Demi Moore and a 3-D worm monster.
The story of Parasite, which filmmaker Charles Band counts as the twelfth production he was involved with, began behind-the-scenes on a movie called The Alchemist, which Band directed for producer Lawrence Appelbaum - but since The Alchemist was delayed and wasn't released until long after Parasite made its way out into the world, Band counts that movie as #17 on his list. So we'll circle back and talk about that one some other day. In the meantime, let's dig into Parasite.
3-D has basically been around as long as movie cameras have. A patent for a 3-D film process had even been filed before the start of the 20th century. A 3-D movie would be made here and there as the decades went by, but the Hollywood studios weren’t really interested in cashing in on the gimmick on a large scale. That changed when the 1950s rolled around and they realized they had to start competing with television. How could they get people to go out to see their movies instead of staying home and watching the tube? The answer must be to get the images to jump off the screen and right into the viewer’s face!
That thinking gave us the golden era of 3-D. Movies like House of Wax, Dial M for Murder, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and many others reached theatres in three dimensions. But that golden era sputtered out in just a few years, and 3-D once again became an oddity.
One of the reasons why the ’50s 3-D boom came to a quick end was because that style of 3-D required two film prints to be projected simultaneously. This was a real headache for projectionists. To see the 3-D effect, audience members had to wear glasses with colorfully tinted lenses, usually a red filter over one eye and a blue filter over the other. This caused its share of literal headaches for movie-goers. In 1970, a new process called Stereovision was invented. This version of 3-D only required one film print, and it was a much more practical system for theatrical exhibition. The viewer still needed to wear glasses to see the 3-D effect, but at least you didn’t have to look at the world through a Mario Bava tint. Still, there wasn’t much call for 3-D in the ’70s, outside of softcore sex comedies and Andy Warhol movies.
Then, in 1980, a pair of Xerox salesmen decided to get into filmmaking by producing a Western. They also decided they could draw in viewers by making the film in 3-D, figuring the modern youth might be intrigued by a gimmick they weren’t particularly familiar with. Their film, Comin’ at Ya!, reached theatres in July of 1981 and became a surprising box-office success. That success caught the attention of Hollywood and helped kick off a new 3-D resurgence. Suddenly, the gimmick that had been gathering dust for years looked like the next big thing.
And Charles Band was ready to get in on the fun.
Band had already established himself as a producer and distributor who knew how to spot the latest trends. He had been involved in genre filmmaking for years and was one of the pioneers of the home video boom, having started his own video distribution company in 1978. Eventually, he would create Full Moon Entertainment, but Full Moon wasn’t even a twinkle in Band’s eye yet when he decided to make Parasite.
Band had been working with actor Robert Glaudini and screenwriter Alan J. Adler on The Alchemist, and the trio started throwing around ideas for a science fiction movie set in a bleak version of the 1990s. The resulting story was a post-nuclear nightmare in which acid rain has made American cities uninhabitable, gangs roam the wastelands, and cash money has become obsolete. Silver coins and lemons are still popular, though.
At the center of it all is Dr. Paul Dean, a scientist on the run from the government-sanctioned merchants who once employed him. Unfortunately for Paul, he has a little problem growing inside his body: a hideous parasite designed to reproduce and kill.
That premise was exactly the sort of thing Charles Band could get excited about. And when the success of Comin’ at Ya! suggested that audiences might once again be willing to put on 3-D glasses, Band saw an opportunity.
He brought in Chris Condon, the creator of the Stereovision process, to help turn Parasite into a 3-D spectacle. In his memoir Confessions of a Puppetmaster, Band recalled that he and effects artist Stan Winston had been discussing the possibilities of 3-D. Band wasn’t particularly impressed by the technology, but he liked the idea of using it as an old-fashioned audience participation gimmick. That was the kind of 3-D he wanted for Parasite: not just making the picture look three-dimensional, but occasionally making the audience duck.
And he knew exactly what needed to come flying out of the screen: the parasite. Band told Stan Winston that, because the movie didn’t have a huge budget, the creature itself had to be perfect. It had to be disgusting. When it emerged from its human host and lunged toward the audience, Band wanted people to recoil.
Winston delivered. The creature is an organic, gooey, eyeless, wormlike monster with a fat body and a head dominated by rows of razor sharp teeth. It is exactly the sort of practical-effects creation that gives a low-budget movie an advantage over its more expensive competition. You may not believe everything happening around it, but when that thing comes crawling toward the camera, you know you’re looking at something that was physically built.
Winston was already becoming a major name in effects work when he made Parasite. He had previously worked on Charles Band’s Mansion of the Doomed, and he was moving toward the sort of blockbuster assignments that would make him one of the most celebrated effects artists in Hollywood. According to Band, Winston even turned down Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to work on Parasite after Band promised that Winston would have an opportunity to co-direct the effects sequences.
