There’s something very peculiar about the films of Larry Blamire. Cult favorite The Lost Skeleton of Cadavera feels like a 1950s sci-fi movie, except all the characters are in on the jokes. It’s all there — the stilted acting, the crazy logic behind the dialogue, the outlandish plots — and it’s exaggerated to absurd heights. There’s so much humor in the movie that it’s like someone left the hose running on a water balloon and it’s getting ready to burst. Wordplay, running gags, clever retorts…even the people’s names are funny!

But what Larry’s doing isn’t quite new because it’s been done before. It just hasn’t been done well in so long that you might not even recognize it when you see it. It’s a spoof, like Airplane, Naked Gun, Young Frankenstein, and Blazing Saddles. Not like Date Movie, Epic Movie, Scary Movie, or any other year-in-review film in which the inclusion of a cultural reference passes for a joke. Remember Flava of Love? Remember Borat? Remember The Love Guru? If you remember enough of those things and slap them together, you might have the next Movie Movie hit.

But if you want great jokes, witty characters, quotable lines, and an all around well-assembled comedy, then you want Larry Blamire. And you wouldn’t be alone because he’s got three films – The Trail of the Screaming Forehead, The Lost Skeleton Returns Again, and Dark And Stormy Night — making the festival rounds and being met by rave reviews and packed theaters.

Ben Kharakh: How would you describe the source material for films such as The Lost Skeleton of Cadavera, its sequel The Lost Skeleton Returns Again, Trail of the Screaming Forehead, etc?

Larry Blamire: The source material is different for these. The original Skeleton was inspired by bargain basement ‘50s sci-fi horror films. The aliens, Kro-Bar, and Lattis were inspired by Ed Wood, while Animala was inspired by such things as Catwomen of the Moon. So it ended up being a conglomeration of all the low-budget sci-fi films of the ‘50s that I loved seeing. And horror too. I didn’t want to repeat the gags of the first Skeleton with this new one — the static framing, long-held master shots, not too much coverage, and slightly slow editing. We wanted to up the ante a little bit, so it’s shot better and has better effects. It’s like the folks who made the original Skeleton made it in 1961, and now they have just a little more money to work with.

The sequel is also a different type of movie. I was watching some old jungle TV show last year and it just popped into my head how absurd an idea it would be if Dr. Paul Armstrong were lost in the jungle for two years and he was a bitter alcoholic and all hard-boiled now. It just seemed so ridiculous and fun to me, and from there it just took off. The plot formed with the jungle adventure where everyone’s after an exotic object — in this case Dalp of Annacrabb — and everyone has a different reason for wanting it. And all that’s an excuse to pile on the absurdity. All these movies are, for me, take-off points for pure silliness and absurdity. I find that absurdity is missing from a lot of comedies these days, and I’d love to see a return to it.

Trail of the Screaming Forehead is similarly a take-off point for absurdity, but it’s based on your alien takeover movies – Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the many similar films, I Married a Monster from Outer Space…movies where small towns are taken over by aliens subversively. The look is totally different. We went for eye-popping, candy-colored, wide screen films if it’s like a 1962 drive-through. I wanted a totally different look — a comic book look. In fact, the characters don’t even change clothing in that movie. It’s like comic book characters — they’re always in the same set of clothes or uniform or whatever. Like Big Dan and Dutch, somewhat protagonists, and Millie, they’re all in the same outfits, wearing the same things all the time. So it has a sort of comic book, candy-colored feel, and it was a nice change from doing the black and white stuff, but we’re back to black and white, obviously, with Skeleton Returns Again. Although, as a jungle adventure, that one kind of works in color too. Maybe we’ll have two options on the DVD.

BK: You mentioned that you feel absurdity is lost from many modern comedies, and that made me think of the recent slew of films made by Judd Apatow and company. They pride themselves on the fact that their films are grounded in reality.

LB: Yeah, that’s fine. I think comedy should be grounded in reality, unless it’s comedy of the absurd, which is a different type of comedy. I think there’s room for all sorts of comedies. I wasn’t think of Judd Apatow’s films in particular, but rather films of that type. I think there’s room for comedies not grounded in reality, like the work of Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and the Zuckers, but we want to do other things too. We’re not going to stay locked into doing the absurd.

BK: Absurdity flourishes when there’s seriousness to juxtapose it against.

LB: There’s nothing more serious than the absurd. Look at Airplane. If Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, and Lloyd Bridges weren’t so damn serious about everything they were doing in that movie, it wouldn’t be nearly as funny. You need to walk the line in these films where you’re playing the role fairly seriously and not camping it up. You need to keep the characters grounded. The next one that we’ve got coming up, Dark and Stormy Nights, is a 1930s murder mystery done very authentically. It looks terrific and I’m very happy with it. If you look at some of the characters in that, they’re very extreme characters, which is different from some of the other things we’ve done. But the characters, though extreme, are still grounded in reality, which makes them feel real, which wouldn’t work if they were acting over-the-top.

