Don Jackson's Cinema

DON JACKSON’S CINEMA:
NO WARDROBE, NO SCRIPT.
PLOT: STARLETS AS FAST FOOD.

Guns of El Chupacabra
This article originally appeared in Femme Fatales July 1998, Volume 7, Number 2

By Craig Reid
 
Last time we talked to B-film auteur Donald G. Jackson he was an avowed practitioner of Zen filmmaking aka spontaneous creation (translation: he shoots movies with no script). Though our coverage of the “Don” was less than flattering, he invited me to attend a shoot of THE GUNS OF EL CHUPACABRA.
 
In addition to exploitation empress Julie Strain, the cast included a clutter of babes who are meat inspected by the chupacabra, i.e. a carnivorous, crustacean monster with an insatiable appetite for naked starlets. If you subscribe to legend, the chupacabra dines on goats. But, and I’m fore-shadowing here what’s gonna move more video units? A monster eating barnyard critters, or a monster picking its teeth with a 35D bikini top?
 
I met Jackson at his Hollywood International Multi-media office. A couple of cute ingenues, seated near his desk, were being briefed on the next Jackson movie. I’m speculating it’ll be an addendum to his HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN trilogy or still another sequel in his ROLLERBLADE WARRIORS series. So I ask Jackson if all this stuff about talking frogs (i.e. human/amphibian hybrids) and girls on skates constituted some kind of fetish . . .
 
“No, it’s not a fetish, it’s a reason for making a movie,” grumbled the producer/director. “It’s a creature feature. Why did I write FROGTOWN as a post-apocalyptic tale about humans transforming into frogs? Because, back then, no one would pay any attention when I tried to promote and get a deal on Kevin Eastman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Nobody cared. I took it to some important people, including executives at Roger Corman’s New World. I showed them the artwork and they said, ‘It’s crude, it’ll go nowhere.’ So I couldn’t produce the ‘Turtles movie, a sort of HELL COMES TO TURTLETOWN. I couldn’t do ‘talking apes’ because it had been done, so the idea was to do frogs.”
 
So why opt for EL CHUPACABRA? It was pure serendipity according to Scott Shaw, the film’s producer. “Don and I were down in Mexico to do a movie called the GUNS OF BAHA, and were scouting locations. We kept hearing about these chupacabras. We got to this weird road and noticed strange dead animals along the roadside. So it’s five in the evening and there was three cars down the road. Suddenly, something apparently ran across the road causing the first car to flip over. We stopped. Don has a bad hip, so I grabbed the camera and start helping people out while trying to shoot things. The people swore it was a chupacabra that made the car flip. Don and I looked at each other — ‘Shit!’ — so then we just decided to change the film title from ‘Baha’ to GUNS OF EL CHUPACABRA. So instead of being a [Sam] Peckinpah shoot-em-up kind of movie, it is now an EL MARIACHI Meets a Creature Feature from the Black Lagoon.”
 
The legend’s expansion into the mainstream has prompted other filmmakers to prep their own adaptations of the entity. Chupacabra, which translates from Spanish into “goat sucker,” has been mythically rendered into a predator that sucks the blood and internal organs from its prey.
 
Chupacabra sightings, initially chronicled in Puerto Rico and Costa Rica, have spread to Mexico, North Africa, Honduras, the United States, Italy and Spain. An episode of THE X-FILES summarized that chupacabras were human beings plagued by an enzyme that accelerated fungal growth on the skin, thus precipitating deformities.
 
Jackson and Shaw have afforded themselves some serious latitude in their own spin-off of the legend. And while Jackson lost the option on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he gained the franchise’s creator, Kevin Eastman, who co-stars with his spouse, the aforementioned Julie Strain.
 
Shaw explained, “My character, Jack-be-Quick Space Sheriff, Intergalactic Marshall, is sent down to Earth by Queen B [Strain] and King Allmedia [Eastman] to hunt down and destroy the chupacabras which were unleashed on the planet by Z-Man, Lord Invader [Robert Z’Dar]. We also have Men in Black searching for the chupacabra and they don’t know if it’s an alien monster or a genetic experiment gone bad. But the way we play it off, it’s actually an alien’s pet that got loose. We add in another comic book twist by adding in these Mexican wrestlers, the ones who wear masks. Ours is called the Santiago Kid [Hervi Estrada].” Sounds to me like THE THREE STOOGES IN ORBIT meets CANNON-BALL RUN meets SUPER-GIANT. On acid.
 
And what’s the price tag for this confection? “I don’t like to quote budgets because there’s no way I can give a satisfactory answer,” said Jackson. “If I lie like some people and say it costs $7,000. …well, I think it was Hitler who said, The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.’ [The $7,000 movie is supposedly fabricated budget for Robert Rodriquez’s EL MARIACHI. Everyone in Hollywood knows Hitler was right on this one.] I really don’t know the budget because I’m spending money on it every day. It’s a pay-as-you-go kind of thing. I make films to please me and not someone else. We also have our own distribution company, so now we can sell the movie. We put together a quick trailer and showed it at film markets last year, and got great responses.”
 
Eager to link Julie Strain to the movie, Jackson brought up the “b” word when requesting a compromise on salary. “Don — I previously worked with him on three of his films — told me they were on a budget,” related Strain. “He said, We’d really like to have you on the project.’ I said, ‘You know what? If you cast my husband Kevin, I’ll do this for free.’ Don said, ‘Oh gee, that’s great.’ Then they started working on the storyline. We later waited a whole hour to meet Don and Scott: finally showing up, they said that they were in a grocery store parking lot writing our script, making up our characters. Kevin was in full armor from head to toe. I battle these chupacabras in 6” metal heels.”
 