One production was underway, Band, Winston, cinematographer Mac Ahlberg, producer Irwin Yablans and others gathered to watch some Parasite dailies in a screening room. They put on their 3-D glasses, started the footage and were thrilled by what they saw. Then Yablans started screaming. The producer was furious. He thought the 3-D looked terrible. He declared that the movie was shit and threatened to shut the production down because it was his money. Then somebody noticed the problem: one of the lenses had fallen out of Yablans’ glasses. So Yablans had been watching the 3-D footage through a pair of broken glasses while angrily declaring that the movie’s 3-D was unusable. The production continued.
Ahlberg was another important piece of the Parasite puzzle. The Swedish-born director of photography would become one of Band’s most important collaborators, working with him for decades. His photography helped Parasite look more expensive than its reported budget of around $750,000.
Ahlberg and Band shot much of the movie’s exterior material around California’s Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park, one of those familiar low budget movie locations that has appeared in countless science fiction and horror films.
Then there was the casting. Band wanted a particular kind of actress for the female lead. He had been watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he was impressed by Karen Allen’s Marion Ravenwood. He wanted somebody who was attractive but also smart, aggressive, and capable of handling herself in an adventure movie. So he told casting director Johanna Ray to find him the next Karen Allen. She found Demi Moore.
Moore was only around twenty years old when she made Parasite, and the movie arrived very early in her career. She plays Patricia, a young woman living in the harsh future that Band and Adler created. Today, Moore has reportedly described Parasite as the worst movie she has ever been in, which makes the film an entertaining piece of early career archaeology for fans of her later work. But Band's memoir reveals that there was more going on behind the scenes.
Band wrote that he and Moore had a brief affair during production. Both were married at the time, and Band described the relationship as intense but short-lived. He remembered meeting Moore at a bar near Sunset Boulevard before heading back to his office, which contained a remarkable piece of Hollywood history. Hanging on the wall was the notorious poster for I Spit on Your Grave, featuring a barely clothed woman standing in a forest. Moore recognized the image because it was her. Before becoming a movie star, Moore had done modeling work to make some money. According to Band, the producers of I Spit on Your Grave had hired her for the photograph used on that infamous poster. So, while making a 3-D monster movie in 1982, the young actress suddenly found herself face-to-face with a giant poster of her own backside hanging in her director’s office. It’s a very strange bit of Hollywood history that feels appropriate to Parasite.
Because Parasite is nothing if not a collection of strange pieces thrown together in the hope that the audience will have a good time. There’s Demi Moore. There’s Cherie Currie of The Runaways playing a punk of the apocalypse. There’s Scott Thomson and Luca Bercovici, both of whom would become familiar faces in the Charles Band/Empire Pictures world. There’s Al Fann of the Harlem Theatrical Ensemble. And there’s Vivian Blaine, the star of the stage and screen who had played Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls back in 1955.
This movie sounds like it should be a blast: a post-nuclear future, punk gangs, laser guns, a monstrous parasite, Stan Winston effects, Demi Moore, Cherie Currie, Vivian Blaine and a new 3-D process designed to send objects directly into the audience. And Parasite certainly delivers some of those things. Blood and slime seem to ooze toward the screen. A snake strikes at the audience. Characters and objects are thrown toward the camera during fights. And, most importantly, Stan Winston’s toothy parasite repeatedly makes a bid to escape the movie and invade the theatre.
The problem is that there’s a whole movie between those moments, and that movie is a clunker.
Parasite drags itself through its story, feeling much longer than its brief 84-minute running time. The post-apocalyptic setting has potential, but the screenplay never generates enough momentum to make the world interesting. The characters spend a lot of time wandering around while the movie waits for the next opportunity to show off its 3-D effects. It’s almost as if the filmmakers were so excited about having objects pop out of the screen that they forgot to make the stuff happening around those objects compelling.
But there are worse reasons to watch a movie. Parasite is a fascinating time capsule of the early ’80s 3-D revival. It captures the moment when filmmakers realized that the old gimmick could be revived with newer technology and sold to an audience that had grown up without it.
And then there’s the creature. Stan Winston’s parasite is the star of the show. It’s nasty and perfectly suited to the 3-D gimmick. Whenever it lunges toward the camera, Parasite briefly becomes exactly the movie it promised to be. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of those moments.
So Parasite is worth checking out as a curiosity, especially if you’re interested in the history of 3-D, Charles Band, Stan Winston, Demi Moore or low budget ’80s science fiction. Just don’t expect the movie itself to be nearly as exciting as the story of how it was made.
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