J.R. Bookwalter. Gosh, how do I even start with this guy? I’ve wanted to talk about this director for some time now. He’s a name that not a lot of people would recognize, but he was a huge force in the boom of the horror home video market in the early 90s. Growing up, I personally wasn’t familiar with his work, but I did see this poster and box art often when growing up in my local video stories. Even though I never saw the Dead Next Door, this poster is nostalgia bait for me.
Dead Next Door was Bookwalter's first feature film and it was actually funded by Sam Raimi himself which is super cool… the follow-up to his cult hit was Robot Ninja which sounds ridiculous but it’s actually a blast. After not making it big off his first two films, Bookwalter decided to scale back his productions and do some contract work for the growing home video market. Since his next couple of films would only see release on VHS, why not shoot on video instead of film? It’s cheaper and there is hardly a difference. Sure shooting on video isn’t future-proof, but it got the job done. He was hired to write, shoot and edit 6 feature-length films in 7 months. This is a crazy feat! Each of these 6 films cost under $2500. These films were later known as the SOV 6 pack.
And this thing is awesome! It’s one of the best happy meals I ever purchased. I love this set because it’s like looking through someone’s home movies that are actually pretty good. You can tell there is talent behind the project. There are some great films on this set like Zombie Cop and Kingdom of the Vampire, but also stinkers like Humanoids from Atlantis.
If you watch these films in order of release, you can visually see the burnout by Bookwalter. Kingdom of the Vampire is an ambitious Martin-inspired lone vampire story and by the end films like Humanoids from Atlantis lack any imagination or inspiration.
Bookwalter was nearing his end. He didn’t want to mass-produce these movies for video stores anymore. He wanted to make something worth watching. He wanted to give it one last shot to see if he could make a good movie. Enter Ozone.
Ozone was Bookwalter going all in. He decided to stick with the video format since he had mastered it over the last year and it was cheaper to produce with. He got a lot of past actors and crew members from the SOV 6 pack days like Jame Black, James Edwards, and special effects wiz Bill Morrison. Ozone is a top-tier Shot on Video film and deserves more eyes on it. But what’s Ozone about?
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Graveyard Shift" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
About HellBound
Welcome to the Hellbound Horror Show. On this channel, you'll find horror movie reviews of horror films both popular and forgotten as well as films I've made in the past.
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