Monthly Archives: January 2023

Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis (1994)

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John Michael McCarthy has made movies like Superstarlet A.D., The Sore Losers, Teenage Tupelo and oh yeah, he’s the man who found Bat Pussy. This is his first film, the story of the daughter of Helvis (Brady Debussey), a rock and roll god who is being opposed by the end of the world church run by Black Jesus (Adimu Ajanaku). He orders them to kill schoolgirl Isla M. (Sherry Lynn Garris, Gorewhore) before she is able to embrace her destiny and free her daddy from his pyramid tomb and help him destroy the Woofman (also Adimu Ajanaku; a lot of people think Jesus becomes a wolfman or a zombie and I don’t think that’s the intention).

Isla is nearly murdered by one of Black Jesus’ women, Candy (Ghetty Chasun from Red Lips!) and this leads to her being reborn as Damselvis, covering herself in leather and fringe, jumping on a motorcycle bound for Memphis to spread the singing gospel.

Oh the people you will meet, Damselvis! Like the wheelchair riding, former guitar playing and stunt death defying Evel Knievelvis (Robert Gann, who did the effects for this movie, Gorotica and Basket Case 2). A nude woman who tempts you in the woods! And oh, the soundtrack! The glorious fuzzy loudness!

Originally a comic book, this movie had no budget and more ideas than every other film you will watch this year put together. This was shot by Hugh Gallagher (Gorgasm), has a zombie Elvis that has one gigantic eye like a live action Big Daddy Roth cartoon and a creator who was brave enough to not only make it, but to try and get Lisa Marie Presley to play the lead.

This is the best $2,000 anyone has ever spent.

You can get this on blu ray from Saturn’s Core, a partner label of Vinegar Syndrome.

Day of the Reaper (1984)

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Shot for $1,000 in Florida on Super 8 — yes, so much SOV is another format, but go with this — Tim Ritter and Joe Preuth made a movie that is basically two teenagers playing Jason and The Shape in their sunburnt hometown and yet there are moments that transcend just dicking around with a camera.

For 70 minutes, a hooded killer (Todd Nolf) does what he does best: kill. Kill and kill and kill and kill, killing bikini girls, killing people in white cutoffs, killing as he menaces Jennifer (Cathy O’Hanlon), the only survivor of his killings from before when he killed now. He can’t stop. He won’t stop. Even death can’t stop him. Even his opposite number, his mind destroyed by the electric chair and the sinister therapy of Doctor Bloch (Patrick Foster) to become an unstoppable force of destruction can’t stop this. Nothing ever will.

Do you know how Ritter raised the money for this? He washed dishes. How many dishes did he have to wash, how many hours did he have to touch half-eaten food from strangers, to earn the money to fill the screen with bending video fuzz, scorching your ears with drone synth, messing with your sense of story by just having the death be the story?

This whole movie is made with ADR sound and a soundtrack that sounds like the synth parts that go whoosh on Van Halen albums when Eddie got sick of playing guitar once he lapped everyone else. What’s even more amazing that by the end, the lack of explanation comes up against exposition that gets so dense, like a pro wrestling fan bugging you with lore that even most of the grapplers haven’t considered. The Festival of the Sanguinary finds one violence-obsessed person every seven years to become a specter and therefore become undying and eventually, it will kill everyone on Earth unless you cut out its heart and eat it in time.

There are just as many people that love this that hate it. Perhaps you will only see the flaws, the lack of budget and the fact that this movie was made with no experience. Or, and I hope this with all my still beating cholesterol ridden heart, that you see past that and allow it to take you over, like when you eat way too strong of an edible and have that sinking feeling that any moment you are about to be overtaken by a high that you may not be able to ride out but then, where is it you wonder, so you take even more and you’re overtaken by tracking lines and sticky corn syrup and food coloring blood melting in the humid Florida sun.

Herschell Gordon Lewis once made a mess here too.

You can get this from SRS.

Devil Worship: The Rise of Satanism (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: You can read another article about this movie here.

I grew up in the middle of the Satanic Panic, a time in which I would be sent to guidance counselors who worked with local priests and police to ensure that Satan would not take over our town and one assumes that Satan would come in through horror movies, heavy metal and role playing games. Five thousand bodies of unidentified kids were showing up every year, or so they said, and every police officer knew an occult expert they could call on. Most of them came to my church to meet us one on one.

