into the door, I remember all of that stuff!”

There’s one moment where Lynn (played by Darcy Brown) is walking outside and picks up a broom and starts sweeping for no discernible reason before putting it back down. Adlum said it was “just a piece of business to do as she walked from here to there” and that “acting wasn’t essential” for anyone to be in this movie.

Adlum talked a bit about actor Alan Brock who played Dr. Ernst Prell, the professor who assembles a group of his students for a field trip to search for a dangerous creature known as a Yeti.

“Alan Brock was at one time a child star on film and hadn’t worked in years,” Adlum said. “He still lived with his mother and even though he was well into his 60s, he was so immature in that he had to be driven home every night instead of staying at the motel with all the other players and the crew. He had to be in his house and in his own bed, then I would pick him up in the morning and bring him back up to the woods (in Westchester County, New York) to do the film.”

The director of “Shriek of the Mutilated” was Michael Findlay, an exploitation filmmaker, and Adlum said the movie was his gift to Findlay for editing “Invasion of the Blood Farmers.” Adlum said he and Findlay were “fierce friends” as they “drank their brains out,” and he described him as knowing more about films than anybody else. For Findlay, “Shriek of the Mutilated” represented his chance to make a real movie as compared to the ones he was famous for like “Take Me Naked” or “The Touch of Her Flesh.”

Sadly, Adlum and Findlay had a big falling out at one point to where Findlay ended up calling Adlum a Nazi for some odd reason, and they didn’t speak again for years. Findlay died in 1977 on top of the Pam Am Building in New York City when a helicopter crashed and killed him and two other people. Upon hearing of his death, Adlum said he cried harder than when he found out his parents had died.

One audience member described “Shriek of the Mutilated” as starting off like a Bigfoot movie but then ends like a Manson cult movie, and he asked Adlum if this was always his plan.

“No, a lot of stuff was done on the fly and it kind of morphed into that,” Adlum said. “You think of stuff while you’re standing there. You may find a prop and work that into the film. Then when you’re all done with the picture and you’re editing it you say, these eight minutes is boring, let’s do something. So, you come up with what we call inserts, and sometimes inserts have nothing to do with the plot but they’ll make people go, oh!”

In talking about the music used in the movie, Adlum said it came from the Prague Philharmonic. This was back in the day of the Iron Curtain and the Eastern Bloc had no intellectual property rights with America, and America didn’t have any with them.

“I bought the record in the bargain bin, and I bought it for $2.98 with the express purpose of using it as background music in the movie” Adlum remembered. “The guy at the counter says to me, what are you doing with that? And I tell him and he says, well you better keep the receipt so that you can prove you have the rights!”

It also turns out Ivan Agar, the man who played the Indian Laughing Crow, was actually a chiropractor from Brooklyn, New York. Adlum said Agar had the funniest scene in the movie where a big line of drool comes out the side of his mouth, but this scene unfortunately didn’t make it into the final cut.

So yeah, “Shriek of the Mutilated” is not on the same level of filmmaking as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” but it was fun to watch even if we enjoyed for all the wrong reasons. It was a treat for us to hear Ed Adlum talk about its making, and you have to admire the sense of humor he has about the finished product. While he thought we would all head home after his Q&A, everyone stayed to watch “Invasion of the Blood Farmers” which showed just how much we appreciated him spending some time with us.