CAMP VIDEO

 

James Golff was among the many young and hungry individuals who got their start in

distribution due to the video boom. In late-1980, Golff began working for distributor Video

Gems in their shipping department, and later in sales. Soon after, he moved onto an operation

ran by Video Station founder George Atkinson that purchased and sold excess product from

other distributors and studios. Both businesses were small and unsophisticated. “There was no

gameplan or blueprint for this,” remembers Golff.

The great success of Charles Band’s early-1982 release of Texas Chainsaw Massacre

through his Wizard Video line inspired Golff to break out on his own. “I started a little company

called United Independent Distributors. The idea was to be the first company that distributed

only independent titles so we would forego the studios titles and stick to the 15 or 20

independent lines that were around. Wizard Video was our main draw, and so we presold a ton

of them.” In the process, United Independent took business away from Atkinson’s operation.

According to Golff, Atkinson got the mob involved, which was not an unusual occurrence. As

Golff tells it, no blood was spilled because of a friendship between the representatives that Golff

and Atkinson hired to negotiate on their behalf. Nonetheless, Golff sold his interest in United

Independent Distributors, and he says it tanked soon after.  After some bouncing around,

Golff found work with upstart distributor L.A. Video in

1984. “They happened to be adult. I needed the work. I didn’t know anything about them. I

went over there, ‘Ehh, they’re triple X. Whatever.’ It didn’t matter to me. When you’re in the

distribution business, whether you’re doing adult or not, it’s all the same. You end crossing the

same paths with a lot of the same buyers and so forth. A lot of companies had two faces. They

had their adult face and their legit general face.”

 

Golff found it odd that some relatively young men from the New York / Rhode Island

area were starting up an adult movie distributor on the west coast, where there already many

established distributors fighting for their place in the market. Not long after being hired, it

started to make sense. “They launched their line in Vegas [at the VSDA] and immediately I

could tell something was not right because of the kind of people that were coming up to them,”

says Golff. LA Video, as it turns out, was heavily involved with Robert “Debe” DiBernardo, the

mobster who controlled the New York porn market.

 

 

As Golff worked his way through LA Video over the next two years, DiBernardo and his

associates frequently made phone calls to the company to discuss business. Remembers Golff,

“One day DiBernardo stops calling. And we’re on the West Coast thinking, ‘What happened to

Didi? What’s going on?’” Not long after, Salvatore Richichi and Nick Marino, two associates

of mobster John Gotti, came to the LA Video office and informed employees that there had been

a change of ownership.

 

When Golff heard that the associate was looking for a legitimate front, Golff spoke up.

“I said, ‘Well, let’s try b-movies. I mean, what are b-movies? They’re just bad movies, awful

movies, but we can get titles for cheap. I think, I don’t know, 10 grand a piece. If that’s what

you want, let’s try it.” The new LA Video went for the idea, and Camp Motion Pictures was

born. The use of the word ‘Camp’ intentionally branded the company as a purveyor of lowbrow

fare. However, Golff preferred to think of the company as the acronym CAMP -- Crimes

Against Motion Pictures.

 

Being the most refined person at LA Video would be no great achievement in the real

world, but for Marino and Richichi, that feat was enough to earn Golff the position as titular

president of Camp Motion Pictures. They soon had their first three Camp Video releases lined

up, all of which were 1960s pictures. Legendary horror director Herschell Gordon Lewis

licensed his movie The Psychic, while Ray Dennis Steckler licensed The Incredibly Strange

Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Rat Pfink and Boo-Boo,

and The Thrill Killers.Burgeoning director / producer Fred Olen Ray made the third deal,

selling a film he was not involved with, Scream Baby Scream, which Camp retitled

Nightmare House.

In press materials the company described its offerings as “classic cult motion pictures that have an

underlying sense of the absurd.”

“It was our art department that saved us,” says Golff, speaking of the lurid box covers

that made movies from the 1960s look like they could possibly be new features, or at the least

something old but watchable. Their releases truly embraced the ‘Camp’ name, but none more

so than their first releases. For example, the back cover of The Psychic contains a large, bold

WARNING declaring Camp Video’s war on video piracy. The accompanying message states

that each copy of The Psychic “bears an invisible marking code to enable the tracing of illegally

duplicated videocassettes.” It goes on to offer a reward of up to $39.95 (the purchase price for

the movie) “for the fingers, limbs, or internal organs of any person(s) guilty of the illegal video

duplication of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Psychic.”