My wife can’t always comprehend the contempt I have for the police, but between being a chubby skateboarder nerd and also being obsessed with gore, speed metal and religion, I grew up constantlyfeeling under surveillance in a small minded small town, a place where people still battle over the seperation of church and state and a mobile Nativity drives past the municpal building, a place where it can no longer be but parks long enough that everyone feels that God is pleased.

There are four types of Satantists or so we are led to believe: the dabblers who spray paint walls and knock over tombstones; the religious ones that are seldom in trouble; the dangerous non-trad ones and then there are the generational ones, like something out of Hammer movies that have worshipped the left hand path since they came to America.

Interestingly, black metal gets called out here — mainly they name Venom — while three years later the really scary moments of black metal itself would play out, the kind of murder and arson that this documentary can only dream of.

This comes from the world where He-Man was teaching children to embrace the dark arts — man, they should have watched Thundercats instead because that show is packed with occult themes — and Richard Ramirez loved AC/DC, so therefore anyone who listens to Back In Black could be a killing machine with a pentagram carved into their hand.

If you ever wondered, “How did we as a society get to the outlandish world of QAnon?” I am here to inform you that we have been there at least as long as I have been alive. This is a place where just because the Church of Satan — bonus points for the glance at the Temple of Set, started by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino, a psychological warfare specialist — just so happened to exist. Man, did these guys pay royalties for just grabbing all that footage from Satanis? Isn’t stealing a sin?

In my hometown there were whispers of the pentagrams on the walls of the closed elementary school. It’s why we never got MTV — as a substiute we were given Hit Video USA, a Christian channel that edited the videos before they were played — until the early 90s. I’d say look how I turned out, but a quick glance at the stuff that I watch points to me still being headed to an eternity in Hades, huh?

You can watch this on YouTube.

Mail Order Murder: The Story of W.A.V.E. Productions (2020)

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This movie was co-directed by Ross Snyder and William Hellfire, who worked for Gary Whitson, the founder of W.A.V.E. Productions, in the 90s and was astounded to learn in 2016 that his old boss was still making his strange films. He pitched him on the idea for this and Whitson gave him full access to all of his movies as well as the people who made — and still make — them on spec.

That’s right. If there’s a horror movie you want to see or more to the point, a death or struggling scene with an attractive actress, W.A.V.E. will film it for you with our their actresses, including Clancy McCauley, Debbie D., Laura Giglio, Deanna Demko, Pamela Sutch and Tina Krause, who all appear in the film.

If you have any love for SOV — I mean, this site just spent nearly three weeks on these movies, so if you’re reading this, you might — this has so may folks show up like Goregasm director High Gallagher, Tempe Video’s J.R. Bookwalter, the guys from Bleeding Skull and Lunchmeat and nearly everyone else associated with W.A.V.E.

There’s also great footage from old Chiller Theater conventions, Debbie D. on The Joe Franklin Show and most of the cast laughing about both the silliness of so many of the movies and the conditions that they were made under.

This movie has no judgment for the films that W.A.V.E. creates and is so good natured about movies that are basically just about women being stabbed, strangled, drowned and even devoured by a giant woman in Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge. Instead, these sleazy movies seem to be made by a strange family of sorts that ended up creating outsider art, if outsider art made several films devoted to women in quicksand.

Man, instead of talking head horror docs that tell us everything we want to know about safe subjects, more people need to go all in on the dark alleys of the genre. This movie is incredible.

You can get this from Saturn’s Core, a partner label of Vinegar Syndrome. You can also watch it on Tubi.

Pathogen (2006)

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Emily Hagin started making this movie when she was only 12 years old. It took two years to make and she had to endure plenty of hardship, including the theft of some of the film’s equipment, which was replaced thanks to a grant from the Texas Filmmakers Production Fund that paid for post-production. A grocery store in town also closed down early so they could shoot the end of the movie there.

What’s amazing is that this film focuses on what it’s like to be a teenager as a zombie epidemic takes over and even your parents are powerless to protect you. Dannie (Rose Kent-McGlew) has been having dreams of this world-ending event and learns that the Nanochip has leaked into the water supply of Austin, which causes a waterborne disease that kills everyone who gets it and then reanimates their corpses.

Hagin has gone on to direct and write the opening of Scare Package and Sorry About the Demon. This movie makes me so happy — despite how dark and absolutely dire the ending gets — because it’s made by someone that truly cares about making something creative, as well as people gathering around her to help make that happen. It’s also so much better than every other zombie movie that will be made after it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Dead Next Door (1989)

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Written, produced and directed by J. R. Bookwalter, The Dead Next Door has some famous folks helping out, as Sam Raimi served as executive producer — The Master Cylinder — and Bruce Campbell dubbed the voices of Raimi and Commander Carpenter.

