Jay Rohr
The Weed Hacker Massacre is ripping up audiences this Halloween season. This horror comedy is a satirical stab at cynical Hollywood cash grabs, while also endeavoring to pay homage to legendary nightmare fuel such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Film Obsessive was able to sit down for a chat with writer Ray Spivey and star Allen Danziger to discuss the film.
This isn’t the first rodeo for either individual. Ray has penned a few motion pictures including a fright flick called Storage Locker. Allen Danziger is, perhaps, best known for starring in the celebrated Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where he played Jerry.
Below is an abridged transcript of our conversation. The full interview is available on YouTube as well as linked below. It contains several amusing anecdotes about things like digging graves, not to mention some expanded points about working in indie cinema. The Weed Hacker Massacre is currently available on Tubi and several other streaming platforms.
Hi, I’m Jay Rohr for Film Obsessive, and I’m here with Ray Spivey and Allen Danziger, and we’re here to discuss The Weed Hacker Massacre… so tell us about this film. What’s it about? It’s a horror comedy, correct?
RAY SPIVEY: Exactly, yeah. Alan, of course, is the living icon from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There’s a lot of you guys still alive, though, so you’re not all six feet under. But Alan, I’ve been friends for about 5, six years, and he wanted to do a comedy. And what better thing than to do something that’s a homage, a parody of what we’re seeing all the time is horror movies, made based on the all-time great horror movies, but they just do remakes after remakes there. And we just thought we’d have a little fun with it.
It’s an interesting concept. It basically comes down to The Weed Hacker Massacre is about a combination of events all sort of coming together at once. It’s people trying to do a remake, a sequel. There’s a guy with amnesia who thinks he might be the killer. There’s all kinds of twists and turns in the story along the way.
RAY SPIVEY: And I think that was the fun of it. The idea evolved, and we decided to follow the exploits of this doomed film crew. And all of us who have been on an indie set or any other kind of set knows that it’s Murphy’s Law. If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And one of our lead actors, Bobbie Grace, does a great job playing Rene Carpenter. She’s trying her best to put this piece together and get it to the finish line. She does a great job.
I really did appreciate her consternation throughout, especially as financial difficulties kept diminishing the crew. Was that something that you’re drawing from life experience?
RAY SPIVEY: Exactly, exactly. And I remember the first time I did it because I’ve always kind of worked my whole life in a kind of a business situation. And the crew was telling me, “Oh my God, you’re paying us at the end of the week. Some of these films we do, we don’t get paid till a month or two later.” I’m like, what? How does this model operate? But they were really happy to get paid weekly.
This isn’t the first rodeo for either of you. You’ve both done films together before, correct? I believe, Allen, you were in the film, Storage Locker.
ALLEN DANZIGER: Yeah, that’s how I met Ray and he was just so nice. He asked if he could write a scene for me to be in Storage Locker. After almost 50 years of not being in the movies, I don’t know, I just agreed because I liked Ray. Then as a result of that, other things have happened. I’ve done the voiceover for Cannibal Comedian that’s out now. I’m in My Dinner with Leatherface, which is a documentary on Gunnar Hansen. Another documentary called Chain Reactions, which is different takes by Patton Oswalt and some other directors of how Chainsaw has changed, literally changed their lives or changed cinema. So it was just a confluence of things happening and developing the movie that we just did, The Weed Hacker Massacre.
RAY SPIVEY: Right. It’s become so popular now at age 83 with the demand. I can’t afford to pay him to make another film.
ALLEN DANZIGER: It’s no different from how it was with Chainsaw. In fact, the real massacre took place after the movie came out because the movie’s making millions and the people that profited from it were the mafia.
Did you have any kind of flashbacks to working with the two different films? Do you ever get this sort of sense of nostalgia for Texas Chainsaw? Sort of like rhymes or echoes with what you’ve experienced?
ALLEN DANZIGER: Just the opposite. This is nothing like whatever happened before, which is true because Chainsaw was a small set. It was brutally hot. The whole thing was not an easy shoot. Then where I get whacked in the house, you didn’t want to be in that house very long because you had rotting bones, you had rotting meat. You had the Leatherface’s costume that he wore for like almost two months, and all the Febreze in the nation couldn’t take the smell out of what was going on there. So, it was a lot different, but it was almost like really a big production on Weed Hacker Massacre. I was really amazed at how many people were involved in this movie.
RAY SPIVEY: Our director, Jody Stelzig, did a great job.
Were there ever moments when you were finally getting into production where you had to sit back and make the unfortunate amputation on certain elements?
RAY SPIVEY: Yeah, one of our friends, a really great actor, we couldn’t hire him because he had just gone SAG. And If we had done this film SAG, it was the stunt people that was going to get us because you have to pay them a very high level rate of pay. And as we were working through it, we had like 15 stunt people on board. The daily rate would really have broken us. So we couldn’t include him in this one.
Besides the obvious, the Texas Chainsaw inspiration, were there any other films that you were sort of taking a page from or inspired by when it came to this, whether horror or comedy?