 

Golff specifically instructed his salespeople to not heap false praise on their titles. “At

the time there were independents coming out with stuff and they were trying to sell the video

stores on schlock and garbage. If you tried to package something or try and hide something,

we all knew it was garbage and it would insult the buyer and the video store owner. They’d

say, ‘Why are you trying to con me?’ So we just figured we’d take the opposite approach and

say, ‘Look, we’re not gonna con you. This is garbage. It’s cheap, it’s ridiculous. But it’s so bad

it’s good.’ And a lot times that worked.”

 

Golff continued "I knew we were on to something because the press picked up on the not-so-inside joke."

So our ads and interviews became even more irreverent and self-effacing in promoting our schlock.

I reasoned

if we beat everybody to the punch in reviewing these films as the worst we could find, it would take the

impact away

from critics. It was like "Yeah, no shit they're bad. Tell us something we don't know..."

According to Golff it

was the only marketing choice they had because they couldn't afford to license anything decent as titles were

being gobbled up by the huge appetite that independent video distributors had created driving up licensing.

By either fate or luck one director who came into the Camp offices one morning after hearing the rumor that a brash

start up company was buying was the legendary Ray Dennis Steckler the Ed Wood of 60's low-budget abominations.

Steckler knew he had a live one in that Golff and company knew very little about the movie business but

soon they would learn the hard way. One of the first things Steckler did was to bring in a very frail and

old man

by the name of George Morgan who was credited as producer for Steckler's films.

 

 

It turned out that poor Mr. Morgan, who lived in Encino, CA - lost his

shirt financing Steckler's awful B-movies and throwing good money after bad paying for Steckler

to book '"Incredibly Strange Creatures" at second run drive-in theatres and neighborhood screens one at a

time because no distributor would touch them . With the advent of home video, titles that

were destined to lay in obscurity with little chance at any television broadcast licensing, were suddenly

resurrected and in demand. To Steckler's credit, the first order of business after he signed with

CAMP was to bring the old man into Golff's office where Golff issued Morgan a check for $7000.00 - a lot of money in 1986, and found money for George who had long written off the loss.

He was  now broke, nearly blind, needed Rays' help walking. He and his wife were living modestly on a fixed income.

 

Golff recalls  "I don't know how much George Morgan lost on Ray Steckler,

it wsa never divulged, but I'll never forget that Ray made sure he repaid George what he could, it was painfully  apparent

that George was not long for this world and Ray did an honorbale thing. For someone who was a such a jerk, which Ray was,

I always respected him for doing that" In a matter of months, Golff found himself in off-beat situations

in off the wall locations interacting with fringe weirdos from the Hollywood underground, a poor man's

"Hollywood Babylon" and he was clueless as to who or what these people were about. He discovered legions

of film buffs and fans of movies and genres and subjects he was vaguely familiar with. Fortuneately he had

sampled some east coast avante-garde theatres in Washing ton DC like the Biograph in Georgeown where he

saw films by Robert  Downey, John Waters , Albert Sayles and even Luis Bunuel. He knew there were markets from

hanging out in Greenwich Village and Venice.

 

Camp Video didn’t release more than 20 titles during its sub-3-year lifespan, but it would

retain notoriety over the years due to the graphic, over the top nature of a few of its releases.

Not long after opening its doors and enjoying a successful launch, Camp followed the

lead of other independents by trying to make a presale pact with a low-budget filmmaker. With

no one on the inside of Camp having substantial knowledge or connections in the independent,

Golff looked to Fred Olen Ray, who Camp had already done business with.

 

“I pitched them two ideas – one was called Zombie Holocaust, which I don’t remember

what was about at this point, and the other one was Chainsaw Hookers. They really liked that

idea. They wanted to add the word ‘Hollywood’ so it sounded more like Texas Chainsaw

Massacre,” says Ray. Ray agreed and added that he may be able to make the connection even

clearer by getting Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, to act

in the film. His name would also help sell the movie. Golff takes credit for the tagline, “They

charge an arm and a leg.” Ray disutes this. “I did rip it off, but it wasn’t Jim Golff.” Ray credits

a short student film by Rick Sloane (Hobgoblins) called Amputee Hookers with the line.

The deal ended up being a sweet one for Ray. Ray agreed to produce Hollywood

 

Chainsaw Hookers, a movie about a private detective who stumbles upon a cult of hookers who

carve up johns with chainsaws. He presold the U.S. home video rights to Camp for seven years

for $25,000 upfront, and Ray retained all international rights. Gunnar Hansen agreed to fly in

from Mount Desert Island, Maine to film some scenes, and burgeoning scream queens Linnea

Quigley and Michelle Bauer, as well Dawn Wildsmith, were hired as the chainsaw wielding

hookers.

