craveonline

Crave Online: First I have to tell you I loved Zombie Strippers.

Robert Englund: [Laughs] Thank you. Yes, Zombie Strippers, that's something that we must have on our resume. Every boy needs Zombie Strippers on his resume.

Crave Online: If you're going to do a movie about zombie strippers, that's how you do Zombie Strippers.

Robert Englund: Exactly, yes. [Laughs]

Crave Online: Can you tell when it's going to be something special versus just something you'll have fun with?

Robert Englund: Well, I know I'm going to have fun. I've just been on a lucky curve. After I did Freddy Vs. Jason, I worked on a reality show for a year that did not come to fruition at CBS. After that in 2005, I had this stack of scripts by the side of my bed and I just said yes to all of them. It began with 2001 Maniacs and then Behind the Mask with Scott Glosserman and then I did a cameo in Hatchet for Adam Green and then I ran up and worked for another guy up in Canada and had fun up there in a movie called Heartstopper and I came back and did Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer. I've been working with all these young kids. What's interesting is there's sort of a nostalgic glance back to '70s and '80s horror that they all have. They have a kind of affinity for it, a kind of love for that hand made use of practicals that was back then, before CGI and some of the technologies that we use today. There's kind of an affection for that moment of time from these young directors, almost like young musicians discovering rock from a previous generation. So it's been really fun for me to play. With Jack Brooks, I was able to really have fun and do some physical comedy, some physical schtick that I haven't done since I was a stage actor, so that was a lot of fun.

Crave Online: How do filmmakers approach you?

Robert Englund: Well, it's pretty traditional. It's submitted through my agent and I get the scripts sent to me and I look at it. Sometimes it's pig in a poke. Any film you make is a crap shoot. Look at what happened to Speed Racer. I would have bet on Speed Racer before I would have bet on Scooby-Doo but Scooby-Doo, they made three of them and Speed Racer is the biggest failure of the summer. So it's hard. We all know it's a crap shoot out there but with these films, I remember Behind the Mask was just this incredible script and I loved doing it. It was kind of this deconstructed horror and it reminded me of Wes Craven's New Nightmare and some of the other more recent ones, a little bit of Blair Witch. With Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, I read it wrong the first time. I didn't have that Sam Raimi fix on it. My agent said, "Read it again. Think Sam Raimi. Think Evil Dead. Think Army of Darkness. Think of the fun value to it." In the meantime, they had submitted me a little short film that the director, Jon Knautz from Canada had done. It was like somebody giving you this really great long lost classic episode of Twilight Zone that you'd been hearing about, this rumor there was some great lost episode, the missing episode of Twilight Zone or something. It was so accomplished, almost to a point of perfection, this little black and white film called Still Life that I immediately picked up the phone and called my agent and said, "Look, I gotta work with these guys. They're onto something." I went up to Ottowa and worked with all these youngsters. It was really fun because it almost makes me young again to work that way. A lot of it's improvised. There's an energy, a kind of around the clock attitude, a can do attitude that these kids had and it was just really fun to do it. Also, they let me go schtick it up which I'll probably never be asked to do again, but when you get to be my age, it's kind of fun to be able to do a pratfall or two.

Crave Online: How hard is it to come up with new monster behaviors at this point?

Robert Englund: I think I have to play bad guys now until I die but after I came out of the makeup, after close to 20 years between all the Nightmare movies and Phantom of the Opera, a couple of Stephen King movies that I did. Even as far back as V I had lizard skin on for a lizard autopsy over at Warner Bros. When I went into the makeup in '83, '84, I was still a young man. When I got done with it, my face had changed. I'd been doing a lot of other stuff too. I'd had a couple television shows using my face, but by the time it was over, in the middle '90s, I looked in the mirror and I was definitely a grownup now. I'd looked young for most of my life but I was beginning to look like an old George C. Scott/Trevor Howard kind of face. The happy accident of that combined with doing horror and science fiction and fantasy is that now I'm like the elder statesman. I get to play the doctors and the fathers and the scientists and the professors. Those are usually pretty good roles, the kind of Vincent Price/Klaus Kinski stuff. I've sort of accepted that mantle now and it's actually kind of fun because I get a lot of dialogue usually. Sometimes directors now, they like to use me as a red herring because I have a lot of baggage. When you see Robert Englund in a movie, you think he is the bad guy but if I'm not the bad guy and I'm supposed to just kind of fool the audience, it makes it a lot easier for whichever actor is the bad guy. So I find myself doing a lot of those, I think they're called red herring characters, faking out the audience. That's fun to do too because I can go over the top a little bit because I want the audience to think that I'm the guy that's going to drink you're blood, and I'm really not. I think I'm kind of out of the makeup now so it's kind of fun to be able to use my own face and my own countenance and rework the evil with that now as opposed to relying on the makeup. Although in Jack Brooks, of course, it's just the opposite. I'm kind of this innocent, lovable old lonely community college science teacher who eats the evil black heart and begins to metamorphosize into a kind of Jabba the Hut meats H.R. Pufenstuf monster that we all have a lot of fun with.

Crave Online: And that's you slamming yourself into walls?

Robert Englund: Well, that's me doing all the stunts in this but they're not that difficult because some of that's speeded up a little bit. I think the hard part in this one was I had to hide an awful lot of projectile vomit in my mouth before I got to really eject it. It's like chewing tobacco. You're always worried about a little bit of it going down the wrong pipe. Then it's no longer special effects projectile vomit. It becomes actually a little bit of your own. That's always uncomfortable to say the least.