This took four years and about $125,000 to make. It’s not technically SOV, as it was shot on Super 8.

Against the wishes of some still alive humans, the government creates Zombie Squad 205, an anti-walking dead special task force after the undead start to take over the world. Raimi, Mercer, Kuller and crew head to Ohio –Bookwalter’s home — and battle a cult that wants to keep zombies alive because God told them to. That is, if they can get the team to stop watching Evil Dead and in action.

This movie came out as there were few zombie films and had so much hype. It’s a low budget but high talent love letter to Romero’s films, feeling very much a continuation of Day of the Dead. I’m not sure if fans wanted so much humor, but that’s what they got. It feels like a video game and I mean that in all the very best of ways.

It’s short, sweet and drowning in sheer gore, too.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy it from Makeflix.

Masters of Magic (2004)

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Director Anthony Stephens and writer Tony Garcia may have few credits but they also made a sword and sorcery film for a budget of about what ten minutes of that Dungeons and Dragons flop coming out this year cost to shoot.

This was on Mill Creek’s Catacombs of Creepshows box set which probably used to sell for a buck at used stores and is now approaching $100 on eBay, thanks to having movies like Fungicide, Tartarus and Death Becomes Them on it.

This movie is so magical that every magic user yells “Fireball” before acting like they’re throwing a fireball and all that happens is that the video effect reverses the color and goes to black and white quickly and I kind of love that effect, one with no uncanny valley, one that people may say is cheap but it works.

An evil Necromancer (Charles Iceler) has been creating an army of zombies who barely have any blue tint but if they say they’re zombies, well…they are. They’re opposed by a thief named Dewin (Marie Noelle Marquis), a warrior woman called Nika (Stefanie Pschill), an adventurer (who very well could be a ranger but I didn’t have time to ask him his character class) and a priest in a pink robe who is pretty much a non-stop homophobic joke, but you know, 2004 was as much 18 centuries ago as it was 18 years.

There’s also a floating sword that looks great. Yeah, I get it. It’s an easy effect. But it was like being in a live action version of Gauntlet.

It’s incredible that in a world where Lord of the Rings can be watched in seconds that anyone would be brave enough to make their own fantasy movie with big aims and ideas in direct inverse relation to their budget. The costumes are great, the synth at the beginning just works and yeah, the swordfights are borderline child in the backyard, which says to me they didn’t fall into the logic of every other dungeon SOV (Song of the Sword, Way Bad Stone) and hire some renaissance faire people to stab one another.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Hidden (1993)

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Michael Wilcott (Simon Mosely) lost his parents in a plane crash and his brother to a murderer. Now, as he hunts down that man — instead of killing himself — he finds himself getting close to The Hidden. And yes, there’s another movie with the same title, but director Nathan Hill and writer Nick Goodman didn’t know that.

Everyone is as Australian as can be and if you are ready to work your way through the accents, you’ll also be rewarded by two shirtless men having an incredible fistfight on the side of a cliff. There’s also a cocaine addicted monster which is really a man in a bear suit, so this also has that going to for it.

I mean, this is a movie where a bear lives in the sewers and eats a man on coke, gets into coke and appears for one scene and you name it The Hidden. This is a movie that demands sheer insanity throughout and instead feels like teenagers trying to make a serious movie except that, yes let me say it again, it has a zooted-out bear in it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Strawberry Estates (1997, 1999)

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When someone tells you that The Blair Witch Project was the first found footage movie, they weren’t even the first in the 90s.

A parapsychology professor, his students and a psychic have locked themselves in the haunted Smith Garrett Building or Strawberry Estates. It’s one of the greatest challenges of psychics and parapsychologists and has become legendary. That’s because this is a place that really is packed with evil and there’s no way anyone is making it out alive.

The 1997 version had a different cast, which included Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause, but director and writer Ron Bonk went back and shot all of that all over again.

It’s long, there’s a lot of talking — I enjoyed the faith discussions more than you may — and there could be a lot of fat trimmed, but when it works, it works.

As you may know, I dislike most found footage movies, so the fact that I finished this 100-minute-long film speaks to the fact that it has something going for it.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy it from SRS.

