In 1972, Blood Freak, co-written and directed by Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawkes, was released. The movie centers around a biker who gets a job at a turkey farm. While there, he agrees to act as a guinea pig for some chemical testing. The result is as bizarre as it is unintentionally hilarious. The movie eventually found an audience among cult film fans who like to mock its overt and bizarre anti-drug messaging.
In 2020, Daniel Boyd and Tim Gross co-directed a remake of the film, written and acted by Boyd. Today we will be talking to Boyd about his unique take on the property and the film’s weird journey to be made.
Why Blood Freak?
Ada: So, why out of all the 70s cult movies did you pick to remake Blood Freak?
Daniel: So, Blood Freak had a very special place in my heart. I bought a VHS copy of it from Incredibly Strange Video, which I don’t know how old you are, but it was a local video store. It closed back in the early 2000s. But yeah, I got the VHS copy from there and just loved the movie for how terrible it was. It’s still great to me. Me and my filming partner Tim Gross were having a conversation about The Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and why do they keep remaking movies that were already perfect? Why don’t we go back and remake movies that were terrible? And that’s how we got to doing that. I started writing it shortly thereafter, and we went into production about a year and a half later.
Ada: So, the assignment was to think of the worst movie possible to remake, and remake that one?
Daniel: Yeah, exactly. That was the first one that came to mind. I got really excited about doing it and went ahead and just started writing the script.
Who Has The Rights?
Ada: I believe we talked for a bit at Akronomicon in Cuyahoga Falls, OH, about some of the issues you had with the rights for Blood Freak. Would you mind explaining more about that?
Daniel: Okay, not so much rights issues. The problem was that most of the people involved in the production of that movie aren’t alive anymore. And the one person that is was I can’t remember his name off the top of my head. The guy who played Hershel ended up having a pretty legitimate career playing Tarzan later on in pretty low-budget Hollywood movies, but he still made some money doing that and wanted nothing to do with Blood Freak. So, he wasn’t, you know, even willing to talk about it if I was even able to track him down.
So, I ended up talking to Lisa Petrucci from Something Weird Video, who was the last person who had released the movie, and she basically said her husband, Mike [Vraney], who had passed away, she wasn’t even sure that he ever owned the rights to it. He might have done the same thing I did and just went ahead and released it. He’d done that with some other productions. And I was like, “Okay, well, as long as you don’t mind me doing it, I’m going to go ahead and do it.
Orphaned Title?
Ada: So when the rights to a movie are kind of fuzzy, it often leads to titles going orphaned or nobody really sure if they can distribute them. And all of those issues can lead to lapses in preservation since everyone is too scared to touch it.
Daniel: I didn’t really worry too much about getting it out there. The worst that could happen is somebody comes and says, “Hey, you can’t do this anymore.” Then you know it’s good to have just made the movie. So yeah, I really wasn’t too worried about all that. But I did, you know, before trying to do, even starting production on it, you know, tried to make sure I wasn’t stepping on anybody’s toes.
Who Would Oppose?
Ada: If the only person alive from the original production doesn’t care about it, I don’t see who would come after you.
Daniel: I don’t even think he’s alive anymore either. He ran some kind of zoo or something. Yeah, after the Tarzan thing, he ended up running like a Tiger King-style zoo; there was a lot of controversy behind that guy too. So there’s literally nobody left from the production of Blood Freak. So anybody out there who wants to bootleg copies of the old Blood Freak movie, you’re probably certainly welcome to.
(Writer’s note: this only works for a case like Boyd’s where the film isn’t owned by any studio. Blood Freak was seemingly owned by Sampson Motion Picture Production Company, a studio created by Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawkes, both of whom have passed away, leaving the studio defunct. Even then, there is still significantly more to the process of a title being considered orphaned. For those curious, Hawkes is also who played Tarzan, and we found out he passed away right before the remake was released. So odds are he was completely unaware of the project.)
Art The Absurd
Ada: Tim Gross, who is also the narrator in the film, refers to Summer’s End by Danielle Steel as not bad but “not very good.” Why do you have beef with that book?
Daniel: [through laughter] I have no beef with Danielle Steel whatsoever. That was just some random book that I threw in there when I was writing the script. I needed something that was completely random, and that was just something that came to mind. My grandmother actually loved Danielle Steel, and that was one of those books I just kind of remembered seeing in our house. It’s hilarious you would ask about that random line.
Blood Freak 2
Ada: The ending does kind of set it up for a Blood Freak 2. Did you all ever think of doing a sequel or anything like that?
Daniel: You know, there was never really a plan for it, but I’ve considered it recently. Just some ideas have popped into my head, and you know, I may go back and revisit it. The only problem is the papier-mâché head is destroyed at this point, I’m sure. We gave it to a friend of ours, and it was already starting to rot then. The person who made it and I had a falling out, and I would have to find a new papier-mâché artist. So, yes, I have come up with some ideas for it, and you know I’m starting a new production company, so maybe at some point it’ll be something that I revisit. We’ll have to see.
Ada: Would you mind sharing any of the ideas, or is it still something you’re workshopping?
Daniel: Still something I’m workshopping. I haven’t put anything to paper yet. But it would probably pick up directly where Blood Freak left off and have a lot to do with the drug dealer, Bud, who got away. So yeah, I had some ideas about picking up where his story left off. But, as I said, these are just stupid little ideas that have popped into my head. There’s nothing really concrete yet.
More Remakes?
Ada: Do you frequently do remakes, or is this kind of just a one-off thing?
