JM Cozzoli

By Paul McVay, It Came From Hollywood

The following interview was conducted on January 20, 2009, and aired on the Drive-In of the Damned radio show a week later. It later appeared in Drive-In of the Damned Magazine (Issue #1/FEB 2018) which has long been OOP. This is the first time it has been shared online.

Of all the interesting people involved in the business of show that I have been fortunate enough to interview, either in print or on the radio, hands-down, the most interesting was Ted V. Mikels. Talking with this genre giant was akin to having an entire day of fun in just two and a half hours. He literally elevated your mood just by listening to him talk, and his personality immediately puts one at ease. The usual anxiety of how well an interview will go, especially one that will be broadcast, disappeared seconds into this discussion. After a two-and-a-half-hour talk that included the decision by both Ted and me to hang up and take a bathroom break mid-way through (this bit was excised for broadcast, but is definitely a piece of the recording I have gone back to listen to just because it still makes me laugh!), Ted and I kept in touch. He delighted me and my radio show audience once again on Halloween 2010 with a live phone-in that lasted over an hour. He was a true Showman even when he had nothing to show. You couldn’t ask for a better interview subject. Ted V. Mikels departed our realm on October 16, 2016.

Paul McVay– One of the best loved packaging of films was the triple bill of The Corpse Grinders, The Undertaker and His Pals and The Embalmer.  Can you share any stories about how that all came about? …

The Ted Mikels InterviewRead More »

It Came From Hollywood, where else?

The nightclub [shown in the movie] called The Haunted House was a real nightclub in Los Angeles, located at the famous corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Vine St. It was also featured in the 1967 film It’s a Bikini World and a TV special in which it was visited by Sonny & Cher. (Mst3k)

Girl in Gold Boots is a low‑budget (less than $50,000) crime‑drama musical about a small‑town waitress who follows a fast‑talking hustler to Los Angeles and gets pulled into the sleazy world of go‑go dancing, drugs, and petty crime. It’s one of Ted V. Mikels’ most infamous exploitation films and later became a fan favorite through its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Mikels was a jack of all trades when it came to cult movie-making. He often filled multiple crew roles on a single project: producer, writer, director, cinematographer, and editor. A New York Times obituary notes he typically employed small, inexperienced crews and little‑known actors working for minimal pay, likening him to figures like Ed Wood and Herschell Gordon Lewis in his relentless output of gory thrillers, sci‑fi cheapies, and action pictures. His corpus of work that included body‑part‑stealing zombies, a cat‑food company grinding corpses, an all‑female commando squad, a black magic witch queen, and stalking killers, fueled through scant resources and mixing it up with gore, camp, and cheesecake, make him a cult movie legend.

The movie’s afterlife has been interesting. Because the film fell into public domain circulation, it was widely available on VHS and later DVD compilations, which helped keep it in circulation among bad‑movie aficionados. It’s a so‑bad‑it’s‑good time capsule of the go‑go era, often noted as an example of Mikels’ peculiar charm: clumsy direction and writing, but full of bizarre yet interesting choices, oddball characters, earnest performances, and surprisingly memorable details like the “gold boots” stage leap and off‑kilter musical cues.

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Girl in Gold Boots (1968) PressbookRead More »

It Came From Hollywood sends us this terrifying pressbook from Crown International.

Terrified is a proto-slasher (sounds cool, right?). It is a transitional movie that, just barely, embraces a few tropes of the slasher genre that would kick into gear in the 1970s. Unfortunately, it is also a half-shoestring budgeted production that Lew Landers (The Raven, The Return of the Vampire) can barely keep credible with his fear-inducing environs because the script is under-baked and wordy and ponderous; but still very interesting in its exploration of fear and the killer’s modus operandi.

Shot at the Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, and on location at a left-over Western ghost town,  the sets are sparse: two small tablecloth joints for closeups and mid-shots as people are introduced and the story is set up; the Western ghost town and nearby blacked-out (as in no frills set dressing and background) cemetery where the killer prowls and young people keep winding up and run scared, a lot, with tight camerawork that chills the atmosphere; and a blacked-out car interior where the main young couple drive, back and forth, while talking a lot too, as they go to the spooky ghost town…at night…looking for someone. Then back again, looking for someone. While the nighttime scenes are effective, they are mainly used to hide the budget shortcomings, but Landers still keeps it all cool and effective.

Meanwhile, the killer, dressed in a suit and tie and wearing a knitted head mask that only shows his piercing maniacal eyes, delights in scaring people off the road and burying young guys in shallow graves while laughing and taunting them. Of course, since only one other guy in the movie wears a suit and tie, you kind of know who the crazy killer is early on. We just don’t know why he’s acting so crazy until the end.

An interesting point to make here: we tend to not give movie serials much attention when talking about the evolution of horror (or movies in general), especially slashers, but looking at the killer’s fashion sense in this movie, he reminded me of the  criminal masterminds found at the center of various serials’ plots (The Crimson Ghost, Mysterious Doctor Satan), driving fear through hidden identities and evil actions. That dangerous-presenting persona resonates through to today’s pivotal menacing characters in many horror movies. Each set-piece too, where the hero (who can also be a victim) is confronted by the menace, triggering an action from fear and survival, is reminiscent of the serial chapter-play structure that was capped with the cliff hanger. Just a thought.

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Terrified (1962) PressbookRead More »