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LOW BUDGET SCARES

David Giancola of Edgewood Studios.

When David Giancola was eight years old, he saw “Star Wars” and says it changed his life. He became obsessed with science fiction and began his love affair with movies. Thirty years later, David is the president of an independent production house he co-founded in Rutland, Vermont that specializes in sci-fi, action and horror releases. David also has an eight-year-old son Adam that happens to be obsessed with a certain George Lucas franchise.

“My kid’s playing with my ‘Star Wars’ figures now,” David said. “I come home, want to sit on the couch and watch the news and he wants me to fight him as a Jedi. And I keep trying to explain to him why 4, 5 and 6 are better than 1, 2 and 3. I’m all, ‘Look, they made the fourth one first,’ and he doesn’t care.”

This year for Halloween, his son is dressing up as Anakin Skywalker. Mom wants Dad to go as Obi-Wan Kenobi. She even bought him a cloak, but David isn’t having it. “I think it’s just a little much,” David said. “I’m a fan, but I’m not a fanatic. But we’ll see what happens. Maybe for my son, but that’s it… or if I get drunk, maybe then I’ll be Obi-Wan.”

Speaking of drinking, that probably answers where the name for his company - Edgewood Studios - comes from. “Take GE off Edgewood and it’s Ed Wood Studios,” David notes. “That was not intentional, just for the record. It was pointed out to me many years after we started this whole thing.”

Though they are probably best known for the 1994 sci-fi cult “Time Chasers,” which appeared on the eighth season of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” Edgewood Studios has been in business for nearly twenty years and is the only fully functional studio in New England. Their most recent releases were Anna Nicole Smith’s last movie “Illegal Aliens,” a sci-fi comedy with a budget of three million, and “Zombie Town,” a $400,000 horror film that gets its DVD release November 20.

Like Ed Wood, it can be said David pretty much lives in his own little world, so it’s no surprise Wood’s name popped up during a discussion with PollyStaffle.com about recommended films to view in celebrating Halloween. No, David doesn’t suggest the infamous Wood films “Glen or Glenda” (1953), “Bride of the Monster” (1955) or “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (1959), but he does advise Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic about the man some call the world’s worst director.

“‘Ed Wood’ is a great Halloween movie,” David said. “Martin Landau’s performance as Bela Lugosi is just unbelievable. It’s also a prefect movie for people who are kind of uninitiated into the B-movie world. It tells you a bit about low budget filmmaking and the story is true, believe it or not.”

“To actually watch Ed Wood’s movies… they are just tedious,” David added “They’re not as much fun unless you have a ‘Mystery Science Theater’ with a bunch of friends. I’ve got them on video at home, but I don’t watch them. You don’t need the torture of sitting through the whole thing. You get samplings of the different movies in Burton’s film and you get to know what was behind it.”

David calls Wood the master of “walk here, walk there” cinema. Roger Corman, the director of over fifty films and producer of over 300, is another guru of low budget films. He doesn’t recommend Corman’s movies either. “I’m fascinated by Corman’s earlier stuff,” David said. “But even if you look at one of his film’s like ‘The Terror,’ the story behind the film is far more interesting than watching it. The movie itself is a lot of walking from point A to point B.”

The 1963 film was improvised and shot over a weekend after “The Raven” wrapped ahead of schedule. Corman shot extra footage of Boris Karloff and other cast members walking across the sets before they were taken down. Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Corman all directed various other scenes, which were later “made sense of” in the editing room. “Corman was the King, there’s no doubt about it,” David said.

For those that are interested in learning the craft of filmmaking, David does recommend the work of B-movie maker Lloyd Kaufman, however. “I learned as much from watching the Troma movies during the early days than I did anything else,” said David, who went straight from high school to starting his own production company with friend Peter Beckwith. “A guy would drive a motorcycle into a house and the house would blow up and you’d think, ‘Wow how did they do that?’ When you slowed it down you realized they just cut to an explosion. It’s all so fast you don’t realize it. That was the stuff that just blew me away about Kaufman’s films. I’d see that and think, ‘God, these guys are so smart.’”

David later ended up working for Troma, cutting trailers, and also bought footage of an explosion from Kaufman for one of his first films. “It was a bus blowing up from one of the ‘Class of Nuke Em Highs.’ Llyod thought it was a great idea. Nobody had ever done that before with him. He loved that I was going to throw three grand at him for something he just had to make copies for. He was ecstatic.”

For those looking for scares this All Hallow’s Eve, David said you can’t go wrong with any of the classics. “The modern stuff I’m not a fan of personally,” David admits. “The remakes to me just seem like what’s the point and I have a problem with the torture movies. I’m not against them so much as I just can’t get into them. The older stuff rings true for me like the original ‘Halloween’ and ‘Psycho,’ as well as ‘Friday the 13th.’”

But topping the list for David would have to be two low budget classics - “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) and “Phantasm” (1979). He distinctly remembers being completely blown away as a child by both films.

“In my day, ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ was probably considered the scariest movie on the planet,” David said. “It was a film I was scared to watch all the way through. I think we rented it and me and some friends kept turning it on and shutting it off. We weren’t supposed to be watching it to begin with and I remember specifically that we would turn it on, ‘No, no, no, no, shut it off, shut it off.’ Turn it on, shut it off, turn it on, shut it off. The intensity of that film would just drive you nuts.”

“It doesn’t pack the punch for me now as it once did,” David added. “It does more so than all the remakes because it looks so real due to the fact it was shot so cheaply. It’s crude and it makes you feel like you are watching a snuff film or something like that.”

Don Coscarelli’s “Phantasm” was another highly effective film made on a very low budget. Coscarelli wrote, directed, photographed, co-produced and edited the movie. It has also been said he actually rented all of the filming equipment used to make it. In order to save the most money, Coscarelli would rent the equipment on Friday, shoot footage all weekend and return it on Monday, paying for just one day of the equipment’s use. When he was finished with his two-year project, “Phantasm” introduced the world to the sadistic and supernatural undertaker The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), his twisted flying silver spheres with spiked blades and a drill, and his army of slave dwarves that resembled Jawas from “Star Wars.”

“That movie always scared the shit out of me as a kid,” said David of “Phantasm,” which spawned four sequels. “It was on HBO when I was a kid and man it scared the crap out of me. It really freaked me out.”

For those looking for more recent B-movie titles, David calls “Arachnia” (2003) and “Ice Queen” (2005) two of Edgewood’s strongest horror titles. “For Halloween, those are our best two,” David said. Both films feature prehistoric creatures and plane crashes using the same wreckage and miniatures. Brett Piper wrote and directed “Arachnia,” which pits college students stuck out in the woods against prehistoric spiders. In Neil Kinsella’s “Ice Queen,” Ami Chorlton stars as a “frozen prehistoric monster, who is actually a really attractive female” that ends up terrorizing a ski resort.

But for an even bigger scare, hopefully David goes all out this Halloween and lurks around your neighborhood in honor of the movie he holds the dearest in his heart. “You see someone hiding behind a tree dressed as Obi-Wan, then we’ve gone too far,” David joked.

- CCF, October 2007