of rats. Again, Grefe came up with the idea while looking through Variety, reading that Willard was the highest grossing independent horror film of its time. “I went to bed that night thinking animal
movies were maybe the next big trend,” he remembers. “And I literally dreamed Stanley from beginning to end.” Grefe pitched it to Jacobs, who he de-
scribes as “a crusty old distributor who always had a cigar about a foot long sticking out of his mouth,” and Mark Tenser (Crown’s vice president and Jacobs’ son-in-law). The men agreed to make the film for $125,000, with Grefe directing it. In true exploitation fashion, Jacobs quickly set up a release date for April 15, even though, at the time (November 1), Grefe didn’t even have a script. So he got together on a Friday with his writer friend Gary Crutcher and wrote out every scene on a legal pad. Grefe then handed the pages to Crutcher and said, “I gotta have a screenplay of this in Miami by Tuesday morning!” Crutcher stayed up for 48 hours writing the script, sent it by FedEx that Monday, and Grefe got it in Miami the next day. Stanley began principal photography on December 1, wrapped right before Christmas, and the film was indeed in theatres by its sched- uled release date. This was typical of the pace set by B-movie moguls of the era. Despite the lightning turnaround, the movie was a hit. Grefe recalls, “It opened
against The Godfather, which made $181,000 in LA – and Stanleymade $175,000!” Other Crown horror hits of this period include the aforementioned Blood Mania
(1970) and Point of Terror (1973), both of which starred Peter Carpenter and went on to become drive-in and late-night TV perennials. While Blood Mania is pretty dreadful (when asked to comment on it, director Robert Vincent O’Neill simply said, “That was a mistake.”), Point of Terror is schlocky fun. Before gaining infamy for playing
the titular role in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S., Dyanne Thorne played a murder- ous black widow in the film, which is centred around a nightclub singer who has homicidal nightmares that turn out to be true. (Thorne says she had a blast making the movie, noting, “I got to keep my heritage of killing some- body in every film I ever get to do!”) Another key Crown horror release
from this period, which became a late- night TV favourite, was 1974’s Horror High. Written by J.D. Feigelson (Dark Night of the Scarecrow), it’s a teenage Jekyll and Hyde story that follows a nerdy science whiz named Vernon Potts (Pat Cardi) who invents a formula that turns him into a monster who, in his altered state, takes violent revenge on the jocks and teachers that bully him. Though the Texas-shot feature was made for under $100,000, its makers had connections to the Dallas Cowboys football team, which is why the film features bit roles by Cowboys John Ni-
land and Calvin Hill. “Mean Joe” Greene of the Pittsburgh Steelers also appears. Looking back at his experiences with
Crown, Cardi has mixed feelings. “I think they did a good job of getting it out there,” he says, although he clearly didn’t see much money from the company. Horror Highwas later reti- tled Twisted Brain for television, and a sequel, Return to Horror High, was made in 1987. He adds, “I wasn’t sure if they were trying differ- ent names, or if they were trying to keep us from knowing where it was playing! The money thing sucks, but the fact is they got a lot of exposure for the film. I have kind of a minor fan base because of it – apparently it
struck a chord with people.” Shortly after Horror High, Crown made its lone foray into blaxploitation with 1975’s
Welcome Home, Brother Charles, which added a bizarre body horror twist to the re- venge tale. An audacious UCLA film school project by a then 33-year-old undergrad- uate named Jamaa Fanaka (Penitentiary), this treatise on African-American male sexuality dispensed with the post-Shaft “superspade” clichés and focused instead on an average Joe named Charles Murray (Marlo Monte), who’s nearly castrated by a racist cop during a marijuana bust and ends up railroaded into prison by a corrupt judge. After being subjected to a series of horrible experiments, Charles is released three years later with newly discovered “abilities” and proceeds to take murderous revenge on those who put him behind bars. However, he doesn’t use a gun or a knife but his own “shaft,” which holds hypnotic power over women and can extend over ten feet to strangle his enemies! The ’70s also saw more killer animal films in the wake of Jaws and sasquatch
movies fuelled by the decade’s Bigfoot craze. The Legend of Boggy Creekwas a mas- sive low-budget hit on the drive-in circuit, so it’s no surprise that Crown would have its own hairy beast flick... well, almost. When writer/director William Stromberg took his script for The Crater Lake Monster
to Crown, the company wasn’t interested in a sasquatch story, and asked if he could come up with something else. So the filmmaker went home, and changed the monster into a dinosaur. The result, released in 1977, is essentially a showcase for the stop- motion animation talents of the late Dave Allen (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Q), Jim Danforth (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, The NeverEnding Story) and Phil Tippett (Star Wars, Starship Troopers). “I thought they did a fine job,” says Stromberg. “I had no problem with how the ef-
fects looked, there just weren’t enough of them. I had planned for several more animation sequences, but Crown vetoed doing any more. I guess they just fig- ured, ‘We don’t want it good, we want it Friday.’” According to Variety, The
Crater Lake Monster made over a million dollars, yet Stromberg says he never saw any of it. “I went to several Hollywood attorneys trying to track down the money, and one lawyer told me, ‘How much justice can you afford? They owe you money, but it’s
Monster Hits: The titular Crater Lake Monster, and (opposite) the hell-hound of Dracula’s Dog.
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