“You learn how to use the equipment and you learn how to tell a story” from a David Schmoeller interview Director David Schmoeller (1947-) is a Kentucky born writer who grew up in Texas and went to film school and undergraduate school. He made seven short films and his thesis movie was nominated for the student Academy Award where he was beaten by Robert Zemeckis. It got him an agent. He is also responsible for a few or more great low budget horror movies which include Tourist Trap (1979), The Seduction (1982), Crawlspace (1986) and Puppet Master (1989).
While it would appear his career has since tailed off into less interesting fare, these cult items are worth checking out. The director cut his teeth working on an internship on Peter Hyams (1943-) Capricorn One (1978) and then went on to raise money to put together Tourist Trap.
“It was a very good experience…. I was comfortable about how the process was,” he said about Capricorn One.
Apparently, Tourist Trap is based on his short film thesis The Spider will Kill You (1976) in terms of that film featuring a deadly mannequin.
Tourist Trap is full of deadly mannequins and they are the creepy centrepiece about the young people who stumble on a countryside tourist museum and associated homestead where a demented keeper lives with his brother. This man is played by none other than The Rifleman (tv show 1958-63) Chuck Connors (1921-1992 lung cancer) who was third on the list to play the role after Jack Palance (1919-2006 natural causes) and Gig Young (1913-1978 murder-suicide) and he received the sum of $50,000. Despite the supernatural elements of the movie Connors’ telekinetic character has a brother or is it the brother who’s telekinetic? HIs name in the cast is Shailar Cobi but no actor exists as the brother in a part of the Psycho plot melded into it and the name is taken from Schmoeller’s own son.
The director said Connors was basically pretty good to work with and that he really wanted to start a career as the new Vincent Price or Boris Karloff of horror.
“He tried to give me a hard time because it was my first time out but I knew he didn’t mean it… Chuck was a baseball star who stumbled into the acting game as a career change.”
Schmoeller remembers the classically trained Jocelyn Jones doing breathing exercises and swinging a chair around to prepare for a scene and Connors would look at her all goofy and it was the director’s job to keep Connors cool.
Schmoeller wrote the script for Tourist Trap and said he received encouragement at school: “What started me, I was fifteen and at a boarding school in Texas and Tommy Lee Jones was there and the editor of the poetry magazine and I wrote a poem and he said Schmoeller you should be a writer.”
“I got hooked on the creative process and it’s a lot of fun.”
The budget was slim and the movie was shot in 24 days in and around Los Angeles. Other cast members include Jocelyn Jones (1950-) and Tanya Roberts (1949-2021 sepsis and multiple organ failure) and it should be noted the son of famed Hollywood director William Wyler (1902-81 heart attack) David Wyler was second assistant director while Nicholas von Sternberg, who was the son of another famed director Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969 heart attack) served as the director of photography.
The essence of Tourist Trap and any horror this movie does display may not thrill others at all. I have always had a fascination with mannequins and despite the fact I prefer real people, as a child I wanted to have my very own mannequin for myself. There was something about them in the shops as you walked around with your mother as she went dress shopping or whatever. I even went so far as to write to the local department store asking if they could let me have one with a broken arm or something. Sadly, they informed me that all the pieces could be replaced. But the very thought of a mannequin in my bedroom at night keeping me company never really seemed that scary. That was until the local drive in started showing the trailer for Tourist Trap on television and somehow it gave me the creeps. Not quite unsettling but weird and unsettling. The film never played the cinemas in my town so I had to go without seeing this movie for something like 20 years when a VHS copy suddenly turned up in a second hand shop. I was not disappointed with the mannequins which seemed to come to life even if it was only someone spinning them around while the mouths of some of the ‘dolls’ would open and shut on hinges as they cried out some sort of unearthly hymn or chorus.
“Tourist Trap was made at the tail end of the drive in theatre period. In those days distributers and exhibiters looked at the first reel. If they grabbed it, they bought it. If not, they didn’t. So you had to have this big grabber right from the start. That was the formula,” said Schmoeller about the powerhouse low budget opening where a young man bites the dust fairly spectacularly.
It was perhaps seeing The Twilight Zone episode The After Hours about mannequins who abscond from a department store which gave me the sense that a mannequin has a soul or some sort of intelligence. The intelligence in Tourist Trap is pure evil and not even that as each mannequin is moved by telekinesis rather that by its own inherent evil – so yes pure unadulterated plaster evil as they pile on top of you and smother you to the ground.
To go a step further and there really aren’t many mannequin movies to choose from except for Mannequin (1987) starring Andrew McCarthy which was a surprise hit and spawned a sequel. Silly comedy or surrealist masterpiece? There’s a Joan Crawford movie by the same name but it probably only refers to her looks rather than being some Blue Oyster Cult masterpiece. Striking though is the image from French movie Eyes Without a Face (1960) which shows its victim wearing a protective mask. “Molly!,” is the cry of a mannequin’s head in the dark paddock of Tourist Trap and it is the single most scary moment in the movie if you had to boil it all down: “See my friend!” Is another line from the almost moronic character played by Connors as he chases Jones through a wooded area on his property. Poetry in motion.
The beauty of Tourist Trap is in its economy. Made for $350,000 and using Charles Band’s production company before it became Full Moon, it has all the hallmarks of a Band movie such as claustrophobic sets which are not quite real, casts which have a main star and others you wouldn’t necessarily have ever heard of …. And to die for to be cute as a saying, a low budget director’s dream… a Pino Donaggio score.
