Longtime readers of Cinema Strikes Back are well aware of our enthusiasm for the Mondo Macabro DVD label founded by Pete Tombs and Andy Starke (not to mention Pete’s stellar book Mondo Macabro, a bible of sorts around these parts). Pete and Andy are also the producers of Hell’s Ground (Zibahkhana), an excellent Pakistani horror flick directed by Omar Khan, the world’s foremost expert on South Asian horror movies. (Check out our review of Hell’s Ground here.) Hell’s Ground is scheduled to be released on DVD in North America on June 24, 2008.

Pete, Andy and Omar sat down with Cinema Strikes Back’s David, Jeff and Charlie in connection with the screening of Hell’s Ground at the 2007 New York Asian Film Festival for a lengthy talk ranging from the making of Hell’s Ground to the future of Mondo Macabro to Indonesian action star Barry Prima (as well as for a viewing of Omar’s extensive Betsy Palmer memorabilia collection while Omar was out of the room – sorry, Omar). We’re publishing the results in two parts – the first focusing on Hell’s Ground and the second to focus on Mondo Macabro itself as well as whatever filmic oddities happened to come up in discussion. (Part Two of our interview can be found here.)

Special thanks to Matt Kiernan for setting up the interview, and to Pete, Andy and Omar for generously giving up their time. We encourage everyone to check out Mondo Macabro – the book and the DVD company – as well as Hell’s Ground and Omar’s website The Hot Spot Online.

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On Hell’s Ground:

CSB: Congratulations on the film. We had a chance to watch it yesterday, and we had a blast … Could you tell us a little about how you guys got hooked up?

Pete: Andy and I were working together on a TV series for Channel Four in the UK, the title of which was Mondo Macabro (a little shameless product placement). It was a long time after the book came out, so that’s our excuse! It was kind of like the book, looking at areas around the world - Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia – making a little program about the cinema in each one of those countries and showing their films.

One of the countries that we wanted to cover was India. When I wrote the book Mondo Macabro, I had contacts with all these wonderful characters. I phoned up a bunch of people I’d met before and said we were doing a program for TV, and want to interview you and so on. And everything was all, “Great, fine, fine, come over.” Anyway, to cut a long story short, we went to Mumbai, and spent a couple of weeks waiting in our hotel room for the call! And we developed this theory – it was not the best place in the world to spend weeks waiting for the phone to ring – a kind of weird theory that it was like that Bunuel film where they keep waiting to have dinner but it never happens. They kept making appointments but then wouldn’t be there. And then we’d get a phone call the next day saying, “We’re sorry, let’s do it tomorrow.” It got so ridiculous.

Omar: It’s a south Asian thing. They tell you what they think you want to hear.

Pete: So we got back to London and started to put this program together and I thought, “What are we going to do?” I thought, “Who do I know who could talk on camera about Indian movies. I started going on the Internet, and I found this site … called The Hot Spot Online. When I wrote Mondo Macabro, the Internet didn’t really exist; it wasn’t much of a useful resource. If you put “Indian horror movies” into a search engine, you got nothing. Now there was this guy writing all this stuff about Indian movies. We wanted someone who could talk about this stuff with some perspective, with some critical range, because our program is basically aimed at a Western audience. So I banged off an email, and I think I got an answer saying Omar was coming over to England to do a show of Pakistani movie posters. Instantly we could see that we had a lot in common, a common interest in movies — the bad ones, and the ones even below that.

Over the years, we corresponded, we kept in touch. One of the things that Omar brought up in conversation, pretty early on, was a tape of a Dracula movie, Zinda Laash, from 1967, which I’d never heard of. It wasn’t in any of the history books. I was expecting it to be kind of dire. I watched it on this bad pirated VHS tape, which was all that existed at the time. I was amazed at how good it was. I said to Omar, “We’ve got to find out where this movie is, and release it.” I remember Omar saying, “Do you think anyone would be interested,” and I remember saying, “I think there would be some people who would be interested.”

Omar: There’s always an interest in vampire films. This film was not available in Pakistan, it hadn’t been seen for years and years. I hadn’t seen it, other than on that choppy videotape.

Pete: We found the negatives and we got a print made. In the process of doing that, I got to learn a bit more about Pakistani movies. It was Omar who was always saying, “We should make one.” The idea originally was to make a Part II to Zinda Laash. In the book of the Top 50 Pakistani Movies of All Time, Zinda Laash is in there. We thought, “Hey, we’ve got the Gone With the Wind of Pakistani horror, so let’s do a sequel.” Then we had the idea to do this completely crazy Black Magic kind of movie that we will make one day — we have a script and everything.

