One of my favorite riffs for the Oozing Skull is one we used in the trailer: a car drives off the road and plunges down into a canyon where it explodes and then begins a seemingly endless, fiery log-roll down the rest of the hill. Trace says “Wow, the car is really milking its death scene!”

I’m so glad this is the first film we used for the launch of Cinematic Titanic. It has everything: the way-too buxom Regina Carroll; Grant Williams, the original “Incredible Shrinking Man”; the amazingly little Angelo Rossito, who’ll you’ll recognize as “the Master” from “Mad Max “Beyond Thunderdome”; and big, seven-foot tall John Bloom, famous (in my mind) as the man who provided the body in “The Incredible Two Headed Transplant”. Put them all together you get “The Oozing Skull”, a movie riffers’ dream with several gratuitous car explosions to boot.

For some reason the locations in this movie were a real trip down memory lane for me, The shooting of “Oozing skull” all takes place in and around Los Angeles, and having spent over 10 years there, you start to notice some of the landmarks that turn up in these movies. First, there’s the car chase up on the Mullholland that descends down into Coldwater Canyon, on its way to the car crack up that I mentioned earlier. One day while screening this movie, it hit me: Hey, that’s how I drive home to the valley on my way home from Hollywood, that’s my street--Wow! This movie has a way of showing those kind of not-so-famous parts of LA. Like Dr. Lloyd Trenton’s lair looks exactly like the house my old landlord lived in up in Laurel Canyon when I first moved out. Also, I the fight on the top of the building between Grant Williams and Richard Smedly takes place above the Levi store in Van Nuys where my brother and I used to buy jeans. You see that a lot in Los Angeles, places they drive by in the movies – in fact I know someone who used to live next door to house where they shot  “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane”. So you see, I am indeed connected to this business we call “show”.

But the one location I can’t quite figure out is where director Al Adamson and producer Sam Sherman staged the car crashes, considering they used a lot of them as demonstrated here in “The Oozing Skull” and also in the film we’re currently riffing live “East Meets Watts”.  The cars in both films crash in pretty much the same place and I wonder were it was. I’m probably just not getting a bead on the smashography. I’ve gotten to know the film’s producer Sam Sherman a bit over that last year and half, having negotiated the film rights for some of the other films we’ve riffed, as well as “The Oozing Skull”.  My perception is he is very thorough. Crashing even a crummy car must have been pretty involved for him and director Adamson. Even through this was the seventies, I’m sure you had to hire a reliable and probably expensive demolition expert who had a rock solid (and safe) method of setting off a petrol-bomb once the car crashes. You really don’t get second takes with stuff like that. There must have been loads of city permits, and maybe even a special producer hired who does that sort of thing: pull all the permits you’d need from the city, hire a fire marshal would not only have to be on hand, but probably book a hook and ladder for the day as well -- just in case. Maybe even hire a special camera/operator package too: someone who knew how to over-crank the film speed to pick up all the flying debris and balls of fire so it would look good in slow motion on the big screen.  Don’t forget, once the shot was “in the can”, hiring the local towing/salvage company to haul away the broke and burned out car once you had the shot.

Maybe I’m just over-thinking it all: I suppose they could have driven out to Chatsworth and just as easily did a “dump and dash” with a couple of P.A.s running the camera.