Unsung Auteurs: Ken Wiederhorn

By Erin Free

FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: writer/director Ken Wiederhorn, who helmed Shock Waves, Eyes Of A Stranger, Return Of The Living Dead II and A House In The Hills.

The cinematic auteur is usually a figure driven by a desperate, pulsating need not just to create, but to communicate their own particular worldview via fictional storytelling or documentary filmmaking. In most cases, these auteurs – even if they are branded “journeyman” directors or “hacks” – need to make the films they do, and often continue to do so, even if at great personal and financial cost. Qualitative issues aside, even after the very public financial disaster of his epic western Heaven’s Gate, that film’s divisive writer and director, Michael Cimino, didn’t stop making movies. Similarly, The Wachowskis were not felled by Speed Racer, and even Roger Christian forged on after Battlefield Earth.

All of which brings us to Ken Wiederhorn, a director who almost fell into filmmaking, and ended up creating an interesting body of work almost in spite of himself. “My career ambition was to become a documentary producer,” Wiederhorn once said, alongside which he also happened to make some pretty compelling and often highly memorable horror flicks, broad comedies and thrillers. Though often merely taking what was offered to him, and often ending up unsatisfied with the results, Ken Wiederhorn nevertheless infused many of these projects with a distinct personal style…regardless of what he might say.

Ken Wiederhorn was born in 1945 in Queens, New York. He attended Kenyon College in Ohio for two years, but dropped out during his sophomore year, and returned to New York. Pursuing his ambition to become a documentary producer, Wiederhorn got a job as a mail boy at major US TV network CBS. Diligent and enterprising, he worked his way up from gofer to editor and eventually became a news producer. Within this, Wiederhorn also studied film at Columbia University, where he teamed with fellow student Reuben Trane on a dual thesis film called Manhattan Melody, which ended up winning the first Student Academy Award in the Drama category in 1973. After graduating, Wiederhorn returned to CBS.

Then he was drawn into the heady world of independent filmmaking. Wiederhorn’s thesis partner Reuben Trane had secured funding to produce a movie, with the proviso from his investors that it had to be a horror movie because that was the genre most likely to turn a significant profit. Trane asked Wiederhorn to work on concepts and direct, and he took a break from CBS’s doco department, jumped on a plane to Florida, nutted out some ideas, and got behind the camera for what would eventually become the 1977 cult favourite Shock Waves.

The original *Shock Waves* movie poster.

Anyone who hung around video stores in the 1980s and 1990s will remember the cover of this inventive little shocker staring back at them from the crowded shelves, likely peering out threateningly from between titles like Chopping Mall and Trick Or Treat. With a plot to literally die for, the excellently titled Shock Waves is the grim, darkly humorous tale of a Nazi scientific bigwig (played by Peter Cushing, no less!) who has created a horde of underwater Third Reich zombies. There’s enough there for about, well, three late-1970s exploitation shockers, and Wiederhorn jammed his lurid little flick tight, as his Nazi zombies wreak havoc on a young Brooke Adams, among others.

Shock Waves is a terrific genre-splice piece which has garnered a small cult over the years, especially since its DVD release. Wiederhorn announced himself as a highly imaginative filmmaker with this schlocky little gem, but he has always been decidedly disparaging about the film, and his own work on it. “We didn’t even know what we were doing on that film,” Wiederhorn told The Flashback Files in 2013. “Peter Cushing used to watch me trying to work out where to put the camera. And he would walk up to me and whisper: ‘Dear boy, might I make a suggestion?’ And he was always right!”

Curiously, the modest success of Shock Waves didn’t endear Wiederhorn to the serious folk at CBS’s doco department. Concerned about his career prospects, Wiederhorn accepted an offer to direct 1979’s King Frat, a very, very broad comedy about a group of frat boys who engage in a farting contest…yes, a farting contest. Wiederhorn wasn’t proud of his work on that one, but there’s something strikingly bold about the complete and utter prurience of its premise and the director’s wholesale embracing of it.

Wiederhorn brushed himself off and then got close to the lurid genius of Shock Waves with the 1981 horror-thriller Eyes Of A Stranger, a Hitchcock-style stalk-and-slash effort juiced by effects legend Tom Savini’s garishly unrestrained brand of bloodletting. While the film’s decidedly mercenary producers pushed Wiederhorn for more gore, the director concentrated on the suspense, and crafted something truly compelling with this story of a news anchor-woman (The Love Boat’s Lauren Tewes) stalked by a serial rapist. The film also notably features the debut big screen performance of the great Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is excellent as Tewes’ traumatised mute sister.

Jennifer Jason Leigh in *Eyes Of A Stranger.*

In one of the most amusing bait-and-switch moves ever pulled in cinematic history, Wiederhorn was next offered the script Call Me Meathead, an ET: The Extra-Terrestrial rip-job about a group of kids at a summer camp who encounter an alien. Thanks to a canny and highly mercenary rights-holding producer and eager studio, Wiederhorn’s goofy, silly comedy was slapped with the wholly inappropriate title Meatballs II to near-criminally and misleadingly cash in on the Bill Murray-starring 1979 comedy classic Meatballs. “Columbia Tristar saw that they could draw an audience with this, and they decided to go with it,” Wiederhorn told The Flashback Files in 2013. “But people had no idea they were being bamboozled! From my point of view, it was a fucking calamity!”

Wiederhorn had a happier sequel switcheroo with his next film. The writer/director had a bunch of scripts in his drawer, and when a cash-driven producer read one about a teen who has a run-in with a bunch of zombies, he asked Wiederhorn to reshape it into Return Of The Living Dead II, a sequel to cult hero Dan O’Bannon’s fantastic punk-inflected 1985 comedy horror zombie flick. Though only very tenuously connected to the original (itself unconnected to George A. Romero’s similarly titled zombie series), Wiederhorn’s Return Of The Living Dead II is a fun, freaky, youth-driven splatter-fest that sees the director fusing his horror and comedy interests with a real sense of cartoonish flair.

Michael Madsen and Helen Slater in *A House In The Hills*.

After Return Of The Living Dead II, Wiederhorn moved into episodic TV, helming instalments of Freddy’s Nightmares, 21 Jump Street and Dark Justice before returning to features with 1993’s A House In The Hills. “I like it a lot,” Wiederhorn has said. “In my opinion, it’s the only really good movie I’ve made.” Though Wiederhorn is certainly selling himself short here, A House In The Hills is a nifty low budget thriller that effectively mixes in dark comedy and quirky romance as Helen Slater’s aspiring actress and house-sitter tangles with Michael Madsen’s strangely alluring thief. The film is very well-performed and Wiederhorn cleverly manages its shifts and tones, again displaying his gifts for unusual material. But for Ken Wiederhorn, that was it.

“After A House In The Hills, I had had enough of feature films,” Wiederhorn told The Flashback Files in 2013. “There’s so much work involved on the business end of it, I’m practically exhausted before the first day of shooting. I went back to New York, worked on television documentaries for a couple of years, and then retired.”