Late Night Classics – Slime City

With the upcoming DVD release of Slime City Massacre right around the corner, I thought now would be an excellent time to look back at Greg Lamberson’s 1988 flick that started it all – Slime City. Put on your raincoats, my friends, because things are about to get messy.

Jason Bene: Although Slime City is a low budget film, it is quite ambitious. Where did you find the funding to make this cult classic?

Greg Lamberson: My producing partners (Marc Makowski and Peter Clark) and I put up about one third of the $50,000 budget ourselves; we bugged friends and family for another third, and a foreign sales rep named Alexander Beck put up the remainder. It was a different time when we started, because video was huge and no-budget films sold well. But by the time we finished, the bottom had dropped out of that market. So in one sense, we missed the boat, but in another, we raised the money just in time.

Jason Bene: Slime City can almost been seen as a companion piece to Jim Muro’s Street Trash. Were you a big fan of the 1987 gut-buster?

Greg Lamberson: Jim Muro and I were classmates at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and Roy Frumkes was our production teacher. The genesis of Slime City was a Super 8 short I made in 1982 called “Bad Worms” which you can glimpse some of it in the “Making Slime” featurette on both DVD releases of Slime City. A few months later, Jimmy and his crew started wearing T-shirts for the short film version of Street Trash. In the summer of 1983, I wrote the first draft of the screenplay for Slime City, and I think about 6 months after that Jimmy shot the 16m Trash short. Then Jimmy got Roy to write the feature version of Trash and produce it. Later in ’84, Roy and I took a class in production management to learn as much as we could about producing. We both planned to shoot in the summer of ’85, but Roy was able to raise his money (18 times what Slime City cost!) and I wasn’t. So they shot in ’85, and me and my guys spent a year saving our money and shot in ’86. Jimmy actually came to our location and did some Steadicam shots for me free; at that time, he was still sound mixing Trash.

So absolutely, in no way, did Street Trash influence Slime City. But they are linked: we were released a year apart, and both films feature strange booze and icky slime, and my key SFX artists, Scott Coulter and Tom Lauten, assisted Jennifer Aspinall on Trash. I’m happy any time my little film is compared to Trash, Basket Case, Troma, etc., but I’m very open with what my influences were: Peter Straub’s novel Floating Dragon, which featured a man slowly liquefying; the dance scene from The Wicker Man: the conspiracy of tenants from Rosemary’s Baby; and the gross out ending of The Evil Dead. Roy is actually a producer on Slime City Massacre, and appears in the film, and there are direct references to both Street Trash and Basket Case because I wanted to celebrate that whole sleazy, slimy sub-genre from the 1980s.

Jason Bene: There is no better place to shoot a grindhouse style exploitation film than in New York/New Jersey. Frank Henenlotter’s best stuff (Basket Case, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker) was shot there. Did you feel the beaten down was needed for that authentic 42nd Street gooeyness?

Greg Lamberson: Peter Clark, Jim Muro and I lived at Sloane House, a YMCA on 34th street and 9th Avenue which served as the dorm for SVA.  It was a hop, skip. and a jump away from 42nd street, and I worked at the RKO National Twin on 43rd and Broadway. We used to eat breakfast in diners populated by hookers, pimps, and drug dealers all coming off the night shift. It’s not so much that I needed NYC to realize the story for Slime City as it was that 42nd Street actually shaped the story as I wrote it. In Naked Fear, my third film, there’s a scene of Robert Sabin walking down 42nd Street when all the grindhouses were boarded up for Giuliani’s big corporate “revitalization” of the strip. By the way, I was Frank’s assistant director on Brain Damage, which we shot in a warehouse two blocks away from Sloane House… and Sloane House is now a high priced condominium!

Jason Bene: I found the make-up effects to be on par with the colorful splatter that was seen in Troma’s The Toxic Avenger. Who did the make-up effects work, and how many buckets of slime did you go through?

