HYB: I was on it like a fly on shit, man. It was three dollars, sorry you didn’t get a cut. But it seems you guys got kinda screwed by Camp in the long run.

GL: Yes, but other filmmakers have been screwed worse. Camp paid us a $13,000 advance, What micro-budget film gets $13,000 now? Troma never paid any filmmaker that much, that’s for sure. They probably owed us another $13,000 by the time they went under, though. They owed the warehouse money, and the warehouse had thousands of copies of their titles sitting around, so they sold them to recoup their losses. Water under the bridge. I remember seeing a T-shirt for sale with Belial on it, from BASKET CASE. I asked Frank Henenlotter why he didn’t sue, and he said because it was free publicity. When I heard a video store in the Bronx was selling bootlegs, I took Frank’s advice and let it slide. Camp was out of biz, and I was just glad people were still able to see the film.

HYB: Thats a good attitude. For low-budget filmmakers the eighties video era was kind of a double edged sword in that the market was so open to these films yet you found yourself getting shafted a lot of the time. But that was a great time to be a horror fan. You mentioned that you were one of the first of the wave of video clerks turned filmmakers. Tell us something about that experience. In the Slime City DVD commentary you mentioned you worked at a video store near Times Square. That must have been a wild time?

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Read Our Review & Watch the Trailer of Slime City HERE

GL: I had a long relationship with Times Square. My dorm was on 34th Street, and I worked as an usher at the RKO National Twin on Broadway and 43rd Street. When Diana Ross gave a free concert, it caused a riot. People were turning cars over, and cops on horseback charged into the crowd. A security guard threw a guy out with a night stick once, and the guy came back with a night stick of his own. So the guard pulled out a .32, 5 feet in front of me! I was this fresh faced, freckled kid from a small town, and I’m dealing with all these bad asses on angel dust. Wild? You might say so. remember that scene in A BRONX TALE when the mafia guys lock the bar door, so those rowdy guys can’t get away, and beat them? We sued to do that for real at the video store. If we caught someone stealing, we’d lock the door, and 2 of us would grab the thief, and my boss would zap him with a stun gun and he’d fall like a ton of bricks.

HYB: So tell us something of the formative years of the guy who ultimately became horror author/filmmaker Greg Lamberson. You grew up in the seventies, the greatest decade for horror movies. What was it like to have films like Carrie, Halloween, TCM etc as the current thing. What caused you to go “astray”?

GL: My mother raised me alone. I remember as far back as when I was 4, when she’d walk me to our single screen theater, and she’d buy me comic books on the way home. She was artistic, and I got that from her; I used to draw a lot. I grew up thinking I wanted to be a comic book artist, or a stop motion animator. She didn’t drive, so I didn’t get to many movies; I was influenced more by TV movies like THE NIGHT STALKER and TRILOGY OF TERROR than anything else. Other kids saw CARRIE, and THE OMEN, but I had to wait for them to come on HBO. HBO saved my life! I saw THE WANDERERS and BILLY JACK and THE WILD GEESE 20 times each. I have to say, it was a good time. I STAR WARS came to town and stayed for 6 months. No other movies for 6 months! Then they’d hit a dry spell and bring it back. I was obsessed with Hammer films, Planet of the Apes, and Logan’s Run; I caught the bug early and never got rid of it. And 70s films are still my favorites.

HYB: For college you went to the School of Visual Arts in New York City as a film student. You said that the decision was mostly so that you could study with Roy Frumkes, who directed Document of the Dead. He had a production class their am I correct?

GL: That’s the short answer, here’s the complete one: I was a lazy student in high school. I aced English andArt without even trying, and got Cs in everything else. I bailed out of math and science first chance I got. My art got me into a summer program at our local college where high school students from around the state lived in dorms for a month and studied with real artists. I wasn’t good enough to progress to the next level, but I’d already decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. The program was sponsored by SVA, and when I checked them out, I saw they didn’t require math and science. And then my uncle, who lived in NYC, sent me a flyer for Roy’s DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD, and I was sold. Romero was my hero, and nothing had as big an impact on me as NOTLD, DAWN and MARTIN. So I figured,wow, a college that doesn’t look down on horror films! But Roy was the only instructor who didn’t–all of the other ones did, and it helped turn me off to the whole film school milieu. Plus, I was just as lazy in college as I was in high school–I got As in the classes I liked, and B’s and Cs–and then incomplete!–in the ones I didn’t. See a pattern there?