BK: These films are sometimes called “so bad, they’re good.” What do you think of this sort of title?

LB: That’s what I’m talking about, but I usually don’t say that. The word “bad” no longer applies for me. I would have called them that in the past, but now I don’t say that because they’re entertaining me, so I don’t think they’re bad. That probably sounds silly, but I just appreciate these films too much to ever call them bad.

BK: When was it that you had decided that making these movies was something you wanted to do?

LB: It started with Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. I always hoped that I would somehow find my way into film, even though it was a weird route getting there, because I started as an illustrator. I was doing some illustrating for science fiction magazines, and then around that time, I started getting into theater. I was doing theater first as an actor, then I started writing and directing. I didn’t really know much about plays or theater, so I started reading a lot of them and I realized that plays were a way for me to make cheap movies. My first play was a western called In The Nations, which I’m actually adapting into a screenplay. The critics were pretty hot about it. It got really good reviews, and I remember one of them referred to my cinematic direction. It’s like there were close-ups and wide-angle shots, and so I think it was always in me to make movies.

I also made my own comic books for a while, which are another way of making movies, I think. It’s telling stories with pictures. So when my wife and I moved out to LA, which was in 2000, with an Internet company that went bust immediately, I needed to do something, and no one was investing in the Internet. So I had this crazy notion of making movies for $40,000. I asked a producer friend of mine if we could do it, and two or three months later we had a movie. It came together very fast, even though there was a ton of work involved. I was auditioning Valentino music tracks from their vintage music library, which lent a lot to Cadavra, and at the same time was doing the storyboard. When we shot the movie, I already knew what music was going to be where in the movie, and so that was great. We shot in ten and a half days, so it all happened very quickly. Of course, then it was another two years before it got picked up, so not that quickly, I guess. But that’s how it happened. It was a weird path getting there for me, but I’m just so happy to be making movies. It’s what I want to do.

BK: You had mentioned that you often use your stories as a jumping-off point for absurdities, and I noticed, watching the films, that at times it’s almost like a series of sketches connected by the plot. How is it that you write the scripts?

LB: I can see where you’d look at Cadavra as being almost a series of comic sketches. If you take The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and remove the aliens, monsters, skeletons, and what-have-you, you’ll see that it’s in the style of a classic drawing room comedy, especially when they’re at the cabin. It’s based on the timeless premise of mistaken identity. You’ve got the aliens, you’ve got Animala, who’s with Roger, you’ve got the clueless scientist couple, and none of them know who the other really is. They’re all in a comedy of errors.

BK: The way your characters speak is very reminiscent of the way the actors speak in low-budget ‘50s sci-fi horror films. You see the humor in that, but for those who made the original films, I imagine it was unintentional.

LB: I think it’s accidental. I think that what you’ve got is writing that was a little bit stiff, a little bit awkward, and all I’ve done, essentially, is amplify that to levels of “yes, I’m using that word again” absurdity, where you just take it to the extreme. I mean, if you look at Ed Wood’s aliens, they speak in that deliberately stilted kind way, like how Indians talked in a lot of the old westerns. It’s all kind of stiff and theatrical, but we’re blowing it up to poke fun at it.

BK: Also there’s the content of what they’re saying. In Forehead, for example, there’s the exchange of Dr. Sheila Bexter and Dr. Philip Latham. Sheila says to Phillip, “Well, you probably are dismissing my work because I’m a woman,” and he says, “If a man told me that our foreheads are the source of all human knowledge, I’d react in the exact same way,” and she says, “Really? And what if that man was a woman?” That’s a funny line that also could have been found in those ’50s films, but I imagine that, again, it would have been unintentional.

LB: I think so. That’s another good example of just taking something like that to the extreme. There’s a certain crazy logic — almost a dream logic — to some of the stuff that people would say in those films. In the new Skeleton film, we’ve got that. There’s a sequence where one crook wants to see another crook’s I.D. I had seen something in a small detective show where someone would say, “Let me see your I.D. No, no, no, hold it by the tip.” And one guy’s got a gun on the other, of course, and he just keeps saying, “Hold it by the tip.” And I just wanted that to keep going to an insane degree.

BK: What are some movies that you’d recommend?

