By Douglas Bankston

Writer-director-actor Larry Blamire’s feature The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001) was a dead-on comedic re-creation of low-budget, B-grade monster/sci-fi movies of the 1950s, complete with corny, stilted dialogue, cheesy special effects, aliens, monsters, a skeleton risen from the dead and ubiquitous gaps in plot logic. The movie became a cult hit, and Sony TriStar picked it up for a theatrical release in 2004. Now Blamire returns (and so does the skeleton) in the aptly entitled sequel: The Lost Skeleton Returns Again. The original cast reprises their roles… mostly. Those that were offed in the first picture conveniently come back as “identical twins,” and aliens and monsters once again make appearances. The follow up is an old-fashioned jungle adventure film in which Dr. Paul Armstrong (Blamire), embittered after science let him down, is roped into finding the valuable Geranium-90 that rests in the hands of the Cantaloupe People. (Yes, really.)  

 Shooting The Lost Skeleton Returns Again on location.

Cadavra, shot in standard-def digital video with a Canon XL1 and converted to black-and-white, cost a mere $60,000 to shoot and finish all the way to the film print stage. The Lost Skeleton Returns Again cost a bit more. “This new one was about $500,000,” Blamire says. “It’s a few years later, and you have inflation on the one hand, and on the other we had twice as many actors and a different level of special effects. We wanted to up the production value so that it looks different from the first film.”

The Lost Skeleton camera team (from left) cinematographer A.J. Rickert-Epstein, 2nd AC Noah Applebaum and 1st AC Steve Murray.

Lost Skeleton Returns Again was produced under Blamire’s Bantam Street production banner and recently started making the festival rounds. “We have interest from distributors and are shopping it around with hopes of a theatrical release,” Blamire says. Because of the precedent with Sony, the studio has the option to match any distribution offer he receives.

Using reflectors and negative fill was a balancing act on the location-shot Lost Skeleton.

Blamire secured production funds via investors. “We’re at the point where we go from film to film by seeking out investors,” he explains. “Skeleton is something like eight investors. In the case of Dark and Stormy Night, it was a single investor.”

The dramatically entitled Dark and Stormy Night Blamire refers to is his other new feature, shot on the heels of Lost Skeleton Returns Again, thanks to an opportunistic timing of funds. The cast and crew just moved from one film to the next. Both movies were shot by cinematographer Anthony J. Rickert-Epstein. “A.J. came highly recommended,” Blamire says. “He is a terrific, all-around filmmaker. He’s got a film that’s being shopped around called Fingerman: Dr. London and the Triangle Force. It’s hilarious! We have similar sensibilities.”

Larry Blamire and cinematographer A.J. Rickert-Epstein shooting Dark and Stormy Night.

Lost Skeleton Returns Again was shot in standard definition to maintain the same aesthetic as Cadavra. However, the aspect ratio was widened to 2.35:1 to suit a jungle picture. “We shot with three Panasonic DVX100s,” notes Rickert-Epstein. “The aspect ratio was an in-camera effect. Panasonic makes an anamorphic adapter that optically squeezes the image into 16:9, and we cropped into that to make it 2.35:1 for the A camera. B and C cameras were in digital-squeeze mode so that they would look similar to A because we only had one adapter.”

With Lost Skeleton Returns Again taking place outdoors — Sable Ranch in Santa Clarita and the Arboretum in Arcadia serving as stand-in jungle locations — modeling the exterior lighting was a challenge for Rickert-Epstein. “I tried to find shaded areas to avoid punchy sunlight coming down through the forest,” he explains. “I would have mirrors or shiny boards 100' away to bounce sunlight into a crevice beneath a tree. I basically imported light from wherever I could find it. It was like ‘light irrigation.’ There was a lot of minute-by-minute adjustment of the shiny boards. My key grip, Axel Llorens, was really good.”

The effects ante was upped with a healthy dose of foreground miniatures. “This was the second time I had done miniatures,” notes Rickert-Epstein. “The first was in college, where I made mushrooms appear twice as tall as the actors. That experience helped. Understanding that concept allowed me to move quicker.”

Shooting a miniature "old dark house" for Dark and Stormy Night

“Right after Skeleton we shot Dark and Stormy Night,” says Blamire. “We shot that in HD. That movie is a take on the 1930s murder mystery, an ‘old, dark house’ movie, as they call it. Dark and Stormy Night was emulating an old movie, not a low-budget movie, so we didn’t want to go with standard def on that. It’s also going to be in black-and-white. Tony Tremblay, the brilliant production designer on both these movies, did these great 1930s mansion sets for us on a soundstage and also did a miniature house. All the exteriors are miniatures.”

Blamire (left) directs actor Dan Conroy on the set of Dark and Stormy Night.

With a budget of just over $1 million, Dark and Stormy Night was the opposite of the Skeleton production. “Being on stage was completely different,” recalls Rickert-Epstein. “There was so much more control available to me. I could pull out walls when I needed to, put the camera on a scissor-lift, all kinds of stuff.”

It also entailed an entirely different shooting approach with much larger Panavised Sony HDW-F900 cameras. Explains Blamire, “When you shoot a film that is potentially talky and static — people trapped in a house, there’s not a lot of action — we tried to make up for that with camera movement. You don’t want to zoom because that takes you out of the 1930s. We did a lot of dolly. One shot was of all 16 subjects in the living room listening to the reading of the will. We set up what we called the ‘two-headed monster,’ which was two full camera crews on a dolly, and we did a slow track along every suspect in the 30' room. One camera is getting the close-ups, and the other is getting the wide. It’s fantastic!”

“We came up with a name for whenever we moved the camera,” adds Rickert-Epstein. “We called it ‘pulling an Archie,’ because it seemed like every time we were on the Archie character, we’d be moving the camera.”

The lighting techniques in those classic “dark house” movies of the 1930s were, it can be argued, rather sloppy and utilitarian. Not wanting to emulate that look entirely, Rickert-Epstein chose a middle ground. “They didn’t care about shadows back in those days,” he says. “There would be five or six shadows from one person due to unmotivated light. That distracted me. I split the difference between soft lighting and hard lighting to get a hint of that look but with less unmotivated light. I usually used 2Ks and below. The only thing bigger than that was a 10K, which we used for lightning.”