One day we sat down and said, look, this is really going to happen. None of us really knows what we’re doing — I mean, we’ve done a lot of TV and post-production stuff, and I’ve written scripts, but none of us really knew how to make a movie.

Omar: In Pakistan, the local industry was falling apart. So there are all these people who were working for years and years and suddenly had nothing to do. And second, the sheer cost of shooting in Pakistan makes it realistic as opposed to completely unrealistic. I started asking people how much the budget was for a typical Lollywood Punjabi film …

Andy: We thought, look, we can make a movie in Pakistan using local technicians and we can recover most of the costs by selling it on video. It was that affordable. So, even if it’s a complete disaster, we’d be okay. It was totally independent — there was no state funding.

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On developing the story for Hell’s Ground:

Pete: I think it was when I met a cousin of Omar’s, a yuppified girl. I remember saying, let’s do a “yuppies get lost in the backwoods” film. The young kids in Pakistan are very, very savvy; everyone’s on the Internet, everyone’s got mobile phones. You look at the magazines in Pakistan; they’re selling Gucci and BMWs. There’s a massive segment of that culture that is very, very rich. The clash between that and the backwoods really works.

Omar: Those of us in Pakistan that have money and who are living in these little pockets of urban cities are in a little bubble. We are watching Hollywood films. Everything is there; all the amenities of life. We speak to each other in English. But as you go outside these cities, you go into the real Pakistan.

Andy: We needed to do something that we could actually finish. It’s not worth making the greatest film in the world if you can’t finish it. It’s much better to make a genre film, which is what we do all day long. Horror is a genre. I’ve never seen a truly original horror film … apart from Mystics in Bali! (laughter). There were skills that we could all bring to the table, and there was this … political and economic tension in Pakistan that we knew would provide an interesting backdrop for the movie.

CSB: Did you get a lot of resistance in Pakistan when people knew you were filming?

Omar: Well, I lied to the administrators. I went to speak to the Assistant Commissioner in Islamabad. Everyone in Pakistan is so insecure about their job that they will not make decisions. If I had asked permission to make Hell’s Ground, this guy would have said, “Okay, give me a copy of what you are doing and go see Mr. XYZ,” who in turn would have told me to do the same. We would have gone in circles and nothing would have gotten done. So I decided the best thing to do was just lie. I told them we were making a short film on local folklore. I thought, if something happens, we’ll just deal with it. The guy actually showed up at my home a couple of times. I don’t know why he was particularly interested. He also showed up on the set one night.

Pete: Probably because he saw there were girls involved!

Omar: Maybe. But he didn’t ask any questions. In Islamabad, the shoot was a little bit exciting for the community. Nobody knew we were shooting other than people who just happened to be there when we’d show up. There was a little bit of excitement because films aren’t shot in Islamabad. We’d get a whole village standing around watching the shooting, and so on. So it wasn’t problematic in that sense, but I did have to lie.

Andy: The problems were in the actual conditions of shooting. The film was ready to go the year before last. Omar came over to go through the script. We were going to go to the Sitges film festival, and then Omar was going to go back and start the pre-production. The day Omar arrived, he got a phone call from his brother saying there’s been this earthquake.

Omar: Everything was completely changed. I left the day after that. It was an aborted trip - we didn’t get anything done. A lot of the staff I have in my ice cream shops are from Kashmir. We were very hard-hit. The film was swept into the background. We were dealing with a real-life horror movie. I’ll never forget when a man showed up in a van with people from Kashmir. They had these haunted expressions - they’d probably seen things that you and I will never see. They were kids — I thought I needed some sort of help to be able to deal with them.

Andy: In that context, making a gory horror film seemed like sort of an insult. There were some months before we talked about it again. Somehow, someone in India who was involved in programming the Sundance Film Festival found out about it.

Omar: I got this pushy letter asking, “Where is it? Where is it? We want it.”

Pete: I remember Omar phoned me. I said, “What’s going to happen with the movie?” He said, “We’ve got to make it now because we’re going to be in Sundance!” (laughter) Omar came back, and we started thrashing the script into shape. It looked like we were going to have to be shooting in the rainy season.

Omar: It’s very, very difficult in the rainy season. Normal people stop working. The film industry - whatever’s left of it - they stop working because the big stars refuse to shoot in such conditions. Part of the cast were college students, so we had to shoot during their vacation. And I wanted the heat and the nastiness of the conditions to perhaps become a flavor of the movie. I think it does creep in to some extent - it was all sticky and hot and very scuzzy and nasty. I’m terrified of cockroaches normally, but I had them on my clothes - it was like being in a tropical rain forest.