Daniel: No, this was the only one. The other three movies that we’ve done have all been original. So, well, the third movie, Tales From The Gross Side, wasn’t really original ideas. Well, they were the original ideas of Tim Gross. I just wrote them into screenplays. But yeah, other than that, it’s all just been me and him, you know, writing stories and making stuff up. Jagoff Massacre, like, I wrote the script to that, but most of it was ad-libbed, to be honest with you. I had two amazing actors who were just great at playing off of each other. So yeah, a lot of that was, you know, just them being goofy.
Ada: Blood Freak was released in 2020. Were you all shooting in and around COVID restrictions, or was this done before that?
Daniel: It was done before that. COVID did make it very hard for us to get it played anywhere, but as far as filming goes, no, there were no COVID restrictions at that time. Even if there were, most of that was filmed in and around my house, my mom’s house, and a few scenes up at my mom’s cabin. So, it really wouldn’t have been that big of a deal. So, yeah, there were no COVID restrictions at that time. It was hard getting it played anywhere when we were finally finished with it, and that really sucked
Daniel’s wife, Courtney Boyd, who is also a producer on the film, chimed in to clarify that shooting wrapped before Christmas. She was also kind enough to fact-check the information about Hawke while we were on the call.
Horror To Horror Comedy
Ada: Did you have Tim play the narrator in the remake to keep it closer to the original?
Daniel: So, Brad Grinter, the guy who directed the original, he comes on in the middle to talk about the movie because the movie was so convoluted; he felt like he needed to do that. Because no one was going to understand the plot, and that was probably a good idea on his part. But he was also very adamant that that wasn’t supposed to be a joke. He really thought that that was going to make people stop smoking marijuana. Now, when I rewrote the script, I totally retooled it into a comedy, and everything was a gag, obviously. But no, he really thought that that was going to be like an anti-drug movie that was going to stop people from smoking weed.
Ada: Almost like Reefer Madness. Which also got turned into a comedy, a musical comedy.
Daniel: I thought that was pretty interesting. I mean, you get a lot of good stories. You talk about Marvel and DCU and all that; everything goes pretty much as planned because they got millions of dollars. We work, you know, flying on the seat of our pants. We have no plans. Nothing ever goes right. And yeah, we just have a lot of beer and hope for the best.
On Set
Ada: So, what went wrong on Blood Freak? Are there any gory production stories?
Courtney: It started with our main actress getting in a car accident on the way to the first shoot, totaling her car.
Daniel: And then something else happened to her as well. Yeah, because she missed the first two shoots, and I actually was thinking like, “Does she just not want to do this?”
Courtney: Well, the first time something happened, and she’s like, “I can’t come.” And then the second one was she like, “I got in a car accident on the way there,” and we’re like, “Do you not want to?” She’s like, “No, really.” She started sending us pictures like, “All right, well, fine. Her car was totaled.”
Daniel: Aside from that, you always have the stories, you know, people not showing up or you can’t get this location when you need it, and everything has to be just shuffled around all the time. Here’s a good one: the first scene we were filming. We set up to get the whole thing filmed, and Tim was doing, like, the intro to the movie, and he needed to have a cigarette. So I went across the street where my mom lived to get a cigarette from her. That’s when we found out that she was having an affair, and her husband found out.
Courtney: It’s fine. She knows we tell that story.
Daniel: We’re open books over here. Blood Freak actually went smoother than our other productions, to be honest with you. I got a million stories from Jagoff Massacre, mostly involving the guy who played Stutch.
The Future
Ada: Do you have any projects coming up that you’d like to talk about?
Daniel: So like I said, I’m starting a new production company. Kind of going out on my own here. Tim wanted to focus more on Grossfest. So, we’re starting a new thing. It’s called Panik Productions. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still going to be using a lot of the plot lines from the Drunken Yinzers movies. [Drunken Yinzers is his former company with Tim, which these movies were shot under]. That’s always something that’s going to be following around.
But the next movie is called Slaybor Day. It is a Labor Day-themed slasher movie. And I said, if I was going to do a movie about Labor Day. It’s going to really be about Labor Day. So, it’s about a group of people who are scab workers at a brewery while the rest of the workers are on strike. The strike ends, and they decide to go out to a cabin and just have one last hurrah before they all have to go get new jobs, and they are systematically eliminated by Scabby the union rat. So, it’s really about Labor Day.
Slaybor Day
Ada: I’ve heard of corrupt unions before, but not quite that blatant.
Daniel: Yeah, I delved a lot into, you know, how I didn’t really know much about unions or anything like that. I do work at a hospital, but we’re not unionized. Yeah, so I delved into a lot of that. The main thing that came out: on picket lines, a lot of times there are giant inflatable rats, and they’re called Scabby the Union Rat. So I was like, “That would be a good killer.” So yeah, we just went up to my mom’s cabin and shot the whole thing. We have one more scene we still have to shoot, and we should be done and probably have everything edited ready to go sometime early next year.
Ada: Yeah, because it seems like your turnaround time is roughly a year or two per film. Correct?
Daniel: Yeah, sometimes a little bit longer. I tend to take a pretty long time writing scripts for these things. I actually started writing the script as Slaybor Day right before production of Tales from the Gross Side. So it’s been kind of a labor of love, but we shot it very quickly. But yeah, it’s usually about two years or so; sometimes three is our turnaround for films.
Ada: It’s pretty brisk for an independent. Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I’m not Steve Rudzinski. He seems to be getting me a new movie every like couple of months.
We’d like to thank Courtney and Daniel Boyd for their time today. You can pick up a copy of his remake of Blood Freak by messaging him here.
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