LB: Well, besides the Ed Wood films, which are obvious, Catwomen of the Moon, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Fiend Without a Face, which are movies that are favorites of mine. Those aren’t the kinds I chuckle over, though. Those I enjoy on a different level — a more serious level — because I think they work in that they do what they set out to do. Recently, World Without End came out on DVD, Warners put that out. That’s a nice example of a widescreen color, late ‘50s Sci-Fi movie. And then Warners also put out The Queen of Outer Space, which is a very similar film but is not nearly as well-made on every level, and there are some amusing things about that. We’re looking to make something kind of along those lines. One of our upcoming projects, Voyage to the Planet of Space, is going to be a science fiction adventure set on another planet. We’ll be using a soundstage and every kind of practical effect you can think of for our creatures: puppets and animatronics, stop-motion, men in suits…you name it. There are a few movies like that — Angry Red Planet and Journey to the Seventh Planet – which are almost remakes made by the same people. Those are both fun space movies. And, of course, then you get a little more serious — Mario Bob, whose Planet of the Vampires is a gorgeous film. That’s a fantastic experience — a great ’60s color film.

BK: One thing about sci-fi films of this nature is that it’s almost as though the writers know absolutely nothing about space and, as a result, have free reign to make up whatever they want.

LB: Yeah, and that’s the fun of it too. I mean, we’re going to definitely use that angle where you can bend the rules. A lot of times they’re going by out-of-date science, even when they were making some of these movies in the ‘50s. The science was already far ahead of what they were doing. It’s fun because, when you get into outer space, if you’re doing a retro movie like this, anything goes. You can just make anything happen.

BK: Films can also capture the flavor of the time in which they were made. I notice you have a lot of fun goofing on how gender roles were conceived of in the 1950s.

LB: Especially in Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, particularly with the character of Betty Armstrong. She is definitely stuck in the ‘50s TV housewife mold, not just TV. She’s also in the mold of a lot of leading ladies in these low-budget sci-fi movies too. We definitely have some fun with the changing mores.

BK: It also seems like you take the same approach with science and people’s view of science, and the pursuit of science as well.

LB: Yes, we just had fun saying, “I’m going to go do science.” The funny thing was, I’ve heard from scientists who have said, “Well, we really do say that,” which is very funny. They actually say, “I’m going to do some science now.” And of course we went crazy with the science. We make up elements like Atmospherium, and in the new movie we have Geranium 90. These are powerful elements, and we have no idea why anyone wants them or what they do. That’s not important. We don’t care. They’re just something that everybody wants to have. Fun with science!

BK: When you’re writing your films, do you intentionally go after these recurring elements, such as gender roles or people’s relationships with science, for example?

LB: No, it comes about more accidentally. I don’t intentionally go after those things. I think you let them come up as you’re writing, because first you have to be conscious of where the plot thread is going, and if these things fall into the plot thread, that’s good. That said, I’ve got notebooks full of stuff. I’ll write something down and try to use it at some point — something that I find interesting or amusing, but I don’t think that you consciously, for the most part, look for those things.

BK: You are often doing send-offs of movie characters. How would you describe the relationship between people on the screen and people in the world?

LB: They’re bigger versions of us. They’re bigger on the screen and they’re bigger in the way they act. They’re often doing things we can’t do, doing things that we want to do, and so it’s like they’re dreams. The movies we make are often based on movies, with observations being made of movie people and not real people. It’s about the limitations of movie characters and what amuses us about them. Take Dark and Stormy Night. There are quite a number of 1930 sort of characters in the film. The protagonists are these male and female reporters. They’re competing for the scoop on who the murderer is and who’s going to get the big will. All these characters are based on archetypes that were in movies, but then you sort of use that as a take-off point because you really want to try to make them your own as a writer and then let the actors make them their own as actors and really own the roles. I’m very excited about Dark and Stormy Night because it allowed our ensemble to do a really rich job of characterizations. It’s just phenomenal.

BK: It seems like there’s the Larry Blamire players, so to speak — these rotating actors and actresses that you like to use. Will they be appearing in these future projects as well?

LB: Yeah, more in some and less in others, but that’s our group. That’s our bunch. They are extremely versatile, so we can do just about any genre and we’ll have a good bunch of actors for it.

BK: Once the first Skeleton of Cadavra film was released and found an audience, what was it that had to happen for all these projects to start being made?

LB: There were a number of things. Getting that picked up by Sony was huge, and that was something that had to happen. The next thing that had to happen was people liked it and it gained a cult following, and it’s still growing. It’s a following for this whole group of actors, and it’s great. It’s kind of a grassroots fan-base that just kept growing.

BK: It seems like you have a lot of projects in the works.

LB: We’re looking for financing on a number of projects. It’s basically which one comes in first. Besides In the Nation, which is a western, I’ve got a modern comedy called The Restroom, which all takes place in a diner, then there is a dark comedy called Jump Camp, which is adapted from my play, and Voyage to the Planet of Space, our Sci-Fi epic. So yeah, there is a lot of stuff lined up. Of course, then I’ve got my dream project, Steam Wars. That’s a retro science-fiction epic, and that’s a huge project for us, so that’s a little down the road. We want to do that right and it will take a lot of money. But, yes, we have a whole slate of stuff that we’re getting out there.