Exclusive interview with John Harrison

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John Harrison has had an incredible life in the movies. From performing music for George Romero’s films and TV series to playing performed as Sir Pelinore in Knightriders, then working as the 1st Assistant Director for Creepshow and Day of the Dead — not to mention his stunning turn as the villain of Effects — he has done so much. He’s still doing it, writing and directing episodes of the Shudder series Creepshow. He’s also been a touring and recording musician, worked on several TV series and oh yeah — made two ground-breaking Dune mini-series.

I had the amazing opportunity to speak with John for an extended period. I thank him for his time, his openness and all he’s done not just for film, but to get the spirit of Pittsburgh out into the entertainment world.

Thanks to both Dusty Nelson and Tony Buba for their assistance in setting up this interview.

You can learn even more at his official site.

B&S About Movies: What’s it like to have Effects being more celebrated now and a new 4K release coming from AGFA?

John Harrison: Dusty (Nelson) has been working on it with the guys down there. And I think it’s going to be a great release. It is kind of amazing to both of us. All these years later, it’s coming — you know, it’s been revived several times over the past ten years — but after having basically come out in just a few drive-ins and a few small theaters when it first came out and then falling off the grid for all these years, it feels good.

B&S: There’s also the great After Effects blu ray.

Harrison: I gotta give Michael Felsher a lot of credit. He put it out and he did a terrific job on that. He was very responsible for getting Effects revived. I was doing a signing for some of my scores that I did for Romero at a place called Dark Delicacies in Burbank and a guy came up to me and said, “Hey, whatever happened to Effects? It’s like, a cult treasure, and everybody talks about it, but nobody can find it.”

I gave him the whole story about the film and its distribution and the guy said, I know a guy at Anchor Bay, which happened to be Michael. I met him and he was actually leaving Anchor Bay and he said, “I know Synapse and I’ll bet you they’d love to release your movie.” And they did. And when we put out the DVD, I went and did a bunch of interviews with all of us that were involved in it at the time. I had everybody over to my house that day, including George, Joe Pilato, Dusty, Pat Buba and everybody. We filmed it and then sent all this stuff to Michael and he made that documentary. I think it’s terrific.

B&S: I’ve bought the DVD, the blu ray, the After Effects blu, so…yeah, I’m ready to upgrade again. (laughs)

Harrison:  I’m just glad that a new generation has found our film. You know, we run into people that weren’t even born when we made this movie. I’m just so happy that people are seeing it because we put a lot of time and effort into that thing. It was a great time in our careers, really when we were just getting started. Obviously, there was also our relationship with George and then deciding to strike out on our own. It was a special time. We didn’t have any money. All we had was energy.

B&S: Yet sometimes, those days are more memorable than when you do have money and been doing this for some time.

Harrison: It was a great time. Everybody that was trying to do it. And so everybody was really supportive of everybody else, working on each other’s films, going to see them and commenting on them, trying to help get them made. It was really a lovely time. And we were fortunate that George was there and kind of took us under his wing. We were doing very much the same things with our company. Image Works that he was doing with Latent Image. We were doing industrials and commercials and just trying to make a living. But we always had the intention of trying to do a feature-length film. And we just said, “What’s stopping us?” We went around and borrowed and stole and ended up with like 50 grand and some unused shorts ends of film stock. We went out and made it.

B&S: Today, movies get shot here, but they don’t get made here.

Harrison: There was George. There was a company called TPC, which was a commercial production house but one of the first video tape production houses in the country and they had really sophisticated equipment. That’s where we shot all the stuff that’s supposedly in Lacey’s basement where he has all the video recording gear set up. We actually shot that in TPC’s control room. And then there was WQED and they were doing all kinds of production at the time. And you’re right, a lot of it was being originated in Pittsburgh, the writing and the production. And I’m glad that people are still coming into the city to make movies because first of all, I love the city. It’s my hometown. And I love that there’s enough work to support crews and so forth. But it would be great if people could originate material from there like we used to.

B&S: How did your music career start? Was it on a parallel path to filmmaking?

Harrison: Well, it’s kind of it’s really odd. When I was growing up, I was always a musician. I had professional experience pretty much all through my life either working in church choirs or singing. I had a band all through high school, we played around and then I was on the road with them in the late 60s and early 70s. That band broke up and I moved back to Pittsburgh because I got serious about my filmmaking career. I didn’t see myself as Mick Jagger and trying to crank out a living as a musician.

