Zach Vasquez
Gary Sherman is a director’s director.
In a more just world, he’d also be a household name—at least in cinephile households—and enjoy a stature similar to John Carpenter.
That Carpenter comparison isn’t a random one, as the two have more than a little in common with one another. Both were—or, technically, still are—consummate craftsmen; both used genre (particularly mood-driven horror and muscular action films) as delivery systems for anti-establishment political stories; both provided their own music for their productions (granted, Sherman is nowhere near as prolific as Carpenter on this front, although he still managed to create one of the all-time banger theme songs); and both experienced a great deal of frustration thanks to studios interference and distributor shenanigans.
In this latter regard, Sherman had to put up with even more egregious and, in one infamous case, legitimately tragic, circumstances than Carpenter, which explains why he stepped away from motion pictures much earlier, and why he only has a handful of feature-length pictures to his name.
Sherman established himself as a successful director in television and commercials during the ‘60s, but by 1972, he’d moved to his mother’s home country of England after growing disillusioned with America following the bloody events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in which he took part on the side of the anti-war protesters. In London, Sherman formed a production company with fellow directors Jonathan Demme and Michael Mann, although the latter left the company after a bitter falling out (Sherman hasn’t gone into specific details, but he has called Mann “one of the most evil human beings I’ve met in my life.”).
Initially, Sherman was set to make his feature directorial debut with a politically charged coming of age movie starring The Kinks’ singer and guitarist Ray Davies, but when that project fell apart, he was encouraged by Demme to write a horror script, since those were easier to sell. Although he had little personal connection to horror, Sherman realized that, like Rod Serling and any number of artists before and after him, he could easily implant a political message into the material.
He soon came up with a script called Death Line, about the hunt for the surviving member of a cannibalistic clan of cave dwellers living in the tunnels of the London Underground. Against this gruesome backdrop, Sherman told a story about labor exploitation and governmental cover up. On the strength of the material (particularly the comic dialog written specifically for him), Sherman was able to cast Donald Pleasance—best know at that time as a serious stage actor and not yet synonymous with horror thanks to his eventual collaborations with Carpenter—which in turn brought in Hammer Films megastar Christopher Lee, who volunteered to work for scale so long as he could act in a scene with Pleasance.
Death Line proved one of the most assured feature debuts, as well as one of the more complex and intelligent horror movies, of its era—the film’s standout sequence is an eight-and-a-half minute single tracking shot inspired by the opening scene from Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil—and it should have achieved the same type of critical and commercial success as the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man. Unfortunately, despite earning strong reviews in the U.K., the film’s U.S. distributor, American International Pictures, drastically recut the movie for its stateside release in order to avoid earning an X-rating, while also renaming it Raw Meat and selling it as a zombie film.
This turn of events was aggravating enough to make Sherman forsake the movie industry and return to commercial and television work for nearly an entire decade. But when a producer who loved Death Line approached him about making another horror movie, he decided to give it another go.
1981’s Dead & Buried, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this month, is an even better film than Death Line, playing like a newly discovered Twilight Zone episode or EC Comics story. Picking a script co-written by Dan O’Bannon—who got his big break working closely with Carpenter on his 1974 debut Dark Star, before working on the special effects for Star Wars and penning the first (and officially credited) draft of the Alien script—he turned in a relentlessly spooky work of coastal horror, one shrouded in dread (to bring things back to Carpenter for a moment, Dead & Buried would make for a perfect double bill with The Fog), punctuated by bursts of legitimately upsetting violence and pitch black comedy, and bolstered by incredible effects work from industry maestro Stan Winston.
Alas, Sherman once again faced interference from producers after principal photography was completed, with one of them demanding that he add some more scenes of violent gore, despite Sherman’s intention never to show the color of blood, as it would take away from the cold, decayed look he wanted for the film. (This same producer told him, “If I wanted [Ingmar] Bergman to make a horror film for me, I would’ve hired Bergman. So, now let’s go make this into a horror film.”)
Luckily, by the time Dead & Buried was released to little commercial fanfare, but more strong reviews, Sherman was already hard at work on his next picture, the same which would prove to be his masterpiece. Stepping away from horror and into the neon grime of ‘Sleaze Noir’, Vice Squad (1982) may actually be Sherman’s most frightening picture, thanks to the terrifying lead performance of Wings Hauser. He plays Ramrod, a sadistic pimp who tears a swath of carnage across Los Angeles’s Skid Row and Sunset Strip districts in a furious attempt to exact vengeance on the streetwise prostitute who set him up for the police.
Hauser, who at the time was married to Dead & Buried costar Nancy Locke, was brought onto the project by Sherman himself, who saw a real darkness hiding just under his surface. Initially, producers rejected the actor—then known for playing a wimpy character on the soap opera The Young and the Restless—but Sherman convinced him to audition in character. This led to Hauser physically assaulting and threatening one of the producers, which in turn resulted in him getting the role. Hauser would later blame Sherman for ruining his life, as he’d gotten so deep into his performance that it nearly led to a full-scale mental breakdown, while also getting him typecast as villains afterwards.
