Jerry Warren: Cinema’s Own Dr. Frankenstein
In the 1980s, there was a filmmaker in Hong Kong named Godfrey Ho who directed over 80 films during that decade, most of which were incomplete. He used what came to be known as the "cut-and-paste" method, where he took a pre-existing film that he licensed, trimmed it down, and spliced in new scenes that he shot, which he would then recycle in several more of his films afterwards.
Richard Harrison credited Ho's rampant usage of his footage with his decision to quit acting, due to the damage done to his reputation.
Ho continued this practice, however, and his films would become notorious in bad movie circles, garnering him the title of "the Ed Wood of Hong Kong", and being lampooned online in series like Ninja the Mission Force, which sees its characters spliced together with and dubbed over random public domain films like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Orson Welles' The Stranger.
Godfrey Ho may be the most well-known proponent of the "cut-and-paste" method, but he is far from the first, nor is he the worst. That honor may just go to American filmmaker Jerry Warren.
Jerry started in the business as a teenager in the 1940s, performing bit parts in films like Anchors Aweigh with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. By 1956, he directed his first film Man Beast, and would then go on to produce "classics" like The Incredible Petrified World and Teenage Zombies. These films would often use stock footage from unfinished films.
By the 1960s, Jerry decided that making movies was way harder and more costly than he had bargained for. He could've just decided that this wasn't his racket and called it a day, but Jerry wasn't a quitter. He figured he could devise a better way to make films. Better for him, at least.
So, through his company Associated Distributors Pictures, he started purchasing foreign films and re-editing them, trimming them down and adding new scenes. His first target was a Swedish film called Space Invasion of Lapland, which was already in English, so there was no need for any dubbing. You may even say there was no need to recut the film at all, but Jerry begged to differ.
Now, this sort of thing can be done well. In 1956, director Terry Morse released his edit of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in North America, which trimmed the original film to nearly half its length and added new scenes with Raymond Burr as an American journalist. It was a quick and cheap way to re-package and homogenize the film for western audiences, but it was done with some tact. They tried to match up Burr's scenes with the original film so that they gelled together well and the difference wasn't too noticeable. This version ended up being the gateway drug for millions of people into the world of tokusatsu.
What Jerry Warren does is another story. Take, for example, Attack of the Mayan Mummy, which aired on television in 1964. This film mostly consists of stock footage from a Mexican film called La momia Azteca. Whatever sort of issue Jerry has with the Aztecs, I have no clue.
Like Terry Morse, Warren trims down the film to around half of its original runtime, and adds new scenes featuring his regular troupe of actors, including a wrap-around device with a scientist named Dr. Munson telling his story to a newspaper editor played by Bruno Ve Sota. However, these scenes are of a significantly lower production quality than the Mexican footage, with static wide shots of cheap sets occupied by two or three actors who ramble on for minutes on end. Some shots linger on for over two minutes, with the camera remaining stationary as the actors spit out exposition.
The characters from La momia Azteca are given new American-sounding names like Dr. Edmund Redding and Ann Taylor. Sometimes their dialogue will be translated into English by dub actors, but a lot of the time, Dr. Munson will describe what the characters are saying in the third person, as we are watching them talk, instead of letting us hear what they have to say.
Warren uses the same technique as producer/director A.J. Nelson in The Creeping Terror. After all the audio he recorded was either damaged or lost, he decided to have a narrator overdub the whole film, describing what the actors were supposed to be saying. Apparently, this seemed like a better alternative to hiring more dub actors. Or better yet, just not releasing the thing at all.
Attack of the Mayan Mummy can be seen as simply a cynical attempt to re-package a foreign-language film for American TV audiences who can't read, but with his next two projects, things get a lot messier.
In March of 1965, Warren released two new films on a double bill, Curse of the Stone Hand and Face of the Screaming Werewolf.
Curse of the Stone Hand uses footage from not one, but two films made in Chile in the 1940s, La dama de la muerte and La casa está vacía. Each film is trimmed down to under half an hour, new footage is spliced into the second film featuring John Carradine as an old groundskeeper at La casa vacía, and then the two films are thrown together to make one incoherent mess. It's just a series of scenes shown without any proper context, and it makes it hard to follow whatever the hell is supposed to be going on.
Warren cherrypicks the moments in the films that feature music without dialogue, so that he can dub over his own dialogue. Then, when we actually see the actors speaking, the music cuts out. The score keeps dropping in and out like you're watching a Turkish mockbuster.
During a scene, Warren randomly cuts to a shot of John Carradine, so that in the next scene he can tell the other characters what he overheard last night. Jerry inserts his footage into the film so haphazardly that, all of a sudden, the actors, the room they're in, and the building it's located in will all completely change appearance.
If you think things are bad now, wait until you see his magnum opus of garbage, Face of the Screaming Werewolf.
This one clocks in at just shy of an hour, and half of it consists of stock footage from Attack of the Mayan Mummy, which, again, was already overdubbed stock footage from La momia Azteca. You're watching stock footage of stock footage! Stock-ception!
Then, after a while, they start using footage from the film La casa del terror, which I've seen before. In this film, a mad scientist steals a mummy played by Lon Chaney, who then turns into the Wolf Man! The film was mainly a vehicle for Mexican comedian Tin Tan, but in Face of the Screaming Werewolf, he is barely ever shown, and all the comedy and musical numbers are removed. You aren't missing much.
Face of the Screaming Werewolf has never been remastered, and is only available in a crappy VHS print. For the sake of picture quality, I will mostly use stills from the original films Casa del terror and Momia Azteca, but if you wanna see what Face of the Screaming Werewolf looks like…
At first, I thought they were going to combine the two films by replacing La momia Azteca in the stock footage with Lon Chaney's mummy, and then have him turn into the werewolf. But nope, there's two different mummies running around, wreaking havoc in different places, just to make things even more disjointed.
Eventually, the footage from Momia Azteca ends and it just shows Casa del terror, with some scant new footage spliced in, showing two cops on the trail of Lon Chaney’s werewolf. These two serve nothing to the plot, they don’t do Jack.
At the end, they show the best part of Casa del terror where Tin Tan whacks the Wolf Man with a torch.
The Wolf Man lies dead on the floor, with the place burning all around him. The cops then walk in, clearly in a different location, and the soundtrack cuts out, replaced with room noise and the sounds of the cops' footsteps. We are shown a blazing fire with no sound to accompany it. One of the cops then remarks on the scene. "Take a look. They talk about monsters and werewolves. Heh, just an ordinary guy. It’s great what the imagination can do, huh?" The End. The final cherry on the crap sundae.
After making his series of stock footage hackjobs in the mid-'60s, Warren would only make two more complete films: The Wild World of Batwoman in 1966 (which was screened on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000) and Frankenstein Island in 1981.
He succumbed to lung cancer in 1988 at the age of 63. In an interview shortly before his death, he said, "I was in the business to make money. I never, ever tried in any way to compete, or to make something worthwhile. I only did enough to get by, so they would buy it, so it would play, and so I’d get a few dollars. It’s not very fair to the public, I guess, but that was my attitude...You didn’t have to go all out and make a really good picture."