It was always part of my life and getting involved in the music of the films was really an accidental enterprise because I was the guy with the piano. Everybody knew that and when I was working with George, for example, we were doing Creepshow and he wanted to use library tracks originally for the score, which is how he had done all his movies in the past. But a lot of those cues weren’t really working out and I told him that I could come up with some interstitial material that might bridge the gaps and enhance some of them.

He said, “Well, look, I need a theme. I need a title music.”

I ended up scoring most of the film. And you know, that just led to more. When we were doing commercials with Image Works, I would do the jingles and stuff like that. And then I was on the road with a guitarist named Roy Buchanan for about four years. My friend Jay Reich was his manager and he brought me into the band so it was kind of a parallel track there for a while. But I never intended to make a career out of scoring movies. It was really just something that happened. And I was lucky enough to have opportunities to do it for George and then for Effects and then for my own stuff when I did Tales from the Darkside, both the movie and the TV show. But for a long time, I guess you could say that it was kind of a parallel thing, but it wasn’t something that I was going to do exclusively.

B&S: Was Tales from the Darkside a major learning experience?

Harrison: I’ve said this many times before, but it was the best film school I ever could have gone to. I never went to film school, so having that opportunity with George and then Richard Rubinstein was an opportunity to basically do everything. They were low budget, so we didn’t have any money and we had to do everything ourselves. I wrote, directed and did the music for my episodes and, as I said, it was the best film school I could have had because.

I didn’t come out of it with just training to be a director. I came out of it having to do everything, learning from it and you couldn’t ask for anything better than that.

B&S: It came at the right time, for you and for horror.

Harrison: It spawned a bunch of other things. I mean, Spielberg saw it and he created Amazing Stories. (laughs) You’ve got Tales from the Crypt and even now Greg Nicotero is doing the new Creepshow on Shudder, Guillermo del Toro has Cabinet of Curiosities on Netflix, there was Masters of Horror. It’s great that people love anthologies and I liked them because if you can find an umbrella theme for the idea and then put in individual stories, you know, as opposed to just single movies, you can make it work. Short stories are really a whole different kind of narrative discipline. You’ve got to really tell the story quick.

B&S: You have so much experience in them — the series and movie Tales from the Darkside, series and movie Creepshow, Monsters… What I love about the Tales from the Darkside movie is that the wraparound story is so strong. It’s not just shorts thrown in without any reason.

I have to confess, the first time I saw the Raw Dawn Chong ending, it was in the middle of the night, I was a teenager and probably drunk and it freaked me out so badly that I stayed away from the movie for some time. It’s really scary. It really works.

Harrison: I’m very proud of that movie. And again, it blows my mind that we made that thing in 1991 and it’s still popular. I mean, it’s always on TV somewhere and then at Halloween, it’s on every day.

The other day, I spoke with a popular romance and horror writer named Cynthia Pelayo and she was just raving about it and how it affected her when she was young. It was one of the most important things in her life. I don’t go to horror conventions very often, but I’ve been to a couple and people come up to me to tell me how much they love that movie. It’s like thirty years old now.

B&S: Savini is a fan. He says it should have been Creepshow 3.

Harrison: Yes, he said that to me.

B&S: The cast is so strong, too.

Harrison: I have to really credit the producers with that. Richard Rubinstein and Mitchel Galin were really determined. It was Julianne Moore’s first movie role.  They went after names and they were lucky to get people like Christian Slater, William Hickey, Steve Buscemi and Debbie Harry.

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B&S: Was doing Tales from the Crypt different?

Harrison: On Tales from the Crypt, we obviously had much bigger budgets. They were a little harder-edged than Tales from the Darkside. On HBO, you could get away with more. I will say this: those episodes had great crews and great writers and I’m really fond of the ones that I did for them.

Then Creepshow came along for Shudder. I will say that Nicotero has been determined to maintain the style and spirit of the original movie. And I think he has pulled it off and I really applaud that. We haven’t tried to invent something new or turn it into something that it isn’t.

B&S: Creepshow came around in my life at the right time, as EC Comics were being reprinted and that movie is the best realization of a comic to film.

Harrison:  Stephen (King) and George (Romero) were very specific about how they wanted to bring a comic book to life.

B&S: You also have worked on a major franchise, as you did two mini-series of Dune for SyFy.

Harrison: They’re kind of like the crowning achievement of my career. I had a great time doing those and it was a book that I loved. I was able to put together a team of artists that were really fantastic.