RAY SPIVEY: I think all the mass killer ones. There’s homages to one of my favorites, Shaun of the Dead. And there’s some things that are mimicking The Shining. There’s the ax through the door and things. But you know, these are all just very light touches just to give those fans a giggle about those great movies of the past.
That’s one of the elements of this movie that I did appreciate. There is a certain subtlety to the little nods that you make to other films. I wanted to ask about the design on one of your main, for lack of a better term, villains, the poker face entity throughout it. Who came up with that? Because I really loved that mask.
RAY SPIVEY: Well, I only came up with the name. We had kind of done away with some others who said that. And so then I had to go to work.
ALLEN DANZIGER: He put the mask together and I think that was brilliant, the way it looks and how it’s woven into the storyline.
When you’re working on something like this, do you ever have any trouble getting across to the cast, like the idea of what you’re going for?
RAY SPIVEY: This is one of those films we made it a point to have a read through. And one of our actors, Parrish Randall, who does a great job as Digger Gunner, told me in all the movies he’s been through, including Circus of the Dead, he never had a table reading. And that kind of surprised me. But that helped us iron out a lot of things there initially.
ALLEN DANZIGER: Ray asked me if there was a read through on Chainsaw and I said there was no read through. In fact, they would change scenes and, constantly. The writers and stuff, I think was stoned probably half of the time.
RAY SPIVEY: What I tried to do, and especially for Bobbie, who plays Renee Carpenter, the director, I tried to write the parts for them to emphasize their strengths. And I’ve worked with Bobbie three, 4 films now. So I know she’s amazing. She can do anything. But I kind of built the character around her. and her own personality.
Do you find that that’s something that you enjoy with independent cinema is that you have more of a degree of control over it?
RAY SPIVEY: Yeah, I think so. You can make those changes on the fly without having to go run it up corporate. That’s amazing. And a lot of times, because you’re so limited in your resources, you’re having to invent things all the time. When you’re under stress, a lot of times, and you come up with a solution, it can be sometimes five times more brilliant than the original idea.
ALLEN DANZIGER: A comparison is in Chainsaw, there’s a scene where Pam is walking up to the house from underneath the swing. Now, the suit said you can’t do that. They didn’t have a budget for it. Fortunately, Toby was able to, and Daniel Pearl had come up with some additional monies where they said, we’re making this. We’re doing it this way. If you fire us, fine, but we’re doing the scene.
RAY SPIVEY: We were with Daniel Pearl out in LA and talked about that. It’s probably the greatest dolly shot in cinematography.
How did you get your career going, Ray? What was the first step you took into this broad world of cinema?
RAY SPIVEY: It was hilarious. I was, you know, looking up your site and enjoying it last night. And one of your fellow writers had written a piece on Waiting for Guffman with Chris Guest. That’s how I kind of got started. They contacted me. I still don’t know exactly how. They knew I was a local artist. And they had me paint a painting for that movie. And it was a lot of fun, so then I sat around for a while and I decided years later to make a few documentaries, took a screenwriting course locally, read books and jumped into it.
Allen, until recently, you had sort of stepped away from acting. After Texas Chainsaw, you didn’t really go in that direction. What has really brought you back to being in films?
ALLEN DANZIGER: It was just a chance occurrence of meeting Ray and him taking me off of the heap. We talked about the different ideas and he came up with the script, it just got funnier and funnier, and I said, if there’s a part for me and you want me to do it. And he came up with Sheriff.
What about this cast? Where did you pull them all in from? Was it just your general casting situation or have you worked with a lot of these people before?
RAY SPIVEY: Some of them are experienced actors. Molly, who plays Candy Kersey and she was a little bit part in Storage Locker. She’s kind of a natural. David Trevino, who plays Willie Wonder, is a graduate from Texas A&M and acting. Bobbie Grace is an actor. Mike Gasaway, who plays Mayor Dick is a full-time actor. But we try to get people who are not actors and give them those kind of roles that they can handle. You can kind of tell they might be a little rough around the edges, but I thought they did a great job overall.
ALLEN DANZIGER: I was also hoping to have grandpa from Chainsaw, John Dugan in for a part with me as a deputy. Unfortunately, he had a knee replacement. But if we do a sequel, I’m hoping we can bring in a lot of the old timers to do some cameos.
What was the hardest part of this production?
RAY SPIVEY: I think the size of it sometimes got pretty big. And there’s a lot of physicality in it for a horror comedy. We got there to the last night of shooting and we’re behind schedule; we’re trying to shoot the big fight scene. Jody Stelzig has done a great job of choreographing. We did it with one camera, and the toughest part was everyone was tired. They wanted to go home. It was two in the morning. And you just got to coax them into, come on, throw one more punch. You can do it. But I thought it went pretty well.
ALLEN DANZIGER: Also, I think financially. Ray carried a lot of the load and, you know, did what I could. It’s always a concern or a problem is raising money for films. ‘Cause most of them don’t make it.
What’s the situation where people are most likely going to be able to see this?
RAY SPIVEY: Yeah, we start on Friday. We’re going to be on Tubi, Amazon Prime, Fandango at home, and a whole list of other platforms. We’ve done the film festivals and won a bunch of awards. We won an award from the Los Angeles International Horror Film Fest and I wasn’t even expecting it.