HYB: My God you sound so much like me it’s scary. I applied to School of Visual Arts because of it’s no math/science policy. But I forgot to fill out some form so my application was denied. But anyway its at this time that the idea of making your own film stated to germinate. You met some of the friends at SVA that would be your toolmaking partners for years, Peter Clark, Director of Photography and co-producer of Slime City and Ed Walloga, assistant director and prod. manager. Were you all connected by a love of horror films?

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GL: Peter loved horror films, and he better instincts than I did about them. I’d only been exposed to mainstream horror flicks, so he tended to like the indie films, and I disliked them–I’m talking major genre fare, here–BASKET CASE, THE EVIL DEAD, RE-ANIMATOR—I almost never liked them the first time. It was only after repeated viewings that I understood these were the good films, and the Hollywood films were shit. In a lot of ways, Peter had a bigger influence on my tastes in movies than anyone else. But that’s what film school is about, if you’re smart: opening yourself up to new experiences. My buddy Ed was never a horror guy; he was always into heroic stuff, whether it was science fiction, comic books, or private eyes. The stuff we both like tends to be 70s cop stuff, but very violent and edgy. But Ed was always open minded about things, and never pooh poohed horror outright. You know, when SLIME CITY originally came out, no one but Film Threat picked up on the whole gooey, sexual subtext of the film; now everyone sees it, it’s so obvious, but not back then. Ed–who is very analytical–was the first one to understand what the film was really about. And of course, Jimmy Muro was my classmate, and lived at the dorm with me. He was a star from the get go, because he’d worked as a P.A. On BASKET CASE. This awestruck cult sprang up around him, but Peter and Ed and I weren’t exactly followers, and I think that’s what Jimmy liked about us. He appeared in one of my student films, and when he saw the film I did that evolved into SLIME CITY, I had his respect. We all used to go to 42nd Street to see triple features–women in prison flicks, karate flicks, hard to describe exploitation. That single college was “formative” for me more than any other period in my life.

HYB: It must have been amazing to be a young film geek, in NYC, during the grindhouse era that your film Slime City in many ways was one of the last of. Any cool stories, experiences from that time?

GL: The grindhouse’s were overrated! They stank of cat urine and bum piss. Winos would just sit in there all day, drinking and peeing, drinking and peeing. Guys used to smoke angel dust, and who was going to tell them not to? A lot of the theaters had cats, and when one of the fuckers would rub against your leg, it would scare the hell out of you! SLIME CITY is sort of a celebration of the sleazy grindhouse era, but it actually played at an indie art house, The Bleecker Street Cinemas, just like BASKET CASE played at the Waverly Twin on West 4th Street, far away from Times Square. But what was cool about the time was midnight movies. Peter and I worked at the same movie theaters and video stores, and we’d race through our closing duties so we could catch a midnight flick—BLADE RUNNER, GALLIPOLI, INFRA-MAN, THE EXORCIST, TAXI DRIVER–great, great movies with great, great audiences. I moved to Buffalo 3 and a half years ago, and for 3 years I was a manager-projectionist at an art house near a college campus. I programmed my own midnight series–one on horror, one on SF, and one on 70s. The response was fantastic, and I had a blast. I brought Roy up to introduce a beautiful, uncut print of STREET TRASH, and I think I sort of anticipated the big resurgence that film’s had. I got a lot of press for this series, and made the front page of the arts section for our paper: ‘Midnight Cowboy.’ Since SLIME CITY was a midnight movie, I like that.

HYB: Now after a year of film school you and your buddies decided to jump right in. You had already written the screenplay to Slime City when you decided to take jobs working on another low-budgeter, I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE. You’ve said that you learned from the mistakes that they made making that film for your film,SC? What specifically did you learn?

GL: Sort of. Peter and I both elected not to go back for a second year. We were making good money for guys our age. I wrote SLIME CITY during the time I would have been in Second Year. I met John Michaels, who had worked as the Assistant Director on SPLATTER U,a t the National Twin. By then i was a big assistant manager, and THE EVIL DEAD and THE DEADLY SPAWN had both run there. The screenplay for I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE was 120 pages long, and the dialog columns were five inches wide. I said to John, “Isn’t this kinda long?” and he snapped his fingers and said, “It’ll go fast!” Well, two major action sequences that each required around the clock shooting ended up getting cut, and tons of other stuff. Also, they didn’t feed us on that shoot. You always feed your cast and crew, if nothing else. One day, John’s assistant brought him a big fat sandwich, and he didn’t want to offend her, so he ate in front of all of us. We literally sat in a circle on the grass at Brooklyn college, and watched him eat that whole sandwich. He was a nice enough guy, but that was a real morale killer. There was also a weird situation with the DPs: there were two of them, not one, and John didn’t get along with one guy. The relationship between a director and his DP is critical. The guy ended up punching John one day, and absconding with that day’s footage. He kept threatening to burn the film until they worked something out with him. So these were a lot of things I hoped to avoid with SLIME CITY!