It’s really hard to get anything made. I did a couple of TV movies that I had written which turned out well, but I never pursued series television. I might have made a hell of a lot more money. (laughs)

But in the 2000s I met a producer named Dean Devlin and I did a show called Kindred. And Dean produced Godzilla and Independence Day. Huge Hollywood movies. We met and he loved me, we became friends and I’ve done a lot of work for him on Leverage and The Librarians. I also did a TV movie for him, Blank Slate.

Back to Dune: In the late 90s, it came along and that took about four years of my life. Doing both of those films were fantastic experiences. And now, with the new movies, people are rediscovering them and that’s great. We brought the whole franchise back after David Lynch’s movie. People kept thinking that Dune was not a movie that could be translated to film. I was lucky because the producers wanted to do a mini-series, so it was really fantastic.

B&S: In Jodorowsky’s Dune, Jodorowsky says how nervous he was to see Lynch’s Dune. Did you feel that way seeing Denis Villeneuve’s movie?

Harrison: I don’t think I’m being arrogant saying this, but I think that the success of my mini-series gave people the idea that well, maybe we could get this translated. Maybe we could do a movie again. And so we went through that process because I was still attached to it. Richard Rubinstein and I were still attached to the process. We went through a bunch of trial and error trying to find somebody who could do it. Some of the attempts were really miserable, so I was kind of worried about it. I do like this director quite a lot. I’ve loved all his movies. So I was kind of excited when I heard he was interested in doing it. So it’s very different, you know, and I’m okay with that. I’m really glad that he has another movie to do the story because the first one was only part of the story. And I would have been really disappointed if it ended then. Because there was so much.

But you know, they’re different and mine will always be there. People still talk about it and they still love it and watch it so I’m okay with it.

B&S: That’s a really healthy attitude to have. If people like that movie, they’re going to find yours.

Harrison: I hope so. Yeah. I mean, the differences are that the new movie is very poetic, cinematically, and obviously he had a lot more money than I ever did. So he could do some things that I would have never been able to do.

The important part of it was that I had brilliant artists working with me. I had Vittorio Storaro and all these people to help me. I was concentrating on making the story coherent and do it all in six hours. So it was much more important to me to have the story be really compelling.

B&S: When you saw the Lynch one in the theater, they have you a pamphlet so you could understand what was happening.

Harrison: That was a bummer. There was some beautiful imagery in his film, but it’s not the book.

I read the book and I knew what was going on and I was still lost.

B&S: It’s a weird idea to think Dune can be a toy-selling movie.

Harrison: Lynch is just an artist of a different color.

B&S: You’ve also acted in a few films.

Harrison: Well, you know, I did start out going to Emerson College studying acting for a while, and I quickly realized that I would rather be behind the camera than in front of the camera.

I wanted more control. I wanted more. I wanted to control my destiny a little bit more. But, you know, I think I’m not unhappy that I did it because I think it’s given me a way of communicating to actors, because I know what’s going on.  I know what they’re going through. I know what I expect and how to talk to them. So it’s all been worthwhile to do it.

In Effects, Dusty and Pat wanted me to be in it and I had no intention of acting in the movie. I was only reading against other actors during auditions. But I guess we saved some money by having me play Lacey. (laughs)

B&S: Dusty told me he thinks you’re the reason the movie works.

Harrison: I give him credit for it then, because he directed me in a way and told me what he wanted out of the character. So I appreciate that.

You know I never had any illusions that I was going to go on to a fabulous career as a movie icon or anything like that. But you know, I enjoy it. I’ve done a few big parts here and there for different things over the years. I always enjoy it because I don’t have the pressure of being the director and instead of having to worry about everything, I just come in and do what they tell me.

B&S: You’re in Rowdy Harrington’s Jack’s Back.

Harrison: That’s the movie that put him on the map.

I was in Striking Distance too, but I got cut.

I was a suicide jumper on the Ninth Street Bridge that Bruce Willis gets pissed off at when he comes up on the boat. He says, “Look, man, if you’re gonna jump, just do it. I don’t have time.” And then he starts shooting off his guns and at me, I don’t jump and just say, “Forget it.”

But it didn’t make it into the final version.

B&S: Your wildest credit is being listed as a writer on some Gorillaz songs.

Harrison: They just sampled some of the Day of the Dead score. It was also used in Stranger Things and in Grindhouse. They sampled it, they got the rights to it and they put me in the credits as a writer. It made me seem kind of cool to my kids. (laughs)