Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: A movie covered by Bleeding Skull
Back in 1986, there was a very real idea that we had broken the world. Or the ozone layer.
Discovered in 1913 by French physicists Charles Fabry and Henri Buisso, it absorbs most of the world’s ultraviolet radiation. This layer of protection for us was destroyed after years of pollution, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and bromofluorocarbons, which means unabsorbed and dangerous ultraviolet radiation was now hitting us at a higher intensity.
You can feel the effects now when there’s a bad weather quality day, as what they call bad ozone can cause harm those with respiratory illnesses such as asthma, COPD and emphysema. Code orange kids, unite and try to take over while hacking up your insides.
I tell you all this to inform you that in 1986, there was a hole in the ozone layer and that seemed like as good a reason as any to cause zombies to wander Texas.
Directed by Matt Devlen, who directed and wrote Tabloid, as well as the man who wrote The Invisible Maniac — and produced Crispin Glover’s What Is It?, which quite frankly blows my mind — Ozone: The Attack of the Redneck Mutants is the movie brave enough to answer the call to make an ozone-related mutant zombie shot on Super 8 epic.
The spiritual cousin or some family to The Abomination — which has a lot of the same cast and crew, as it was shot first and then this came next — this all starts with Kevin Muncy (Scott Davis, Cody from The Abomination, get ready for a lot of …from The Abomination mentions) sneaking into the trunk of the car of Arlene Wells (Blue Thompson AKA Carolyn McCormick, Bret’s wife; of course she was in the movie you already know I’m going to talk about, playing Kelly. She also edited his movies Blood On the Badge and Armed for Action as well as acting as the costume designer for Time Tracers). They’re on their way to Poolville, Texas — an incorporated community of around five hundred people in North Texas that’s close to the birthplace of Robert E. Howard — he was from Peaster, TX — and Mart Martin, as well as the final resting place of Chewbacca. No, really. Peter Mayhew lived in Boyd, TX.
Anyways, Poolville is at the junction of farm roads 3107 and 920, named for the big pool of water in the middle of town. There are five churches, one for every hundred people.
Back to Ozone. Get ready to meet characters with names like Outhouse Mutant, Car Mutant, Country Store Mutant, Granny Mutant, Big Fat Mutant and Melon Mutant. There are lots of melons. This movie has more watermelons than Mr. Majestyk. It also has effects that make me genuinely concerned for the actors in this, as the effects look like being tarred and feathered. I can only imagine that the zombie makeup stayed on their skin for days and that throwing up all of the multicolored liquids gave them all diarrhea.
This also has some kind of misplaced love story, as Wade McCoy (Brad McCormick, Ike from…yeah, repetition is the essential comedic device) has promised to pick up Loretta Lipscomb (Ashley Nevada AKA Barbara Dow who is in…actually a whole lot of movies, such as The Invisible Maniac, Mad At the Moon, Deathrow Gameshow, Curse of the Queerwolf, Nudist Colony of the Dead, Witchcraft IV: Virgin Heart, Cage II, Red Lipstick and G.I. Jesus) for the talent show down at the general store. We also meet his mother Ruby (Janice Williams), who at one point invites Kevin and Arlene to a picnic that turns into chaos.
I asked Bret McCormick about this movie and he filled in a lot of the gaps for me.
“We agreed to do these two movies back to back. It was supposed to be like a one-month thing with ten days on each movie. He was supposed to go first. And at the last minute, he backed off and bailed out. So I went in and shot The Abomination first and we shot for 10 days and that was kind of it. The production of Ozone went on for like 22 days. And it got to the point where we just kind of had to say it’s time to stop because it could have gone on forever.”
As to how they were able to just shoot whatever they wanted and not be bothered, he said, “In Poolville, back in those days, I mean, you could shoot a scene on one of the dirt roads, run through the town and be out in the street for 30-40 minutes before a car came by. We were largely undisturbed with pretty much anything we wanted to do out there. The locals, some of them were curious and, you know, helped us out and played big parts in the movie.”
This is the kind of movie where puke and blood get on everything. That’s how they do it in Texas, the kind of place where a chainsaw massacre gets filmed in a way too hot shack filled with real animal guts and the sequel is made in a newspaper printing facility that had ink pouring down the walls and everyone had some mysterious respiratory illness. It feels handmade and not perfect and that’s how movies should be, messy affairs that make you laugh or throw up and sometimes that happens in the same moment.
The score is great, too. The music crew was Richard Davis (who also worked on Dear God No!, Amazon Hot Box, Monsters and, wow, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), John Hudek, Lasalo Mur and Kim Davis, who has worked as a location manager on movies like Alita: Battle Angel, Stone Cold, Problem Child, Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss and Don Henley’s video for “The End of the Innocence.”
Where The Abomination is a film about darkness within the light of religion and literal cancer coming to life to be a Biblical end times beast, Ozone is happier to just be people hooting and hollering, shotgun blasts blowing melons to bits and an ending that’s beyond deserved.
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