HYB: Slime City is such a perfect B-movie scenario. You’ve said that part of it was inspired by the first chapter of Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon. It’s been years since I read that. How so? And much has been made of the sexual sub-text of the movie. You joked in the DVD commentary that it’s aimed at 25 year old guys with no girl friend. Now I’m of the mind set that you never try to read too much into B horror movies but theres clearly some underlying stuff going on in this movie.

GL: People used to call SLIME CITY a clone of THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN, but I’ve never seen that movie! I may have been influenced by pictures of Rick Baker’s masks–he sculpted 11 of them, don’t you know?–but from what I know of the story, it was nothing like mine. It’s an astronaut, right? Returns from space changed and all that? The influences are clearly ROSEMARY’S BABY–for me–and THE VIL DEAD—for Peter. It’s been a lot longer since I’ve read Floating Dragon than it has for you! I read it when it first came out. I’m a big Peter Straub, and GHOST STORY is one of my favorite novels, I’ve read it a dozen times. But I’ only read Floating Dragon once. it wasn’t one of my favorites, but there’s this character in the beginning who’s liquefying, and he’s desperately trying to hold himself together, suing rubber gloves and stuff. So that’s what I got from the book, really–that image, when Alex wraps himself up like the Invisible Man. I’ve come to realize that the styles of Romero and David Cronenberg really influenced me, too. If you look at DAWN, even scenes of Frannie sitting around alone in that store room have this really uneasy, sickening feeling about them, which I liken to some of Cronenberg’s takes on the human body revolting against itself. I don’t want to over analyze this, because SLIME CITY is a cheese and pepperoni pizza compared to their filet mignon. But, while most of the retro reviews have emphasized the film’s gooey, ’80s grindhouse flavor, a couple of reviewers expressedreal unease, stemming from the bodily fluids. BTW, as you can see from my site, I’ve done a bunch of interviews since SLIME CITY came out on DVD. I love that people are discovering it for the first time. But what makes this interview different is that you’re an actual fan, from back in the day.

HYB: Yeah I’ve been pimping Slime City to my friends for years. Now, I want to talk about what the audience reaction was to Slime City on it’s original release. You said that it wasn’t until then that you realized you had made a comedy. Did certain scenes live up to expectations when a live crowd saw them. I’m thinking of one scene in particular. The prostitutes murder is pretty hilarious but it’s one of the most atmospherically scary scenes in the movie. And the grueling ending must have elicited some interesting reactions.

GL: You plan a film, you a shoot a film and then you edit a film–and that’s when you realize what you’ve got. Some things work, some don’t. We had a 2:1 ratio, which meant that if we did 3 takes of one shot, we could only do 1 of another. This is because films stock was so expensive. Some moments that I THOUGHT were cutting edge–like when Alex says to Nicole, “You WHORE!”–tended to be quite funny, but in a good way. The hooker scene, my Lord, talk about nightmares. Poor Eva Lee had just freaked out at a Troma casting session, saying, “You think the only roles actresses can play re hookers!” and then she accepts that very stereotypical role in SLIME CITY, and had a miserable time. That poor woman was terrified of our straight edge razor, even hen I ran it over my own wrists to show it had been filed down. Even after that moment was over, she was too terrified to react–and she doesn’t exactly come off as terrified, does she? Just as funny is the effete way Robert swings the razor! He and I have joked for years, he just doesn’t have violence in him! Anyway, “You crazy bastard!” is the line most often quoted to me. Whenever my wife and I watch it at a screening, we both tense up when that part approaches. But I’ve Learned Top Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb. The midnight run was awesome! It was an 80 seat theater, and we filled it to capacity for 5 or 6 weekends, Fridays and Saturdays. People laughed and screamed and had a great time. It was a real midnight experience, a party and a half. I still remember watching a guy come in during the middle once. He actually paid cash to come into a theater at 12:45, just watch the last 40 minutes of our little movie. You have to appreciate moments like that, they get you through a lot of dreary hours at crappy jobs.

