Delaware Resident Produces Full-Length Zombie Movie

(May 1991)
By GREGG KIRK
Maybe Wilmington native John Kalinowski took the Army’s “be all you can be” motto just a little too far after he joined their ranks as a college student in 1969.

It was the Vietnam era and his getting drafted was inevitable, so the self-described “red-blooded American boy who loved camping and backpacking” saved the government some time and volunteered.

When his tour of duty ended in 1973, Kalinowski took to civilian life, but the impact of the army never seemed to fade. While working in research and development at the DuPont Experimental Station, Kalinowski reaffirmed his military ties by joining the national guard in 1981 and transferring as a major in the army reserves last year.

It was during his stint with the reserves that something snapped in his mind.

“In late 1988, a military unit that I was in was sent in to take over a former insane asylum,” says Kalinowski. “And there’s something about an insane asylum — once you spend some time there, you start feeling like an inmate.”

It was when this feeling and a latent desire to form a movie production company called Cheapshot Productions, Inc. collided that Kalinowski realized that it was his destiny to be all he could be by becoming a fledgling movie producer. The time spent posted at the former asylum only enhanced this yen.

“On the first day, we started exploring this place to see what buildings we could use and what kind of shape they were in,” says Kalinowski. “We patrolled around the abandoned asylum that had things scattered everywhere, and we found things left over by the nuts — their artwork on the walls, their clothes, their photographs, all this kind of stuff. During our exploring, a lieutenant ran up to me and said,” This is just like the kind of place they make a zombie movie.”

And that was when The Zombie Army, a full-length gore flick/music video/contest give-away was conceived. After drafting a few notes and doing some research on zombie movies, Kalinowski realized the tone of the film.

“I used to write under a pseudonym a number of years ago,” says Kalinowski. “And everything that was good didn’t get published and the real slime did. So I knew that slime sold. And besides, everyone knows the four great themes of literature: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Himself, and Man vs. Zombie (laughs). The reason I say this is all zombie movies don’t seem to have real good story lines to them.”

With this in mind, and a budget that prohibited him from doing otherwise, Kalinowski sought to intentionally make a B-grade splatter flick. He garnered the services of a production crew called Video Network in Newark, DE, rented from the army the actual asylum that had inspired the film, and began shooting on location at a homemade sound stage in May of 1989.

When it came to finding actors for the motion picture, he went to A.I. DuPont High School and contacted their drama department. Not only did a good portion of the movie’s cast come from this contact, but Betty Stapleford, the drama coach at A.I. ended up taking over the role of the director during the filming. While this was well and good for some scenes in the movie, Kalinowski felt the film needed an extra injection of realism. Admittedly, knowledge of acting wasn’t his forte, but if there was anything Kalinowski knew, it was how a soldier should be represented in the film.

“Most actors know how to be good actors, but they don’t know how to be good soldiers,” he says. “The average soldier in a zombie movie is so pitifully portrayed — good acting but lousy soldiering.”

Because of this, he went to the University of Delaware’s ROTC program and enlisted a few of the students. And when it came to fire-fight scenes, the soldiers used live ammunition.

“It’s sort of a departure from Hollywood, where they use blanks on real people,” laughs Kalinowski. “We used live ammo on dummies. In one of the scenes we have an explosive decapitation, where a girl shoots a zombie in the head with a shotgun — 12 gauge 00 buck.”

While the fledgling producer took pains to keep some realism, he stretches the audience’s imagination with a few aspects of the plot.

“In the last couple of years I’ve heard a lot of complaining about women being portrayed as just ‘helpless bimbettes’ in the movies,” says Kalinowski. “And I thought about that, and it ended up being that we changed the thrust of the movie. We created the experimental all-girl combat unit known as the ‘Lethal Ladies,’ who come in and try to wipe out the zombies.”

Not so coincidentally, their presence in the action scenes leaves room for a few female soldiers getting their fatigues strategically ripped by the groping hands of zombies. This, and a mild sex scene at the end of the flick, only add to Kalinowski’s plan to appeal to his viewing audience’s baser desires with “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.”

The drugs come into play when two soldiers steal away from their battalion in order to smoke a joint and predictably become the film’s first casualties. The rock ‘n’ roll is laced through the movie’s soundtrack. The original music of local bands the Killtoys and Halo is used during many of the action scenes, and incidental music was composed by Halo as well. Tongue-in-cheek tunes such as “The Halls of Montezombie” and a Jimi-Hendrix-risen-from-the-dead version of the national anthem add to the film’s less-than-serious atmosphere.

And if these aspects aren’t enough to drive home to the movie’s audience that much of the film is to be taken with a grain of smelling salts, Kalinowski intimates that after a few filming s.n.a.f.u.s, the production team decided to play upon the mistakes and have a contest to see who could find the most.

By the end of filming, the idea was so popular among the crew that they intentionally left continuity errors in the final production. This fact is heralded at the end of the movie in a short announcement made by a young “soldierette” sitting atop an army surplus jeep in a camouflage bathing suit. She tells the movie watchers that the vehicle will go to the person who picks out the most defects in the filming, and then clues are even fed to the audience. According to the film’s producer, the jeep will be delivered to the door of the winner on Halloween eve of this year.

“The idea for the contest is for multiple rental,” admits Kalinowski. “You see this thing once, and you’re going to see a handful of continuity defects. You see it four or five times and you’re going to get smart. In reality, I kind of view this as being a party tape. It’s good music on it, and you get a gang of people together, and you break out the pizza and watch the thing over and over.”

So just how is the movie? Well, this reviewer got a complementary advanced cassette of it and did as Kalinowski suggested but substituted beer for pizza. The one scene that sticks in my mind is a memorable exchange between two zombies — a “just turned” zombie and a zombie veteran. After the original zombie has literally ripped the innards out of the former human and turned him into one of the living dead, the new zombie mumbles “Need guts!” to which the other zombie replies by regurgitating a few links of intestines and stuffing them back in his rib cage. It’s that kind of flick. I give it two thumbs off.

While Kalinowski is still searching for a major distributor for his movie, which he claims to be the first full-length release totally produced in Delaware, the film will be available in local video stores on May 15. Click here to watch the entire film on YouTube.