Greg Lamberson: Scott Coulter and Tom Lauten both worked on The Toxic Avenger and Street Trash before Slime City, so that’s the real connection between those films. Scott and Tom rented a brownstone about a mile away from the Brooklyn house I rented. They created the effects in their basement lab, and we shot about half the film in my house. It was great to see my monster coming to life, a dream come true. I have no idea how much methylcelulose (book binding glue used as a thickening agent in fast food milkshakes) we went through, I only know that stuff stained my carpets!

Jason Bene: The ending of Slime City is a gorehounds wet dream come true. All these years later, it is still the most talked about scene in the movie. Was it your goal to finish with something utterly outrageous like that?

Greg Lamberson: Completely. Peter Clark shot the film, and I wrote it for us to collaborate on. I wanted to do a slow building horror film like Rosemary’s Baby and he wanted to do The Evil Dead, so I fused elements from those films together. I had to cut some of the gags from the script, but I’m glad I did because they turned up in Re-Animator anyway! I firmly believe that with a softer ending, the film would have disappeared. And guess what? We almost DID film in the summer of ’85, at the same time as Street Trash. Two Wall Street guys wanted to finance the film for $150,000. Then, at the last minute, they told me they wanted the best friend to live, because he was the most likable character, and they wanted me to scrap the ending so Alex would live and he and Lori could have a happily ever after ending. They told me they wanted me to copy A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. I said, “Freddy’s Revenge” sucks!” They said, “You can’t argue with success.” So I walked. I suppose that for $150,000 I could have made a better film, and we would have come out at the same time as Street Trash, so nobody would have accused me of copying it, and I might have had a career. But I stuck to my guns and made the movie I wanted to make.

Jason Bene: Slime City was released in the late 80′s when Ma and Pa video were still the king of the hill. It was the kind of film that “Chunk Blower” scribe Chas. Balun always said horror fans needed to balance out the Hollywood fluff that was being made. Do you miss that era as much as I do?

Greg Lamberson: I miss that era, I miss mom and pop video stores, and I miss video stores PERIOD! Slime City retailed for $59.99, and I know Camp Home Video sold at least 5,000 units before they went under and Sal Richichi, the owner, disappeared. Camp sent full sized posters of the film to video stores all over the country. Can you imagine?

Jason Bene: On May 10, 2011, the long-awaited sequel to Slime City, Slime City Massacre, will be released on DVD. You brought in “Scream Queen” Debbie Rochon and even more slime. It’s great to see you back!

Greg Lamberson: Thank you! Debbie is a first rate actress and a true supporter of indie filmmaking. I went into Slime City Massacre thinking, “I’ll probably never make another movie again, so I have to give this one everything I’ve got.” I had an incredible cast, including Buffalo actress Jennifer Bihl, horror author Kealan Patrick Burke, Brooke Lewis, Lee Perkins, original Slime stars Robert Sabin and Mary Huner-Bogle, Tom Sweeney who starred in Undying Love, Roy Frumkes, Lloyd Kaufman… so many talented people who really stand out on screen, and too many to give appropriate credit to. A local guy named John Renna plays the “mayor of Slime City,” and I think horror fans are going to love him. The film is a sequel to Slime City and a prequel, the way The Godfather Part II was, and it’s a crazy mixture of horror, science fiction, and action, as well as an homage to the 80s while being something totally new and unique. It’s the one film I’ve made that I’m completely proud of, the terrific cast and crew share credit for that. Shriek Show is releasing the 2-disk DVD, which is jammed with extras, and I hope everyone checks it out!

Jason Bene: Will there be any special screenings before its release?

Greg Lamberson: We’ve been playing at film festivals for year now, and have won quite a few awards, so I’m really just anxious for the DVD to come out. I’m doing a double feature of Slime City and Slime City Massacre here in Buffalo on May 9th, to benefit Benjamin Heppel, a local 8 year old boy who has Leukemia. Then I’m joining Debbie, Mary, Lloyd Kaufman, and several other cast and crew members for a DVD signing at Forbidden Planet in NYC on Friday the 13th of May. And Brooke and Robert are doing a signing at Dark Delicacies in Burbank on June 4th. These will all be great, fun events, but what I’m most looking forward to is the reaction of horror fans when they’ve actually seen the movie we all worked so hard on.