HYB: Sounds like a fun time. Now on Retro Shock-O-Rama’s DVD reissue included is your third film Naked Fear which stars R. Sabin again and Tommy Sweeney from your second feature Undying Love. I must admit that I usually donut care for films shot on video but Naked Fear was great and it’s because you show a great control of the mood and pacing for the film. In the intervening years you’d obviously grown as a filmmaker. This is a thriller about an agoraphobic who gets a psychopath as a roommate. Tell us about the inspiration for this. Didi you purposely want to do a thriller to show another side of your talent?

GL: Well, let’s step back just a bit. UNDYING LOVE (aka New York Vampire), my second film, is actually my favorite, although I like them all for different reasons. That was definitely an attempt by me to do a different type of film than SLIME CITY. Unfortunately, SLIME CITY squeaked by at the end of a successful horror cycle, and by the time UNDYING LOVE came out, the bottom had fallen out of the home video market for low budget horror films.

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It was a very similar situation to what happened with horror fiction in the ’80s: everyone wanted to publish “the next Stephen King,” and authors who hated horror were writing it to cash in, and the market became glutted with crap. So UNDYING LOVE, despite positive reviews, sat on the shelf a long time. I decided to make NAKED FEAR as a lark. The idea came to me during the filming of UNDYING LOVE- actually, the night before filming–when Tommy and I were watching horror videos. I was laying on the floor, and he was sitting in a chair behind me, and I heard him snore, and when I turned around, I saw that he had fallen asleep with the knife we used in the film unsheathed and in his hand. That was a pretty inspiring moment! I’d always been a fan of THE ODD COUPLE, so I decided to do a psych killer take on it. I wrote it right after we finished shooting UNDYING LOVE. It was intended to take place entirely in one apartment, the same apartment I’d featured prominently in SLIME CITY and UNDYING LOVE. And I wanted to pit the star of SLIME against the star of LOVE. By the time we got around to it, I was living in a studio, so we had to use Ed’s apartment instead. And, of course, we shot it on Hi 8 video. I say it was lark, because after UNDYING LOVE failed, I had no illusions about a micro budget film leading to a real career. We basically did it for fun, to bring a lot of our people together again, and to have the freedom to shoot multiple takes. So it wasn’t a deliberate attempt to get away from supernatural horror, that’s just how it came together.

HYB: Now Undying Love, your second feature is unfortunately not on DVD as of yet. But it also bears the marks of your growth as a director. Tell us something about that production. We’re there things you learned about film production from your experiences with Slime City that helped you with this film. The film has a really dark vibe to it that I loved.

GL: I always say, you learn from your mistakes more than you do from what you do right, and you discover your mistakes in the editing. Overall, I think UNDYING LOVE is my best directed film. It’s also the most consistent in tone, and except for the party scene with the vampire groupies–who are supposed to be sexy and gothic!–the finished film is closest to the screenplay i wrote. I had the idea in my head for awhile. I wanted to a dark, downtown type of film, a vampire film that wasn’t really a vampire film, but more of a film noir, with a triangle between a protagonist, a female vampire, and a vampire overlord. It was different from SLIME int hat the hero—or anti-hero–had a villain to oppose. What held me back creatively with writing the script was that I saw Robert as the character, and that just wasn’t working. I was managing a movie theater, and I used to hang out at a record/video store around the corner. When Tommy started working there, I learned that D.B. Sweeney was his brother. I asked him if he could act, and he lied and said yes (he could act, but he had to figure it out along the way, because he had no real experience). Now, Tommy pretty much is his character in UNDYING LOVE–and NAKED FEAR!–except that he has a great sense of humor. it’s easy to write for an attitude like that, and I wrote the script in a weekend. He was pretty surprised when I came back with the script that fast.

HYB: To go off the subject for a second, You’ve mentioned here and in several articles I’ve read that you love film noir. In both Undying Love and naked Fear you can feel that influence. Now I Love film noir which is probably why I really liked both films because I could pick out some of the elements in them. What are some of your favorite noir films?

GL: I love noir as much as I do horror, although I’m not as knowledgeable about it. THE MALTESE FALCON and DOUBLE INDEMNITY are the two I like the most; DOUBLE INDEMNITY influenced UNDYING LOVE, and MALTESE FALCON influenced my novel, PERSONAL DEMONS. I also love contemporary noirs: KLUTE, JOHNNY HANDSOME, RED ROCK WEST, THE LAST SEDUCTION, and ONE FALSE MOVE. Oh, and the Larry Cohen/Armand Assante version of I, THE JURY. I love the moral ambiguity. I also love crime dramas like THE KING OF NEW YORK, and TV shows like CRIME STORY and WISEGUY.

