#jack shrum

A little over 20 years ago a friend and I were making a sprawling epic of an SOV horror film called RIVERHAUS RANSOM. On a night totally unrelated to the process I was driving down the interstate and smashed my 1988 Chevrolet Celebrity into a deer, sending it flying over the hood and onto the side of the road. I was fine, the deer was not. The Celebrity was somewhere in the middle, matted with a bit of hair, spattered with blood and left with a severed coolant line and some other miscellaneous issues that would make it sound like the yawning apocalypse every time its engine was running for the brief remainder of its life.

There are a few select scenes in RIVERHAUS RANSOM (pictured above) during which you can hear it bellowing out of hell down the street, its garbled engine noises taking over the VHS camera's meager audio capabilities and adding a new kind of ambience into the mix. When I really think about it, this is why I appreciate homemade movies in the first place. Not because they all need to have a beater screaming for dear life (and ending deer life), but because they capture a moment in time that even small indie films can't manage. A time when a group of like-minded—or not—folks got a wild hare up their ass to make something, even if that something can barely muster material worthy of a z-grade rating.

From one Kentucky filmmaker—hey, I can call myself whatever the hell I want—to another, it was my solemn duty to pop in Jack Shrum's BLOOD HUNTER at the wild-eyed witch's hour. Released in 1996, just a few years prior to the filming of RIVERHAUS RANSOM, BLOOD HUNTER tells the tale of Victor, a vampire who relocated to rural Kentucky due to the similarities he finds its environment has in relation to the vague Russian location from which he hails. It's here that he posts up in a cave and lives a relatively quiet life as a nighttime auto mechanic, at least when he's not killing some of the more unsavory denizens of Brownsville. 

Shrum wasn't originally supposed to play the blood-sucking lead, but that didn't stop him from delivering plenty of deliciously dry one-liners you can see coming from a mile away. They're all welcome, and it's clear everyone involved in the film was very welcome in town, too, as they brought a slice of Hollywood to add to the local flavor in a place that apparently didn't even have any stoplights at the time. Who could fault their enthusiasm? There are plenty of locations that give residents a chance to laugh it up in the background, or even step into the occasional role. Shrum loves tasking his actors with spewing out full scenes of dialogue exchanges without any cuts, which makes it extra delightful when an actor stumbles over a word in one of their final lines. You can practically feel the "fuck it, we're not doing that scene again" energy floating through the air. There are almost no actors here anyway outside of Chuck Ellis, who plays Sheriff Ben Taylor from deep down within his soul. 

When BLOOD HUNTER came out it made the local news in an incredible time capsule of a report that's included in VHShitfest's Blu-ray, which gives the film about as loving a home as humanly possible. BLOOD HUNTER was produced for around $18,000 depending on who you ask, most of which came from Shrum himself and little of which is visible on screen at any single moment. It may not be a masterpiece even by the standards of its contemporaries, but it was money well spent, clearly, and the only fallout was that poor fella who played the child molester. Apparently everyone thought this role reflected reality and his reputation quickly turned to dirt, forcing him to relocate.