Greetings, all. Ambush Bug here with a special AICN HORROR: ZOMBIES & SHARKS column. I had a chance to talk for a few moments with CHROMESKULL: LAID TO REST 2 writer/director Robert Hall a while back. We reminisced about slasher films and old school gore. But before we get to the interview, here’s what I thought about the film…
New on DVD and VOD this week!CHROMESKULL: LAID TO REST 2
Director: Robert HallWriter: Robert Hall and Kevin Laroche
Starring: Brian Austin Green, Thomas Dekker, Mimi Michaels, Owain Yeoman, Danielle Harris, Gail O'Grady, Christopher Allen Nelson, Johnathon Schaech, and Nick Principe
Find out more about this film on MySpace here, and on Facebook here!
Reviewed by Ambush Bug
Having grown up watching slash and stalk flicks, I think the LAID TO REST series is a franchise custom built for me. Writer/director Robert Hall has taken a lot of old school conventions—a distinctive looking killer with an original motif, a penchant for murdering folks in creative and devious ways and a tendency not to die, whatever is thrown on him or in his path. Much like Jason Voorhees and Michael Meyers, Chromeskull is a serial killer whose masked face reflects the cold inscrutable manner with which he dispatches his victims. In many ways, LAID TO REST is exactly like FRIDAY THE 13th and HALLOWEEN, but Hall adds a few more layers to this character as well as some effects which harken back to the days when names like Savini and Bottin ruled the world and no one knew what the letters CGI meant.In the below interview, Robert Hall mentions how cool those old slasher films were because the makeup artists were honest to god talented illusionists. We wondered how Savini could make it look like the blade was going though someone’s throat or Bottin’s spider head sprouted legs and walked. It was part of the fun trying to figure that stuff out. Hall explains below how he incorporated practical effects with CGI in order to reinject that illusion in LAID TO REST 2 and the results gave me a smile so big I could taste my ears.
Story aside, if you’re a gore hound, CHROMESKULL: LAID TO REST 2 is a must see. You’ll cringe and laugh at the same time as our killer saws off a person’s ear and drives a blade through a victim’s head, wondering “How the hell did they do that?” The effects in this film are top notch, mainly because they happen in the scene with the characters. It also helps that the makeup is convincing as hell.
The cool thing about this is that much like the first 3 or 4 FRIDAY THE 13ths and the first two HALLOWEENs, LAID TO REST 2 takes place seconds after the first film ends. There’s something awesome about that, even though you know they are separate movies. It’s fun to watch the films back to back and imagine this is all one big epic. You get the same feeling with LAID TO REST. The sequel continues moments after Chromeskull was disposed of in the first film. But unlike HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13th which basically repeat the same formula in its sequels, LAID TO REST expands on the mystery of Chromeskull by uncovering some form of shadow corporation behind his murders. Though only a snippet of the details are revealed, turns out Chromeskull has a whole cadre of employees working for him including current queen of the scream queens Danielle Harris in a restrained performance and Brian Austin Green in a surprisingly and wickedly fun performance.
Hall also injects a bit more heft than your usual slasher yarn by incorporating and expanding on the voyeuristic elements from the first. Chromeskull wears a camera on his shoulder, videotaping all of his murders. Turns out when the camera is off, he won’t kill. Introducing this pathology to the character immediately gives him an Achilles heel and though he may seem unstoppable with force, a final girl with a little know-how can still get the better of him.Of course, the film is left wide open to be sequelized once again in a variety of directions, but given the ingenuity of the effects, the uniqueness of the character of Chromeskull and the ever expanding mystery of the corporation and what makes the killer tick, CHROMESKULL: LAID TO REST 2 proves that while its roots definitely lie in the slasher genre, it proves to be much less restricted by the conventions that give the genre and especially the sequels of these films such a bad name.
And now, here’s what writer/director Robert Hall has to tell me about CHROMESKULL: LAID TO REST 2!
AMBUSH BUG (BUG): Hi Robert.
ROBERT HALL (RH): Hey Mark, how are you man?
