By Steve Newton
As the Vancouver correspondent for Fangoria for 13 years, I visited quite a few movie sets. I’d drive to the film location, do in-person interviews with the director, the producers, the stars, and the makeup-FX artists, go home and bang out a 3,000-word feature, fax it off to New York, and then wait several months or more to see my words show up in the glossy, blood-spattered pages of the fabled horror mag.
I freakin’ loved it.
Between my first set-visit for Fango (the 1988 Dean Koontz-based debacle Watchers) and my last (the 2002 Michael Myers debacle Halloween: Resurrection), I got to interview some pretty cool actors, including Jeff Goldblum (1995’s Hideaway), Alicia Silverstone (1993’s The Crush), Amanda Plummer (1993’s Needful Things), and–best of all–Tim Curry (1990’s It).
Usually the talent was very welcoming–who wouldn’t want to have their horror chops highlighted in Fangoria?–but on at least one occasion I was the victim of bad vibes.
Back in 1995 I was assigned to cover the Vancouver filming of the gory vampire-comedy Bordello of Blood, the second film in a proposed Tales from the Crypt film trilogy. I’d quite enjoyed the first one, director Ernest Dickerson’s stylishly twisted Demon Knight, so had high hopes for B.O.B.
I was told in advance that I’d be able to interview actors Chris Sarandon, Angie Everhart, and Corey Feldman, but that main star Dennis Miller would not be making himself available. I’d had that happen before, while covering Needful Things and The Crush, when respective stars Ed Harris and Carey Elwes deigned to talk to Fango for one reason or another.
Undeterred, I showed up on the set while Miller and Everhart were rehearsing a scene on some scaffolding in the B.C. Enterprise Hall, a high-ceilinged, glass-walled structure on the city’s old Expo 86 site. I clearly recall Miller glaring down at me as if he were wondering how the hell some longhaired, biker-lookin’ dude with a notepad got onto his set.
Turns out I wasn’t the only person who noticed Dennis Miller wasn’t thrilled to be on the Bordello set. According to the movie’s Wikipedia page, he didn’t want to make the film, but offered to play the lead for a cool $1 million, which led executive producer Joel Silver to cut $750,000 from the budget to hire him.
According to the mini-documentary, Tainted Blood: The Making of Bordello of Blood, on some days Miller wouldn’t even show up on set, and when he did he’d just improvise most of his dialogue. As exasperated co-star Corey Feldman points out in Tainted Blood, when it came time for Miller to promote the show on national TV, he actually urged people not to see it!
What kinda person gets paid a shit-ton of money to make a low-budget flick, makes the shoot miserable for all involved, then tries to sabotage its opening week? Not to mention gives the stink-eye to some enthusiastic freelance writer who’s just trying to get a decent story for a popular horror publication?
As it turns out, I actually got some revenge on Miller for his unprovoked dirty look, because when the movie was released in theatres in August of 1996 I wrote a scathing review and called him a “second-rate performer”.
Do yourself a favour this Halloween. Take Dennis Miller’s advice and do not watch Bordello of Blood–even if it’s streaming for free on Tubi.