 

Ray produced Chainsaw Hookers in 5 ½ days for $23,000 over two weekends, with the

total budget to lock the film being between $50,000 and $58,000. While undoubtedly cheap, it

still looks like a substantially larger production, thanks mostly to Ray’s standout ability to

identify opportunities for cost savings. “I was working on a picture called Moon in Scorpio [for

Trans-World Entertainment] helping them with some pick-ups on this Gary Graver movie, and

they needed like four days of shooting. So I said, ‘Well, here’s what we need to do since you

can’t really pay me for this. You’ll give me this amount of money and you’ll let me have the

equipment on the days that you’re not using it.’ They only needed it for four days, so I picked

up the equipment early on Friday, and I had it Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday, then I ran

off to do Moon in Scorpio from Monday through Thursday, and then I had their equipment back

on the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the following weekend.” Also part of the deal was the

use of Trans-World’s Sunset Boulevard office suite as locations in the movie, including as a

private detective’s office and a police station.

 

“When Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers was done the adult video people were so

enthralled that they actually rented the Egyptian Theater and had the premiere [there], which was

quite a large theater at the time. I went over there to see the premiere of my own movie, and it

was like I didn’t exist. All of a sudden, the filmmakers had become the second-class citizens and

the guys who put up the lousy 25 grand were the kings of the hill,” recounts Fred.

 

Adding to his confusion was the sight of a man dressed in a policeman’s uniform signing

autographs. “I said to somebody, ‘Who is that guy? Who is that guy?’ They said, ‘Well, that’s

Paul Marco who played Kelton in Plan 9 From Outer Space,’ and I said, ‘Get out of here.’ And

the next day, the LA Times actually ran an article about the premiere of the movie and they

noted the guy in the police uniform over in the corner signing autographs. And [L.A. Times

writer] Kevin Thomas said, I’ll never forget, ‘Celebrity comes easy in places like this.’”

The October 1987 premiere of Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers would generate significant

publicity for the film, and Golff says it did pay off in video sales. In preparation for its Camp

Video release, the one 35mm print that was made of Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers made its way

around the U.S., with Golff remembering it getting booked in New York, Miami, Los Angeles,

and Seattle.

 

Fred sold the film in numerous international territories, making back far more money

than he expended on production. The film received some unique attention in England. First, the

film’s U.K. distributor was forced to remove ‘Chainsaw’ from the title. ‘Hookers’ was perfectly

acceptable, but not chainsaw. To remedy this issue, the distributor called it Hollywood Hookers,

but inserted a chainsaw in-between the words in marketing materials, including a bright red,

cardboard cut-out of a chainsaw with “Hollywood [picture of a chainsaw] Hookers” written on

the blade. England was not alone in failing to find humor in the playful title, as other countries

also changed the title upon release.

 

Second, the newly-titled Hollywood Hookers would soon be on the receiving end of

some unexpected attention from the British government. As Ray remembers, “We were a little

stunned at one point when the British Government released a report of what the ‘Top 10 Worst

Offenders’ were in motion pictures in England – films that were most likely to cause a viewer

to commit an act of violence. And we were number seven or number eight, which I laugh at

because this movie was a comedy. There wasn’t anything serious about this film at all.” In fact,

as Fred notes, a movie that features men being slaughtered by hookers they pick up from the

classified ads is, if anything, a message about safe sex. “Be careful who you find yourself naked

in a room. They may have a chainsaw or something in the dresser drawer,” laughs Ray.

About 15 years after its release, Maxim Magazine named Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers

the fourth coolest b-film of all time.

 

*****

 

Aside from Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, the Video Violence series is the most notable

of the few 1980s-made movies released by Camp.

Inspiration for the film came when director Gary Cohen, a Mom and Pop owner of

two New Jersey video stores, was approached by a woman with two young children. The kids

wanted to rent I Dismember Mama, and the woman questioned Cohen, “Does this have any

nudity?” Cohen replied, “No, I don’t remember, but that film has decapitations and all sorts of

gore.” Unfazed, she replied, “Oh. Okay, then the kids can watch it.” Cohen wanted to make a

movie that reflected this muddled viewpoint where parents forbade their children from seeing

nude bodies, but not dismembered bodies. And plus, being a horror fan and a video store owner,

he had seen a few shot-on-video movies that had managed to get out to video stores.