It was all real - we didn’t build our sets. I remember when I found this completely decayed, rotting building, I was drooling with excitement. There were people looking at me like, “What is wrong with you?” I was like, “Oh, that’s beautiful! That crack in the wall - oh my God!” The Associated Press came with a photographer to do an interview in Islamabad. The guy said, “Do you have any props?” I said, “Yeah, I’ve got my head.” So I pulled out this head, and he took a step backward!

After working out the script, I went back around May and started scouting locations. Andy came over for a week. For me to explain why the cost of this was going very, very high would have been difficult if he had not been there.

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On finding a cast and crew for Hell’s Ground:

Andy: We needed a DP who was going to be able to shoot in a modern style, on the fly, who could do it in a way that didn’t look like the classic Lollywood stuff. In those old Punjabi Lollywood movies - you’ve probably noticed this yourself - there are some delirious moments, and then there’s a whole load of dull stuff. But the delirious moments are so good that you think, “Whoever shot this has really got something.” The original idea was to facilitate one of these guys - the guy who made Haseena Atom Bomb, for example — to make a film that was like that all the way through without any of the boring bits. We placed ads in various places …

Omar: I put ads in my shop. Islamabad has got this theater scene at the moment, which is a lot of kids just getting into amateur theater. I was able to pick up some of those kids. We did the same in Karachi and Lahore. Karachi is where a lot of the TV is going on at the moment. We have people working in dramas, and TV-related stuff, soap operas and things. So we got some of those people. And then Lahore was where you have the traditional film industry, and the raunchy theater that they do locally. So we had a pool of pretty skilled people to pick from. We went through auditions twice in both cities.

Andy: We spent quite a while going through these auditions. There were some roles that were relatively easy to cast. Getting the women was the difficult one. It’s not my place to say, but with Pakistan being an Islamic country …

Omar: We didn’t have that many girls audition. But, the moment I met one girl who auditioned, I thought, I think I’m writing about her.

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On “realistic” and “unrealistic” special effects:

Omar: When I found the makeup guy, I remember sending one of my staff to him and telling him, do me up some cuts and things, make me like a zombie, just to check him out and see what he was able to do. I was extremely impressed.

CSB: We were actually going to ask if you had brought in effects people. It looks like KNB quality - I mean, it’s really good gore. (laughter) For what that’s worth! It means a lot to us anyway.

Omar: To us that means a heck of a lot. I’m going to go back and tell this guy what you said. He’s an old man, he’s received absolutely zero recognition, and no one knows who he is.

Pete: There’s one hilarious moment I remember where you showed the makeup guy Zombie Flesh Eaters … I mean, here’s this 70-year-old guy, who’s probably never left Pakistan, watching Zombie Flesh Eaters!

Omar: He was very intimidated at first. I read him the riot act, which was, “Look, we can’t get laughed at when the gore scenes happen.” He was very nervous, but we kind of helped him through a little bit.

Pete: You’ve got to sort of frame the context a bit. There’s such a ridiculous world now, you watch a film that’s got 20 million people running over a hill, and that’s boring. That’s really wrong, I think. After you’ve seen it once, it’s dull. How can that be dull? It should be the most incredible thing you’ve ever seen in your life. That’s why there’s something great about going back to practical effects. It’s like in High Tension, the actual gore was done in the eighties way of doing it.

In Asian movies, particularly South Asian movies, there’s a quality to the effects that’s sort of unreal. They’re not trying to show exactly what a severed hand looks like - there’s something sort of pantomimey about it - you’ve got to bring your imagination to it. I don’t care that it looks cheesy - it actually looks better - stranger and better. So what if it looks like a fake head? I don’t care, I’ve gone beyond that. If you want it to look real, then go and watch Lord of the Rings. But it never does look real. Each time they push the envelope, and it’s as slick as slick can be, you know that in five years’ time, that’s going to look really old-fashioned.

I remember years ago, when I used to watch ninth-generation VHS dubs of foreign movies, and you couldn’t quite often see everything that was going on, but in your imagination, this was the greatest movie you’d ever seen because you were filling in the bits.

Omar: I watched 300 earlier, and I remember the blood drops, and I remember Zatoichi with the beautiful CGI blood which falls down onto the ground like rose petals, beautiful rose petals. Obviously we didn’t have those resources, so we had to do everything the way it was done probably in the sixties and fifties -

CSB: Like the Herschell Gordon Lewis squishiness –

Omar: Yeah, and we tried things that didn’t work - it was a lot of trial and error. And if it worked, great, and if it didn’t, we moved on. We had to perhaps make a few compromises here and there with things that required more technical skills that we were not able to do. This guy who did the special effects worked literally from the hardware store and used things like flour and glue and cotton wool and grease and Vaseline. It was fantastic to watch this man work. I was in awe, really, of his ability.

