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| Parasite "Charlie, you've hit a new low." So said executive producer Irwin Yablans, reportedly, upon seeing dailies of a PARASITE scene in which a slimy, eel-like creature erupts from the face of veteran actress "Miss Vivian Blaine" (as the GUYS AND DOLLS star is billed). But director / producer Charles Band was also making B-movie history, of a sort: as the ads proclaimed, PARASITE was "The First Futuristic Monster Movie in 3-D!" In the '50s, as the new invention of television threatened to keep audiences home from the movie palaces, studios turned to various technical innovations to provide big-screen experiences that TV couldn't duplicate. One of them was three-dimensional photography, but despite the process' use on numerous major features (from KISS ME KATE to Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER), 3-D remained a gimmick that fizzled out by the decade's end. In the early '80s, as videocassettes were beginning to pose simular competition to the theatrical business, 3-D enjoyed a brief resurgence, spearheaded by the Italian cheapie COMIN' AT YA!, released in the U.S. in 1981. While that film was racking up unexpectedly strong grosses, Band was just making his own leap into the 3-D realm (ironic, considering that his Media Home Entertainment and Wizard Video were among the first companies to take advantage of the burgeoning video boom). A veteran exploitation producer (MANSION OF THE DOOMED< LASERBLAST) at the age of 29, Band had been convinced by 3-D specialist Randall Larsen to add an extra dimension to PARASITE, a project already in preparation. This would be Band's third film as director, following Crash! (1977) and THE ALCHEMIST, which he helmed in 1980 with PARASITE star Robert Glaudini in the lead, but which wasn't released until 1983, bearing the directorial pseudonym "James Amante." PARASITE's script was dreamed up by ALCHEMIST writer Alan J. Adler along with Michael Shoob and Frank Levering, shortly after Adler met the duo at a Hollywood party. Set in the distant year of 1992, it follows a scientist played by Glaudini as he flees an oppressive paramilitary government, bearing a pair of flesh-eating creatures he had reluctantly created for them: One he keeps in a canister, the other is growing in his stomach. Holing up in a desolate small town, he befriends a pretty young farmer (played by then-unknown, 18-year-old Demi Moore) and tries to figure out how to kill the parasite within him while fending off both a gang of punks (including Luca Bercovici, who later directed Band's GHOULIES, and former Runaways lead singer Cherie Currie) and a villainous agnet (James Davidson). Despite the "Futuristic" come-on in the ads, this villains's accoutrements are among the only such trappings on view: a penlike laser weapon and his Lamborghini Countach car, whose vertically opening doors provoked as many "oohs" and "aahs" from young audiences as the 3-D effects. The latter were the responsibility of Chris J. Condon, whose StereoVision process was trouted as a revolution in dimensional photography. Unlike cumbersome past rigs, this lens system could be applied to traditional 35mm cameras, even those used for hand-held shots. The result was a series of gags highlighted by not only parasites leaping in audiences' faces, but a rattlesnake crawling at them and a blood-dripping metal pipe sticking out of a victim and into the theater (going a simular impaling from the Band-produced TOURIST TRAP one better). The monsters and gore were created by Stan Winston - who had worked for Band on MANSION OF THE DOOMED and received his first Oscar nomination (for HEARTBEEPS) a month before PARASITE's release - along with James Kagel and Lance Anderson. The reviews for all their efforts varied wildly. A few critics applauded the film's literal in-your-face gruesomness, while others complained that the 3-D at their particular shows didn't work and described Winston and company's creature as everything from "a hamburger with teeth" to "a Slinky covered with green Naugahyde" to "look[ing] as if someone had stuffed socks with oatmeal and painted fangs on the end." But PARASITE chomped its way to solid box-office returns, grossing about $7 million (on a reported budget of $800,000) for distributor Embassy Pictures and paving the way for such 3-D studio successes as FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III (1982) and JAWS 3-D (1983). Alas, the new 3-D trend proved to be short-lived, though Band returned to the process for 1983's METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN, which Universal not only piggybacked onto the release of JAWS 3-D but also promoted with the '80s boom's only 3-D trailer at its head. Embassy didn't last much longer; as Avco Embassy, the company had given genre fans such modern classics as SCANNERS, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and THE HOWLING, but in '82 it was bought by a consortium headed by sitcom king Norman Lear, who failed in trying to keep it successful with "higher-class" titles (issuing another modern classic, THIS IS SPINAL TAP, along the way). Band would soon turn to self-distribution, forming Empire Pictures and announcing an ambitious slate of big-screen genre dare. This outfit too only lasted a few years, and Band went on to direct-to-video production, leaving a series of potentail 3-D theatrical films unproduced - among them the inevitable PARASITE II. -Michael Gingold Return to Parasite. |