By Harvey F. Chartrand
Ottawa’s prolific Duke of Doom Brett Kelly is springing his remake of Kingdom of the Vampire onto DVD buyers and is now in preproduction on a redo of the fondly remembered 1959 swamp monster flick Attack of the Giant Leeches. From his home in Canada’s capital (not exactly the showbiz capital of the world), Kelly has produced several cult horror movies, including The Feral Man (2002) and The Bonesetter (2003). Despite their extremely low budgets, Kelly’s DVDs are attracting international attention, selling like crazy through his website (brettkelly.net) and Tempe Video. Penny Blood cornered the elusive Kelly while he and his model designer were devising a more sophisticated look for the giant leeches than the “men in garbage bags” who give the original Z-movie its special cachet.
PENNY BLOOD: Is Kingdom of the Vampire a straight horror flick? I just visited your website and the production stills are quite impressive. The expressionistic lighting creates an atmosphere of almost palpable gloom.
KELLY: Yeah, the tone is actually very specific. Kingdom of the Vampire has a Dark Shadows vibe. We’re describing the film as being “like Romeo and Juliet with fangs.” [laughs] It’s a horrific relationship movie. Karin Landstad [aka Gabrielle Mackenzie] plays my mom. She’s got me under her thumb and she doesn’t want to let me go. Then my character Jeff finds love [Nina as played by Anastasia Kimmett] and wants to escape from this stifling relationship, but Mom won’t let him out of her clutches. Jeff is sort of like a Norman Bates character – he’s mother-dominated and wants to break free. The entire production was filmed at a creepy gothic mansion-esque cottage in the Gatineau Hills of Quebec. Big stuffed creatures all over the place... vivid paintings and draperies. It’s unreal.
Kingdom of the Vampire is not a spoof or a send-up. We’re playing it straight here. I do keep my tongue in cheek for a few moments. There is one self-referential dig at one of my previous movies, but other than that, it’s pretty much played straight. Actually Kingdom of the Vampire is a fairly romantic movie, which is one of the things I liked about the script by Janet S. Waltham. So I jumped at the chance to do the remake. Tempe Video will release Kingdom of the Vampire on DVD in October. The original version made by J.R. Bookwalter in 1991 will be an extra feature.
Gabrielle is amazing as Mom – she plays it very seductive and menacing at the same time. In the 1991 version, the mother was very irritating and domineering. She yelled and hollered at this guy, and so you don’t really feel sympathetic towards him and wonder why he doesn’t just leave. If Mom were a raging lunatic, I’d be out of there in no time. So when I was rethinking the story, I said to the distributor: “What if we make the vampire life more interesting so it’ll be harder for Jeff to leave it (and Mom) behind?”
KELLY: Jeff has been isolated for his entire life. He hasn’t ever known anyone but Mom, so there is the fear that if she’s not there… who will be? So I cast a beautiful woman as Mom and nobody would believe I’d want to leave her, until she opens up her mouth and shows us her fangs and her eyes go totally red. The blood swirl that encompasses her eyes is a pretty cool effect.
Jeff still hasn’t inherited any of Mom’s vampiric tendencies, although he keeps getting these urges and expects to turn at any time. He’s trying to fight the change. It’s a metaphor for the onset of puberty, in a way – even though I’m way post-pubescent. (laughs) For Jeff, being caught in the act of bloodletting would be like getting caught doing something dirty in the bathroom, like if his mom walked in on him while he was in there masturbating. Resisting the urges towards vampirism is almost a sexual thing, I guess.
PENNY BLOOD: You are attracting attention in horror circles. Your films are reviewed in VideoScope and Rue Morgue Magazine just did a one-page profile on you.
KELLY: Yes I was very surprised by that. Sometimes I feel so invisible and then something like that happens. You never know what people are going to gravitate towards. I’m catering to a niche market, but there are people out there who like what I do. I get fan mail from all over the world.
