By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Tom DeSimone, who helmed Hell Night, Chatterbox and Reform School Girls.
How many (relatively) mainstream directors that have gone on to direct TV series like, say, Pensacola: Wings Of Gold starring James Brolin, got their start making gay porn? The very simple answer to that would be, well, not very many at all, which makes the decidedly under-heralded Tom DeSimone all the more interesting. While he has only a handful of mainstream feature credits on his resume (along with far more gay porn ones directed under the very cool moniker of Lancer Brooks), Tom DeSimone has directed a few notable cult curios that should see him singled out a little more frequently when the critical wand is waved over directors with unlikely backgrounds and a penchant for the cinematically bizarre.
Tom DeSimone was born in 1939 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was always interested in cinema. “I started making 8mm films when I was ten and continued on all through high school,” the director told Racks & Razors. “Mostly using friends, family and table-top models for my projects. It was always my intention, if I would be so lucky, to go to California and work in movies.” DeSimone studied in Boston and later at UCLA, where he eventually received a master’s degree in motion picture production, which then led to post-production work in LA. After directing a number of educational films and award-winning shorts, DeSimone was drafted in by producer Ricky Torres to direct the low-low budget1968 exploitation flick Terror In The Jungle, about a boy who survives a plane crash and is then captured by a tribe of violent savages.
The young Tom DeSimone worked on the project for about three weeks, and directed the film’s initial plane-set sequences, but eventually left the project after too many altercations with the constantly interfering Ricky Torres. “When I began insisting, as the director, that a certain scene simply had to be cut, he used the old, ‘I’m the producer, and what I say goes’ routine,” DeSimone has explained. “By then, I’d had it. I told him that either we reach some compromise, or I was off the film. The film was going to be a real turkey and I decided it wasn’t worth it. I quit, never thinking he would keep my name on the project. Little did I know, unfortunately.”
Though now something of a bizarro cult curio, DeSimone got little out of his experience on Terror In The Jungle, and then made the unlikely move into gay erotica, where the young director became something of a pioneer in the burgeoning field. His 1970 film The Collection was the first X-rated gay feature film to include dialogue and a plot, while his 1971 effort Confessions Of A Male Groupie Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Electric Banana was a multi-award winner. As well as pushing the envelop with his gay porn films, DeSimone also took hetero adult films in a new direction with his 1972 flick Prison Girls, which is frequently billed as the first 3D adult film. Filled with all manner of salacious activity, this sordid women-in-prison sex flick is a wholly scabrous affair, but it’s also something of a landmark in its own seamy way.
Tom DeSimone continued to work on gay porn through the seventies, but eventually went mainstream (kinda) with the 1977 sex comedy Chatterbox, the story of a young woman dealing with the trials and tribulations that come with possessing, well, a talking vagina. “It was my first real mainstream movie,” DeSimone told Retro Slashers. “I had an old story outline for an X-rated comedy called Lips. A producer saw it, liked it, and we joined forces and it became Chatterbox. American International Pictures did the theatrical releases.” Starring cult darling Candice Rialson (Hollywood Boulevard, Moonshine County Express) and boasting an amusingly tongue-in-cheek approach, Chatterbox was a hit, and further showcased DeSimone as a filmmaker decidedly ahead of his time. After more gay porn, DeSimone jumped from adult filmmaking altogether, and made a much more concerted effort to move into the mainstream.
In 1981, DeSimone delivered a rock-solid horror flick with Hell Night, in which a group of college students spend the night in a sprawling mansion with a very dark past as part of an initiation ceremony. Played by the likes of Linda Blair (The Exorcist) and Jeff Barton, the hapless students are then picked off one by one by a crazed killer in a variety of different ways. Filled with cool kill-scenes and plenty of jump scares, Hell Night is pure slasher madness, with DeSimone displaying a real talent for ratcheting up the tension and creating a sense of chaotic dread. It’s an enjoyably campy slab of genre filmmaking, with DeSimone more than proficient in hitting all the right slasher tropes. He did it again for the women-in-prison genre with 1982’s inventively lurid The Concrete Jungle starring Jill St. John as a cruel and corrupt warden.
After being dropped from two notoriously excessive exploitation shockers (1984’s urban vigilante, rape-revenge thriller Savage Streets with Linda Blair, and 1985’s creepy, seamy nuthouse nightmare Hellhole, with Ray Sharkey, Judy Landers and the great Marjoe Gortner), DeSimone effectively parodied the already near-parodic women-in-prison genre with 1986’s Reform School Girls, a very funny and utterly bizarre flick dominated by commanding punk rock icon Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics. An arch, hilariously self-aware black comedy, Reform School Girls should have a much larger and more adoring cult.
After clocking in with a late, wholly fitting instalment of an exploitation favourite franchise with 1988’s Angel III: The Final Chapter (in which the titular prostitute discovers the true identity of her mother and tangles with a violent crime syndicate), Tom DeSimone disappeared rather surprisingly and improbably into the world of episodic television, where he has directed episodes of shows like Freddy’s Nightmares, Swamp Thing, Super Force, Dark Justice, She Spies and the aforementioned Pensacola: Wings Of Gold. A daring director with a winning penchant for recharging well-trodden genres, Tom DeSimone is a wonderfully fringe and wholly under-celebrated talent.
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