BUG: Good, good. How are you doing today?
RH: I’m in New York and it’s very noisy being here, but I’m doing all right. BUG: Great, well I wanted to talk about CHROMESKULL today.
RH: Awesome.
BUG: Can you tell the AICN readers about CHROMESKULL for those who might not have seen the original and might not know anything about the movies?
RH: Yeah, sure. Well essentially I have a makeup effects background, so that sort of needs to come into play, but I’ve been directing movies for eight years. My first one was a film called LIGHTNING BUG which is actually a drama which got a really nice review on Ain’t It Cool News, which was really nice, and that was eight years ago when we made that movie and so I think that was directing my first feature and then I did a horror series too, but when I set out to do LAID TO REST I had done a drama and I said, “Let me make the movie that everybody sort of expects me to make. Let me make the movie that everybody is going to see.” You know, when you make a drama, even though I’m very proud of LIGHTNING BUG, it’s kind of a mixed bag in terms of who is going to see it and who is going to respond to it and also where you can get it. We didn’t get into Walmart, which is kind of disappointing, and so LAID TO REST is the first one and almost like a knee jerk reaction for me saying “Alright, you want a mainstream horror film with sort of my tip of the hat to movies that I grew up on in the 80’s, let me give you LAID TO REST.”
And so LAID TO REST was written very simply, a stalker slasher movie, but what set it apart was my cool killer, Chromeskull, and the deaths. I’m trying to bring back the cool “How did they do that?” that’s missing from a lot of horror films today regardless of the budget, especially…it’s nonexistent in small movies, but even in big budget movies people just go “Oh, that must be CGI” and there’s no real wonderment. All of my favorite movies had broken spots on their VHS’s around all of the kills or all of the cool effects, because you were rewinding it, pausing it, and going frame by frame trying to figure out how they did it. I think that’s totally missing from today’s movies just at any budget range--“So let me take my effects background and try to figure out a way where I can combine heavy practical stuff and slightly augment it with slight CG enhancements where you just don’t know what you are looking at, you just don’t know how we did it anymore” and I think we achieved that in LAID TO REST. Even the people that hate it with it’s simple story or hate whatever about it, all even still said “It had the best kills I’ve ever seen,” so I think I did something right with the first movie and then so with the second one, the idea was to write a completely new story around it that starts exactly where the first movie ended and take what worked off of the first movie which was the kills and Chromeskull and explain a little bit more about him. BUG: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask. What did you learn going from the first film into the second? As far as just filmmaking is concerned or anything, just experience-wise…
RH: Well, it was my third film as director. I did a series called FEAR CLINIC with Robert Englund and you always learn a little bit more about technique, you always learn a little bit more just about the process. You know, I’ve worked on probably now 90 something films and you always learn a little bit more about yourself and about your style, but you know really more than anything I, for better or for worse, read what everybody writes about my stuff which is not always the best thing to do, especially because you definitely have that segment of the population who are haters and hate everything. Think of the best, coolest movie ever that has zero flaws and some people go “Eh, it’s a piece of shit. It’s meh…” Whoever says that by the way should be punched in the face. BUG: Yeah, especially a lot on Ain’t it Cool News too. (Laughs)
RH: I’ll go on record saying “Anyone that says “meh” should just be instantly punched in the face” and so you, know, I just…another thing is you have so many people who sort of lie to me and you know you…I go on and I read everything that everyone says and you know I look at it from a good standpoint is that you get to take away some time that you did take away from good, when it’s not someone trying to be clever from their parents’ basement. When there actually is something constructive in there then you take that away and I think that I was able to take away some of the things that people didn’t like about the first movie and go “Okay, I let me see if there’s a way that I fix that or explain that a little bit better” and so I think that would be the only real change.
BUG: Is there anything specific that you can talk about that you read about and definitely made a definite change in the second one?