Donaggio was apparently in America scoring Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) when the Spanish speaking Schmoeller spoke to him and asked him to write the score for Tourist Trap. They would collaborate again on Crawlspace. One of the producers hated the Donaggio score since he saw the film without it and had Halloween on hand for release as well. When Halloween came back with the dynamite John Carpenter score, the perfect low key cues of Tourist Trap seemed to send the film bust along with its PG rating which suggested that children could easily see it.
There are a couple of cuts of Tourist Trap with one running a few minutes longer with a stronger opening scene. As for the rest of the movie? Slausen’s Lost Oasis is perfectly hokey as the lost tourist trap of the title with what is possibly the remains of Connors’ late wife kept there as the girls feel “real” skin on her mannequin – oh well at the least the Dr Pepper machine still works. The girls are beautiful and Jocelyn Jones is the daughter of stage and screen actor Henry Jones (1912-99 after a fall) and she is the best actress of the lot.
“Don’t fidget so,” says a female voice in front of a television to a mannequin child, or was it the brother, and while it is not really a serious study of mental illness – what horror movie really is – this case of someone suffering dissociative identity disorder could be described as riveting or casually amusing. It think it’s a cult classic and I bet Mr Slausen’s neatly pressed blue overalls there will be others who will think so too.
The second and another important cult movie made by Schmoeller is Crawlspace (1987) which stars Klaus Kinski (1926-91 heart attack) as the son of a Nazi or a Nazi himself who runs an apartment building where he stalks the tenants who are mainly women by roaming around the crawlspace in the ceiling of the building on a piece of wood with casters. Crazed and practically salivating as he terrorises those who owe him rent, Kinski then goes to his attic hideaway or back to his apartment where he presses a gun to his head Russian roulette style and upon the gun not going off says: “So be it!” … And so the killing goes on.
Schmoeller slated 20 days for shooting Crawlspace but with all the trouble the notoriously hostile Kinski had against the director this stretched out to 30 days. In fact the director some years later wrote and made a short film about the experience entitled Please Kill Mr Kinski! (1999).
Inserted into Crawlspace is a moment where the director says to Kinski as a parting shot as he shuts his apartment door: “Creep.”
What is most striking about Crawlspace is that it is particularly nasty in tone and any film about Nazis and a self loathing psychopath with a God complex who likes to practice euthanasia isn’t going to be the Teddy Bears Picnic.
It is said the director wrote the script with a Vietnam veteran in mind but Charles Band convinced him to do it about a Nazi as he felt that Hollywood wasn’t ready for such a concept. Kinski is delightfully demented in the lead while the opening credits would have made Saul Bass proud with a camera craning through the crawlspace.
As for Schmoeller’s earlier movie The Seduction (1982), it stars Morgan Fairchild (1950-), Andrew Stevens and (1955-) Michael Sarrazin (1940-2011 heart attack) and is the slickest piece of work from the director. There is some great imagery in the movie which tells of a Los Angeles newscaster who is stalked by one of her fans. And once more this narcissist suffers some kind of undiagnosed mental illness.
“I want to make love to you,” says a sweaty Andrew Stevens, peering from a darkened closet as he hides in Morgan Fairchild’s room. Such is the stalking element of The Seduction and it was the first screen role for the actress who had played in soap operas. She said she was suitable for the role and that there had been a case in Los Angeles where a reporter was stalked although she really didn’t study it to any degree.
She did however in the 1970s get grabbed by two men in a cab in New York, who threatened her for a couple of hours and then released her when she showed she could be strong and fearless. Thus she is the perfect Barbie doll for the movie while her acting chops show nothing particularly deep and the chemistry between she and Sarrazin really doesn’t exist.
Like Tourist Trap and Crawlspace, it took years for me to catch up with The Seduction. The film had been so damned that it seemed to disappear from view. But finally having caught up with all three of these cult movies, I was assured that Schmoeller was a talent and he now works in teaching film and working on small projects.
The Seduction was nominated for a number of Razzies including Fairchild for two and Variety said those involved would never work again. The director had to wait five years for another project while he insists it made money and gave him strong residuals.
“I thought Morgan Fairchild was badly miscast,” said the director who wanted someone like Theresa Russell but there was a problem with clueless and feuding producers.
Just a word on the climax and the shotgun scene and Fairchild said: “The movie was kind of groundbreaking for the time. It was the first time a stalker fan story was done and the first time the ‘girl’ turned the tables and chased HIM with a shotgun. Although after chasing him through the whole house with that gun, and missing him numerous times. I told the director that NO ONE could miss him that many times with a shotgun. It was getting embarrassing, for a Texan.”
As for summing up the director, he said in an interview: “I consider myself a filmmaker who has made a number of horror films. I think the horror film is greatly underrated. And it is clearly treated as the poor stepchild of films.”
This is true of this director and of his movies. He made Puppet Master (1989) for Full Moon and got no real credit although that movie is also termed some sort of cult item. The director considers one of his best films as the ‘lost’ Catacombs (1988) which was filmed in Italy. I haven’t seen it as yet but I can’t wait to throw on Tourist Trap again: “Mollleeeee!!”
Cult Film Alley 