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On merchandizing Hell’s Ground

Omar: When Burqa Man came forward with his mace and the place broke out into applause, that is just the most thrilling bit of the movie for me. The girl goes in and finds her boyfriend decapitated, and Burqa Man takes his mace and starts swinging it around. I actually made an action figure that I called a shuttlecock because I made the model using a badminton shuttlecock. It had a little base, and a stick, and I put the shuttlecock on it upside down.

Pete: I bet it looked really good. (laughs)

Omar: It did, actually.

Pete: We would like to get one of those action figures, like a Frankenstein kind of thing, of the Burqa Man.

Omar: Motorize the mace …

Pete: If we sell enough of those, about 8 of them, we can finance it.

CSB: Are you guys going to do a soundtrack for Hell’s Ground?

Andy: Yes, we’re working on it now. A lot of the electronic music in the film was done by a guy named Steve Thrower. He did a book called “Nightmare USA” and a book on Lucio Fulci as well.

Pete: The music’s fantastic. We hope to do a CD.

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On the Pakistani film scene

Andy: We went into a shop in Pakistan just to get some DVDs. Everything’s bootlegged. It was just a corner shop but there were thousands of DVDs. All of the Criterion Collection for like a buck. They had all of the Visconti movies.

Omar: There are factories manufacturing DVDs in Pakistan. Until a couple of years ago, we used to get all of the extras, all of the commentary tracks. You could barely tell the difference between something in the U.S. and there. It’s great for us in Pakistan because we don’t have access to the legal stuff, anyway. Piracy is absolutely rampant.

Pete: Lollywood music has got this weird mix because they’re into some disco and they’ve also got this amazing sound of sixties garage rock. This mix of disco synths with garage guitars - it sounds amazing to me. I keep thinking, “Wow, no one’s ever really done that.”

CSB: Bollywood doesn’t sound like that anymore.

Pete: No. In these Punjabi movies, the musical numbers are as close as you can get to sex without actually having sex.

Omar: It’s just lascivious.

Pete: There’s also the violence, like Sam Peckinpah-esque shootouts. In this one film, for about fifteen minutes this guy’s wading through water getting shot in slow motion. It goes on and on and on. You think, God, it can’t go on any longer than this. It’s incredible stuff. (Editors’ Note: Having now seen it, the CSB team can vouch for what they’re talking about.)

Omar: I put up some clips on Youtube and believe it or not a couple of them were removed for being too offensive. And these were from Pakistani films that had been censored.

Pete: They were an offense against good taste.

Omar: There’s one song that was just incredibly raunchy and disgusting, really sleazy. Fully clothed and all that, or partially, but it was removed within 24 hours. Then my “she-beast hairy monster” and the toe-sniffing sex kind of thing, that’s gone as well. I’m very surprised.

CSB: I have to ask you Omar, where did that “It’s My Challenge” clip come from? (check out the clip here)

Omar: Listen, I risked my neck once trying to do that dance. I was too old, obviously, but it’s simply compelling. “It’s My Challenge” is from a movie called Pyaar Karke Dekho. And if you get your hands on it, send me a copy as well, because I’m looking for it. It’s got great songs. It’s a Govinda film from the ‘80s when they were doing all those disco films. It’s a great film; try to get it, truly.

Pete: The men in the white coats are coming in a minute to take him back, don’t worry.

Omar: I’ve bought the rights to about 10 or 12 really bizarre films, and I’m trying to kick them into doing something. We paid money for them, and we’ve got these bizarre Pashtun movies – Maneater (Adam Khor), The Witch. Like we’ve mentioned, most of them are just turgid, you can’t watch them, but the good bits are amazing. We are playing with the idea of how we can possibly put these together and put them out, because I think that people would really, really enjoy them if they were … slightly abbreviated.

Andy: Cut out the boring bits (laughs)

Omar: Yeah. Make it a double feature on one DVD or something. The clips (screened at the 2007 New York Asian Film Festival), exploitation crap kind of cinema …

Andy: You’ll see it in the reel, and there are loads more where that came from. But as we were saying before, these films have these delirious moments and then they have these really dull moments. Well, they have the delirious moments and then the dull 25 minutes. If you could actually correct the situation either by editing or by making a new movie where you have just the delirious moments – I mean, you have to have some downs to go up, but generally keep them going up – you’d have something that was pretty special.

CSB: Or you could just have a few beers.

(To be continued next week)