Tiffany Brown

Moviemaker Ted V. Mikels has seen a revival of interest in his style of campy horror films, which include “Blood Orgy the She-Devils” and “Mark of the Astro-Zombies.”

By Brendan Buhler

Thu, Oct 9, 2008 (2 a.m.)

What makes for a 60-year career in the movies?

In the studio of Ted V. Mikels the answers overflow, covering every inch of wall space, stacked 2 feet high on desks, filling rooms with antiquated equipment, and filling sets with scantily clad mannequins, plywood thrones, foam manacles and salvaged medical equipment.

(You never know what you’ll need to bring a zombie to life.)

It’s been a life on the fringes of film, a place of lurid posters and low budgets, producing what some call grindhouse or schlock. Not Mikels. He calls it guerrilla moviemaking, and if the skimpy budgets have put limits on his dreams, the ability to do everything himself has meant what he makes are still, distinctly, his dreams. It’s not everyone who can keep doing that approaching his ninth decade.

Looking back over the years, the writer and director (and usually cinematographer, editor and marketer) of such films as “Blood Orgy the She-Devils,” “Mission: Killfast” and “Mark of the Astro-Zombies,” is proud of his films but also a little protective of them.

“What I don’t want mentioned is trash, so-called trash movies,” Mikels says, the long waxed tips of his white mustache quivering like sensitive antennae.

“You don’t spend 60 years of your life making movies — from when you’re a teenager to now, when I’m a few months away from 80 — to have them called that.”

What then would he have you call them? Horror. Supernatural thrillers. Musical dramas. Heartwarming family pictures. He has made all kinds of movies. And they are all, indisputably, his, identifiable by their strangely mesmerizing dialogue and dream-logic plots.

And a lot of them are camp, a category Mikels is happy to be put in. He defines it as “a deliberate and surrealistic attempt to be funny — semiconscious comedy.”

A former bodybuilder, a magician and a backward-talking vaudevillian (he still talks backward sometimes for fun), Mikels is a compulsive entertainer. His movies are successes, he says, if people are entertained, especially himself. He can do this without much money, he says.

Take the least expensive, most successful and best known of Ted V. Mikels movies, “The Corpse Grinders.”

The plot of this camp horror film involves, as you might imagine, the grinding of human corpses. Into cat food. The cats that eat this food naturally develop a taste for human flesh and attack their owners, many of whom are unprepared for this assault because they are wearing only their bras and panties. Meanwhile, back at the cat food factory, the manufacturers decide to stop buying corpses and to start killing. A doctor and a nurse investigate.

And that is how, in 1972 when movie tickets cost about two bucks, Mikels turned $49,000 into $10 million in box office receipts.

Mikels has a second definition of camp: “It’s the only way I can compete with the big movies.”

He’s had his shots at the big time, Mikels says, but he never quite made it in. He claims he was offered a chance to make “Easy Rider” until people realized he never had proper financing for his movies. And then there was his dream project, a movie about Beowulf based on the epic poem that entranced Mikels when he was in high school. He still has the script. “And it is a powerful script,” Mikels says. “Big, big scenes.”

Mikels’ voice fades to a whisper as he talks about the movie. It would have taken place mostly after Beowulf’s battles with Grendel and his mother, covering his 40-year reign as king of the Geats, during which he would sail around the North Sea and battle skeletons.

He managed to get a meeting with big studio executives in the 1980s, he says, but they wanted to cut the script and wouldn’t offer a budget to let him film in Norway’s fjords.

Now he’ll probably never be able to make his big movie.

Meanwhile, the film business has changed. The introduction of VCRs killed small theaters that ran movies all day long, grindhouse theaters, the kind of theaters that played Mikels’ movies. In 1985, he moved out of Hollywood and to Las Vegas to cut filming costs.

But 20 years later, Mikels’ style of movies has been rediscovered. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have embraced the genre and there are revival film festivals. Mikels has been a guest of honor in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“The screaming and the yelling and the clapping brought tears to my eyes,” he says. “You don’t get money but you get appreciation.”

Besides, it’s not like he ever stopped making movies. His latest is called “Demon Haunt,” a computer graphics-enhanced story of a satanically possessed house. “It’s basically a family-oriented movie,” Mikels says. It has a prerelease screening this weekend at the Clark County Public Library.

(Eventually, as with his other movies, copies will be for sale on his Web site: www.tedvmikels.com.)

Next up, he’s planning his third “Astro-Zombies” movie. And he’ll do it the same way he always has, scavenging props, finding small investors and bruising his credit cards.

He’ll do whatever it takes to put the mind of Mikels onscreen.