The budget didn’t cover wardrobe expenses for a supportive cast of starlets, who were only wearing tans. Stalked in the desert by a hungry chupacabra, the youthful ladies are captured, incarcerated within oversize bird cages or chicken wire cells, and sweat it out until they’re literally cooked and served as dinner. Shaw insists the premise is harmless; “If you see STARSHIP TROOPERS, the movie is very ill spirited. I mean the bugs are sucking brain juices out of people. There is just death and corpses everywhere. We are not mean spirited nor blood-and-guts people. Things are implied.”
 
And why aren’t the film-makers adhering to the historical concept of chupacabras chowing-down on goats? “Visual interest,” snapped Jackson. “Naked girls are a cheaper special effect. Plus, I think it adds another audience to the film.”
 
Some of the naked lunch requested billing under pseudonyms. “My husband heard from a friend about this film,” said Dee, who was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Queens. She moved to L.A. six years ago. “I thought it would be fun to try it. It won’t hurt anyone. I play this girl who is trapped with Tyler in a cage, while an alien and chupacabra taunt us. I do a lot of screaming. It’s okay that I don’t have lines, because I don’t want to goof up my first time. I do nudity and I’m okay with that. I’ve never posed nude for a magazine, but I have always been comfortable with my body.”
 
Odessa, also cast as a blue-plate special, responded to my query about her phony name with a blunt “Why not?” No qualms about performing her entire role in the buff? “It’s my first film and I don’t think it will be my last,” shrugged Odessa, who earned a degree in nutrition and, upon moving to L.A. with her boyfriend, turned to modeling. “But I don’t want to be an actress, I’ve no passion for it. It’s fun, but I’m just doing it to pay the bills. In this movie, I beat up the alien guy, fire some guns and hang out in the nude. They wouldn’t let me put on my clothes. I do nude modeling on the side, so I’m comfortable with my sexuality. I really don’t identify with the character because it’s a Don Jackson movie — you can’t! He just tells you your words right away and you say them.”
 
Jackson is the first to admit, “It’s all pretty funny. Looking back about 20 years ago, the first movie I ever did was a creature film with naked girls. [THE DEMON LOVER: Shaw denies the rumor that Jackson cut off his thumb so he could sink the insurance money into the film]. Now it has come full circle and I am doing a creature movie with naked girls. I don’t know why this genre. I don’t particularly like horror movies or have any interest in them. I don’t even go see them.”
 
Jackson’s professes a fondness for Bolivian film-maker Alejandro Jodorwoski (EL TOPO) and Robert England’s ground breaking electric Western ZACHARIAH. Orson Wells, Sergio Leone, Sam Fuller.
 
He deflects critical vilification of his movies with, “All the stories have been told. Stories can be too confining. I think we simplify it. Like a lot of my work, parts of THE GUNS OF CHUPACABRA will be confusing, normal and mysterious. It’s all about audience manipulation. I get tired of the MTV- style of cutting, and some-times I will just go and do a shot for ten minutes that holds for a while. Plus, I don’t shoot everything from a hundred different angles. We map it as it goes along. In part two of our EL CHUPACABRA trilogy, we don’t do any master shots at all.”
 
“Another thing is that we don’t have scripts,” reaffirmed Shaw. “No scripts?” “No scripts,” he repeated, “It’s Zen filmmaking,” continued Jackson. “Scripts are good for multi-million dollar pictures, where you have to go through an agent to get some big actor interested. I have fired script supervisors. Good ones document what you do. Bad ones ask too many questions and interrupt daily flow.”
 
Julie Strain rhapsodized Zen filmmaking; “With no scripts, we do a lot of ad libbing. It’s not uncomfortable when you’re with people you know. You realize that your work is going to be better because of it, and you just go with it. It’s great, every-body is winging it. You know like two sentences of the storyline, but you come up with ten minutes of film in just one scene and all the actors walk away doing some of their best work ever. It’s really a fabulous style of film-making.”
 
Jackson invites film apprentices and aspiring actors to come try Zen filmmaking. “I am looking for people who will trust my guidance, and will enjoy being in a movie surrounded by name talent. Getting your face on a video box cover goes further in landing acting jobs than any head shot. We can provide that. When I got off the bus in 1981, people would line up to be in a non-union independent film. Now most would rather be a SAG extra for a lot less money than be a star in an independent. People used to let you use their house or place of business for cheap, but now all they want is a lot of money for the exposure. They would rather it stay empty until a studio wants to pay them $20,000 dollars for the use.
 
“Actors before just wanted some tape for their reel, money wasn’t as important as experience and exposure and making contacts for the future. I would love to write a book on guerrilla filmmaking, but you can’t appreciate it unless you have been there. We started our own distribution company because we were tired of creating our projects and then having to send them away; a distributor lies and tells you your movie is no good, even though they’re making a fortune from it. The bottom line is if you can’t sell the movie you can’t make the movie.”
 
Now, I don’t buy the Zen thing and I still don’t understand the stuff about roller- blading coquettes and frogs that talk too much. But in a town that bows to TITANIC’s edict of extravagance — ‘larger is better” — you got to admire Donald G. Jackson. Hollywood’s last angry man.