RH: Well you know, the first movie was written as a vehicle for my wife at the time who is no longer now my wife and a lot of people didn’t like her performance and so we recast that part in the second the movie and I think to a great benefit and then also the entire movie set out to be really no one’s movie. It’s potentially Chromeskull’s movie, but the movie is such an ensemble piece, like Thomas Dekker has a huge role in it and Brian Austin Green has a huge role in it and he is so menacing and so unlike anything you have ever seen and you know Angelina Armani is in it and we just have a lot of really really great cast like Gail O’Grady, a three time Emmy winning actress, so we have like a really…the first one I wrote as a simple chase movie with a very few cast and this movie’s got a lot of subplots, a lot of layers, a lot of different things happening. You learn more about CHROMESKULL and his organization and so I think it’s really just apples and oranges and I focus more on the performances, because people give some really great performances…people said “It’s unbelievable, there’s not enough cops around,” so I put more cops in it and by putting more cops in it, then you inadvertently have more deaths, so there’s a lot of things like that. (Laughs) People said, “Not enough people have cell phones…” In this movie everybody has a cell phone, including the girl that gets kidnapped, so you know little things like that. BUG: Let’s talk a little bit about the killer himself. There’s an awful lot of ambiguity in the first one and you said the second film reveals a little bit more about him, but is there still a lot left to tell about Chromeskull after this one?
RH: Absolutely. I’m never ever going to explain to you that he was picked on as a kid and had a chrome plate in his head and kids called him “Chrome Dome” and pushed him off a cliff…I mean, that is never going to come out in a later movie…if that’s what you are looking for, for me to hold you down and tape your eyelids open and force feed you that information, it’s never going to happen in one of my movies, especially not one of these movies. BUG: For me that makes the killer so much more evil and so much more threatening, just that I don’t know all of this stuff about him.
RH: Well exactly, and real life references like when people say “well, I want to know about it. How come he doesn’t explain everything?” I’m like, tell me why the guy in Canada two years ago that sat down next to an Asian guy with his headphones on and started stabbing him in the neck until his head separated from his body and he took it to the front of the bus and then started showing it off to the rest of the terrified passengers? Why did that happen? I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to that guy as a kid. I don’t know why he did that and you know what? No explanation that you write, Frank Darabont writes, or I write is going to be good enough to satiate that explanation, so why the fuck would I make up some goofy ass back-story? It’s never ever going to be good enough. I think that we live in a society where we know that there’s a lot of evil that goes on. If you watch a lot of films you know…I mean it’s all girls and he’s putting them in caskets and he’s doing something that’s very sexually charged and sexually motivated to them before he kills them, I think a lot of it is there if you are paying attention. I think, sadly, there are some people who want a clarification and they don’t like to pay attention to be honest with you, but a lot of it is in there if you actually are paying attention.
BUG: Yeah, and there’s another aspect to the character where he films, he has a video camera on his shoulder. What inspired you to incorporate that into the character? RH: Well more than anything I mean I’m kind of a videofile, but I think it’s just to play up to these voyeuristic issues like movies shot in 2008 and there are other movies floating around where people have done that and even my friends, the Dowdles, did that in POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES, so no way did I take that from any movie in particular, but I think a lot of people were starting to do it around that time or at least starting to hear about it in real life news stories, so I think for me I just wanted something that symbolized technology and where we are with it and how it can become a detriment, and so for me the camera was the perfect voyeuristic way in to see that and also it gives you a great mechanism to be able to showcase some of the stuff that he’s done and also to provide exposition, because I didn’t want to shoot it in a linear fashion, so for me the camera on his shoulder in the first film was a way for the girl to find out who she was and to rewind it and now it’s become something a little bit different, but it provided a little bit of back-story in a non linear way and then that really to me was all it was. It wasn’t really thought out in a weapon sort of way, but it has become a motif and I’m hugely thankful that SCREAM 4 ripped us off and talked about it. I am. I mean, it’s pretty awesome that it was a thinly veiled effort that they had in their film.