Yet, you can’t accuse Sherman of asking Hauser to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself. He likewise threw himself into the world of the movie, spending countless hours alongside real Los Angeles vice detectives (so many, in fact, that he was made a volunteer deputy) as well as individuals one the other side of the law (particularly sex workers). Watching Vice Squad today, one finds themselves as struck as much by the sense of verisimilitude as they are the insanity of its action set pieces or the seediness of its locale. For all that the film plays like a crazy exploitation picture, at heart, it’s really a movie about exploitation.
(One is also continually surprised by how damn good looking the movie is, at least until you realize that it was shot by Stanley Kubrick’s regular DP, John Alcott.)
Vice Squad proved a modest critical and commercial success, although it would be another five years before Sherman released his next film, a feature-length version of the popular 50’s TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive, with Rutger Hauer stepping into the role originated by Steve McQueen. In it, he plays a former CIA operative turned bounty hunter, who finds himself embroiled in a plot involving Middle Eastern terrorists (the main antagonist is played hilariously—albeit problematically—by Kiss guitarist Gene Simmons.)
While the least personal and idiosyncratic of Sherman’s movies up to that point, Wanted: Dead or Alive is still a relentlessly entertaining, well-made action picture, one with a surprising amount of pathos and an appropriately cynical view of the American intelligence community. It also contains one of the best villain deaths in ‘80s cinema—“Fuck the bonus”—which is really saying something.
Soon after Wanted: Dead or Alive was released, Sherman began work on Poltergeist III, which saw him move the franchise’s story from ghost-haunted suburbia to an inner-city apartment high-rise. Along with the new urban setting, Sherman brought a surreal spin to his story by taking inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. To achieve the proper feel for his vision, Sherman and his team decided to use only live practical effects. On that level—and that level alone—the film was a success. In every other regard, it was a disaster.
The film’s production was a troubled one from the start, plagued by budget cuts and on-set accidents. Then, on January 31st of 1988, just as post-production was set to get underway, tragedy struck when the film’s star, 12-year-old Heather O’Rourke, died from congenital stenosis, complicated by septic shock. (She had been ill all throughout filming, having been misdiagnosed with Crohn‘s Disease and prescribed cortisone injections that caused noticeable facial swelling.)
Following O’Rourke’s passing, Sherman was adamantly opposed to re-shooting the movie’s ending per the studio’s request, but he eventually gave in to their demands. It’s a sad, anger-inducing story as told in detail by Sherman in the third episode of the Shudder original documentary series Cursed Films, and despite remaining proud of some sections of the film, Sherman understandably regards it as his least favorite of his movies.
The experience irrevocably soured him on feature filmmaking, but before Sherman returned to television for the next 16 years, he would make one more picture, the young adult thriller Lisa (1990), about a lonely teenage girl who embarks on a provocative phone flirtation with a handsome stranger who, unbeknownst to her, happens to be a serial killer. Sherman said he made the movie for his daughter, and indeed, Lisa is one of the more psychologically complex depictions of female adolescence to be found in genre cinema of that time (or since, for that matter). It’s also a real corker of the Hitchcockian variety, one that fans of the genre would do well to track down.
As it turns out, Lisa would not be Sherman’s final feature, although it is the last one seen by more than a handful of viewers. In 2006, Sherman’s ultra-low budget, DV found footage serial killer thriller, 39: A Film By Carroll McKane, screened at a couple of genre film festivals, but it has since languished in obscurity. According to those who have seen it, it’s an incredibly harrowing film, but Sherman has expressed reticence to ever screen it again, worrying that “people will miss the underlying message of 39 because it’s so disturbing.” Coming from anyone else, this would read like hucksterism 101, but Sherman has more than earned the benefit of the doubt.
Regardless of whether 39: A Film By Carroll McKane ever sees the light of day (or, even more unlikely, he ever directs another movie), Sherman remains a highly influential, if still perpetually underrated artist, especially amongst his fellow filmmakers. Guillermo del Toro and Quentin Tarantino have both expressed admiration for his work, while Edgar Wright consulted him about the practical mirror effects that appear throughout Poltergeist III for in his new movie, Last Night in Soho (Sherman received special thanks in the credits of that film). If that’s not enough, Martin Scorsese is a vocal fan of Vice Squad, having declared it the best film of its year before paying homage to its opening montage in his own urban fever dream from 1999, Bringing Out the Dead.
It’s probably asking too much to expect audiences to heap as much reverence upon Sherman as those directors, but at the very least, some sort of proper Gary Sherman retrospective is long overdue. Perhaps even more deserving of admiration than the films themselves was Sherman’s repeated willingness to walk away from the movie industry when pushed too far.
Fuck the bonus, indeed. 