Video Violence was made for less than $1,000 and was shot on 3/4” U-matic video

equipment, which gives the movie a public access feel. The movie concerns a husband and

wife who open a video store in a small, strange town where the residents are solely interested

in slasher films. Well, with the exception of those who occasionally enjoy a little pornography.

But when a customer accidentally returns a home video tape, the couple discovers what appears

to be a snuff film, and are forced to play detective and discover the town’s dark secret.

After completing the film, Cohen remembers sending off about a dozen copies to any

company that handled horror, including Vestron, Paragon, United, Wizard, Vidmark, and

Majestic. Cohen remembers Vidmark expressed interest in the film, but ultimately, Camp made

an offer they couldn’t refuse – no upfront money, but Camp would produce the artwork, provide

Cohen with a few dozen copies of the video release, and most importantly for Cohen, produce

Video Violence posters.

 

Shortly thereafter, Golff and his colleagues at Camp were surprised to find themselves

invited to the 1986 American Film Institute Awards, where Video Violence was nominated for

best independent film. The event was held in Hollywood at the Roosevelt Theater, the sight of

the first Academy Awards. As Golff looked around, he took stock of the various independent

filmmakers and distributors mulling around the venue. “Those guys had class. And here we are

drunk and coked up out of our minds going, ‘What are we doing here?’ And for what? We didn’t

make a movie,’” laughs Golff.

 

Shot-on-video horror film expert Joseph A. Ziemba theorizes that with the exception

of United Home Video’s Blood Cult, Video Violence was probably the most widely distributed

shot-on-video horror film of the 1980s. Not long after its release, Camp sold out of its first run

of Video Violence, which had been released in a big box version. At that point, Cohen received

a few hundred dollars from Camp. “We were thrilled – to make anything was amazing,” recalls

Cohen. A second run of the movie with a redesigned box art and in a regularly sized box

followed.

 

Cohen agreed to produce a sequel for Camp on the condition that Camp would again

make posters for the movie. Cohen delivered another 3-figure budgeted, shot-on-video movie,

Video Violence 2: The Exploitation, that was incredibly silly, but again quite charming. He

didn’t see any money on the deal because Camp and L.A. Video were on their way out by

the time of the sequel’s release, but that didn’t concern Cohen too much. Camp at least came

through with the posters.

 

Cohen’s describes his dealings with Camp as being far better than with Majestic Home

Video. Majestic distributed Captives, a movie he shot in-between the two Video Violence

films. “They took the master - recut it horribly, called it Mama’s Home, but the art on the box

had nothing to do with the movie. They sent me a dozen copies and we never heard from them

again.”

 

****

 

The owners of Camp used the profits generated from releases of titles like Video Violence

and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers to invest in new projects, none of which Golff had such faith

Zombie Death House was up first. “It was [veteran genre actor] John Saxon’s directorial

debut and I believe his first and last attempt at directing. It was an absolute parody of itself. It

was just unbelievable,” remembers Golff. “Anthony Franciosa was in it. He said, ‘Give me

$10,000, tell me what to say, I don’t want to hear from you guys ever again. I’ll work for you for

one day.”

 

Saxon himself described the experience as such: “Death House was a very low budget

film that I jumped in to direct at the very last moment. While doing it I was thrilled about starting

a directing career. By the time the film was finished, I felt my directing career was set back a

dozen years.”1

 

Because Zombie Death House utilized a prison set during much of its filming, someone

in the Camp office pitched the idea of making a second movie during the off hours. The result of

this idea was Death Row Diner.

Terror Night starred multiple faded actors, including John Ireland, Cameron Mitchell,

Alan Hale Jr., Aldo Ray, and Dan Haggerty.

Death Row Diner would go out through Camp Video. Instead of handling them in-house,

Camp’s owners brought Death House and Terror Night to Double Helix, a sales company out of

New York.

William Butler: “I worked with André De Toth man. He was the guy who directed the original

House of Wax. And by the time he got to me I was acting in a movie – I think it was originally

called Terror Night, and the title got changed to Bloody Movie or something. It was this horrible

movie with what looked to be a hand-drawn DVD cover, and he was directing it. And by the

time I worked with him he had a neckbrace on, a leg brace, and like a cast, and smoked with one

of those long cigarette holders and had glasses that were like 3 inches thick. He was limping

around the set. I remember we were filming up at the old Errol Flynn Estate and I was afraid he

was going to fall into the empty swimming pool the whole time. It was awesome. I’ve been a

very lucky boy.”