BUG: Yeah, definitely. So are you planning on doing another film with LAID TO REST? Where does this series go after this film? RH: Well, I think we definitely set it up for a third one. I’m still working on a few things that I’m doing as a director that I think I will be probably too busy to do…I’m turning my web series into a feature and that looks to be happening really soon and then I’m writing something that’s very unlike anything that I’ve ever done called THE SEAM, kind of like a seam in pants. So between those two things and a dark love story that I’m doing called APPETITES, there is probably too much on my plate to actually do it, so I think I will pass the mask off to someone that I trust, but I’ll stick around and my company will produce it and I’ll make sure that the deaths are what they should be, but I think for a third one with almost 100% certainty I probably won’t direct it, but I’ll be around to make sure it looks good. I think that we leave it open ended and when you watch it, it will make a little bit more sense and you can go in a lot of different directions.
BUG: Well, I can’t wait to see it. So what slasher films or serial killer films are your favorite ones from the 80’s? It sounds like we have the same kind of likes. I love those films. Even though people rip on them all of the time, I go back to them and I watch them all of the time over and over again.
RH: Yeah, well the ones with repeatability to me are the first two HALLOWEEN films. With the second one say what you will about it, I still think it really feels a lot like the first movie. I know it’s different in a lot of ways, but you can watch them back to back and it still feels like a continuation, which I love. That’s what I really tried to do with LAID TO REST. If anything it’s more inspired by HALLOWEEN 2 although I think we made a better film than the first one, it’s just a little bit different. HALLOWEEN is a classic and then the second one is different, but I like the fact that you can watch them back to back. I think you can do that with both of these two films. So there’s those and then the over the top Savini gore fests like THE PROWLER and MANIAC, those are my favorites and then…I really enjoyed the FRIDAY THE 13TH series, but my favorite series overall was always NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST., so working with Robert Englund and especially now directing him is like a huge compliment to me and I still pinch myself at times. He was my wallpaper when I was a kid. BUG: I had that cardboard standee of Robert Englund from the video store.
RH: I did too.
[Both laugh]
RH: Which one? The one from part 2?
BUG: Yeah.
RH: Yeah.
BUG: It scared all of my relatives when they came over to my house, they would jump the minute they saw it. So can we talk about FEAR CLINIC? When are we going to be seeing that as a feature film? RH: It looks like we are gong to be shooting that at the end of the year and we have some major players, besides the cast…Danielle is returning, Danielle Harris and Robert Englund…those are the two that have signed on for now, but besides the cast there are some major players behind it production-wise and distribution-wise that hopefully will come out soon that are making it possible, but yeah it all looks really good. Robert is really behind it. We are setting up…I don’t know if you have seen the series, if you watched it on FearNet, but it’s abut a doctor trying to cure these patients with phobias and puts them in this fear chamber and the fear chamber malfunctions and their phobias sort of manifest themselves in real life, so it’s an extrapolation, but really a whole new film.
BUG: Okay. Is that through FearNet? Is that being produced through them?
RH: The series was through FearNet, yeah.
BUG: I really look forward to seeing that.
RH: Thank you.
BUG: Great. Okay, well thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I know you are really busy.
RH: I love the site and I think it would be a great thing to have it up there.
BUG: And you said the FEAR CLINIC stuff, is that available on like Youtube? RH: The best way to find it is fearnet.com. It’s now is becoming more of a terrestrial channel, so a lot of people that have certain cable carriers can just watch it at home. They can just On Demand FEAR CLINIC.
BUG: Awesome. Sounds good. Well, thanks a lot for taking the time for me. Have a great day.
RH: Thank you, man.
BUG: CHROMESKULL: LAID TO REST 2 is available now on DVD and VOD. No self respecting slasher fan should miss it.
Ambush Bug is Mark L. Miller, original @$$Hole / wordslinger / reviewer / co-editor of AICN Comics for over nine years. Mark is also a regular writer for FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND and will be releasing FAMOUS MONSTERS first ever comic book miniseries LUNA in October (co-written by Martin Fisher with art by Tim Rees) Order Code: AUG111067! Support a Bug by checking out his comics (click on the covers to purchase)!
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