I had a bigger budget to work with on Kingdom of the Vampire. Before, my films were in the $5,000 to $6,000 range and financed out of my own pocket. But Tempe asked me to do the movie and gave me a decent budget, so they were solidly behind me. For the first time, we were able to do elaborate crane and dolly shots and try other effects that we could never afford to use before. I had a fantastic crew. My director of photography lit the scenes so gothically and so creepily that Gabrielle looks like a porcelain doll at some times. She looks stunning!
I had a Horror Night in Canada screening of Kingdom of the Vampire at a local public library recently and it went over very well. A lot of people were saying it’s my best movie yet, which is always nice. I had a very positive response from women who thought the film was kind of romantic. The guys thought it was horrific and violent and the girls said it was a gothic chick flick. I guess Kingdom of the Vampire is somewhere in the middle. It’ll please a wide demographic.
PENNY BLOOD: How far along are you with the remake of the old Roger Corman film, Attack of the Giant Leeches?
KELLY: We’re still casting but we have finished the final draft of the script. I was just discussing the graphic art with the leech model designer. We start shooting in September and wrap in October. We should be into post-production by late fall. We’re still scouting for locations but we’ll probably shoot Attack of the Giant Leeches near Smiths Falls and in West Carleton [in Ontario]. I’m hoping to have the inaugural screening in early spring 2008. This will be my ninth feature. I’ve had a busy year. I filmed a wild-man-in-the-woods monster movie called Prey for the Beast and I’m now completing Pirates of Snake Island [formerly Dinosaur Island] – a rollicking, swashbuckling adventure story.
PENNY BLOOD: How significantly will your remake of Attack of the Giant Leeches differ from the low-budgeter directed by Bernard L. Kowalski in 1959?
KELLY: There were moments in the original Roger Corman-produced creature feature where I thought I was watching a Tennessee Williams play. It’s filled with rednecks living in the Florida swamplands. There’s a scene in the middle where Yvette Vickers with her southern drawl is leaving her fat husband [Bruno VeSota] for a studly young man. Then a shotgun comes out. The original Attack of the Giant Leeches takes this weird turn into Tennessee Williams territory and then goes back to being a creature feature, which I thought was really cool, so we did keep elements of that. But the 1959 Leeches was also rather one-dimensional. They don’t show you what created the giant leeches. There is only a casual conversation where someone theorizes that radiation must have been the cause of the leeches’ gigantism.
In our remake, we developed the character relationships a bit more, so instead of the square-jawed hero running in to save the day, the female roles are more significant. In the original, the wife character had nothing else to do but pour coffee. And she did that a lot. At one point, the characters are looking for giant leeches in a rowboat (!) and there she is pouring coffee. I don’t know if coffee and sugar would be a significant weapon against a giant leech. We’re expanding the story a bit. The original was only 62 minutes long, while our version will be a full-length feature. Our leeches are going to be considerably different from the men in garbage bags they had in the original [laughs]. Ours will be giants by leech standards but smaller than humans - although still quite deadly - and physically on the set. We’re going to use five-foot-tall puppets made of latex and not rely on computer graphics effects at all. There is actually going to be a physical creature there on the set to interact with. And we have an explanation for the leeches’ growth spurt. The marsh the leeches inhabit used to be an industrial area and certain toxins were left behind when the industry closed down. So the leeches in the marsh grew to enormous size when they were exposed to contaminants dumped in the water.
KELLY: It’s going to be a B-movie with no apologies. It’ll be genuinely scary in a few spots, but hopefully it is going to be a drive-in movie for today – if they were still making those kinds of movies. A lot of people seem to think Yvette Vickers will be a tough act to follow. We’ll see what we can do about that. We’re not linked to any distributor yet, but we’re hoping that some company will jump at it. There is some interest out there. This time, the budget will exceed $100,000 because of all the special effects.
KELLY: When I was a kid, I stepped into a boat and a leech stuck to my foot. Some strange man came along and burned it off with a cigarette. That traumatized me. Leeches don’t like salt either, so maybe we’ll throw a big bag of Windsor Salt at one of them [laughs].
Tempe Video has just announced the release dates and art for Kingdom of the Vampire. Check it out HERE.