HYB: Cool, and perfect segue way. Your debut novel Personal Demons is just that, a mixture of horror and noir. I’m sorry to say I couldn’t get a copy to read before our interview can you tell us about it. It seems like it rocks. In fact it won the inaugural Anubis Award for Horror.

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GL: The ONLY Anubis Award for Horror! Judged by T.M. Wright, one of my favorite authors, which made it a real thrill. If you were to look at the years my films were released, you’d see a mighty long gap between UNDYING LOVE (1992) and NAKED FEAR (1999). In reality, we shot NAKED FEAR in 1995, but our sound sucked, so we had to dub the entire film–which is why the sound is perfect now! The rough cut also came in at 64 minutes, way too late. My editor Phil Gallo, directed his own movie, which I helped produce, a crime drama called WEST NEW YORK, which threw us into limbo for about two years. But I was pretty busy during that time. I wrote 5 screenplays: a werewolf project, a crime drama, two-thirds of a trilogy about a magician, and the script hat became my novel, PERSONAL DEMONS. None of these were micro-budget scripts, or even low budget scripts. They were big budget monsters, and better written than my earlier scripts because I didn’t limit myself for fear of going over budget. I guess i thought I’d try to sell them, but I never really made the contacts to take that next step. Or maybe I just wrote them for myself. In any case, after 911, I decided to novelize the script for PERSONAL DEMONS. It’s about Jake Helman, a cokehead homicide cop who loses his job and his wife, and takes a job working security for a reclusive billionaire. The billionaire owns a genetics company, and is conducting all kinds of illegal experiments. Christian fundamentalists opposed to the experiments are always threatening him, and Jake thinks they’re who he’s been hired to protect the old guy from him. But that’s not it at all. There’s a serial killer running around NYC, and he’s capturing the souls of his victims and turning them over to the billionaire. And the ghosts of the victims–called Soul Searchers–keep showing up at the building, trying to free their souls. And then Cain and Abel show up… so there’s a lot of action, a lot of twists and turns, and a lot of monsters. If I never do anything else, I’ll be proud that I wrote this novel. But I plan to do a lot more!

HYB: That sounds fucking awesome! I cant wait to read it. But there is another project that began life as a screenplay that you are now re writing as a novel. It’s called Johnny Gruesome, Headbanger from Hell. Believe me when I say that when I first heard of it I went gaga because I’ve always felt that horror and heavy metal go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Tell us more.

GL: Yeah, this is one of my oldest projects: I wrote it after SLIME CITY. Freddy Krueger hadn’t made the scene yet, and I created Johnny as an alternative to Jason and Michael Meyers. He’s a heavy metal teenager who’s murdered, and comes back from the grave as a wisecracking zombie who wants to take out everyone whoever looked at him the wrong way. As the story progresses, he rots more and more. It’s very E.C. comics-ish, but not jokey. And it’s straight out horror. I’d love to be able to write more novels about Jake Helman, my PERSONAL DEMONS hero, but that will really depend on it getting a mass market release; right now, you can only get it as a signed and numbered, limited edition hardcover, or as a trade paperback, and you can only get it on-line. But whether or not I write more Jake Helman chillers, I suspect that Johnny is the character I’m going to be known for. He’s my baby. Everyone whoever read the screenplay told me it scared the hell out of them. I never made it as a film, because it was too expensive. Vestron Video loved the script, but they didn’t expect a 19 year old kid to show up to the meeting they set up! The novel is much better than the movie would have been had I made it as my first feature. My wife read it the other day, and she said, “It’s like SLIME CITY–only scary!” By that she meant, the murders are very graphic. But they don’t occur until the halfway mark. My novels are very character driven. Right now, I have 3 horror writer friends–and Robert Sabin, who’s been in LA for years working on screenplays–reading the manuscript. After I get their feedback, I’m sending it off to a publisher who’s expressed initial interest. At the same time, I’ve hired a talented artist named Zach McCain to illustrate scenes from the book. They may be included in a limited edition hardcover–or they may be used to present to investors for a film version. With the SLIME CITY DVD, I learned a lot about marketing, and I have a lot of unique plans to promote the novel.

HYB: Good luck, you have one fan here who can’t wait to be introduced to the Headbanger from Hell. Now I also read somewhere that you were trying to get a book published called “Cheap Scares: How to make aNo-budget horror film.” From all you’ve learned about the process what advice would you offer a young horror filmmaker?