Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 7, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
You’re one of a group of young people hired to restore an old air museum, and you’ve all decided to hang around after the facility has closed for the day. Now you’re trapped in the place with a flight-suited maniac running amok, bumping your new friends off one by one. Your boss, Harry, seemed a little off-kilter earlier in the day; could he be the one threatening everyone’s lives?
That’s the scenario in Blood Relic, the latest horror movie from director J. Christian Ingvordsen and his Sultan Films team, out on VHS and special-edition DVD from MTI. And it’s no surprise to find actor Billy Drago in the role of Harry—not only because he’s made a career out of playing various threatening sorts, but also due to his track record with Ingvordsen. This is the fourth project on which Drago has teamed with the independent filmmaker, and the second in the fright genre following last year’s Fort Doom.
To hear Drago tell it, the role of Harry is not just about the menace; he has his own personal demons to deal with. “He’s got a single-minded passion born out of his father’s death many years ago,” the actor says. “Harry is an educated man, but he’s driven by this one single obsession, and he’s determined that no matter what, no matter how long it takes and no matter what he has to do, he’s going to accomplish this task. And that is to build this museum on the actual grounds of the base where his father took off to the Vietnam War—where he died—when Harry was a small boy. He was killed through a real government screw-up—a miscalculation that was no fault of his own. So to honor him, Harry has spent 20 years trying to put together this museum on the site of the base his father flew out of for the last time.”
The contemporary setting of Blood Relic is a far cry from the 1800s Midwest milieu of Fort Doom (actually shot in upstate New York), in which Drago plays the undertaker in a community plagued by mysterious murders. “It’s supposed to be the Missouri-Kansas border,” Drago notes, “and my great-grandfather actually lived in that area. I was given a book by my cousin that has a history of the region, and my great-grandfather not only lived there, he was the town coffin-maker! So in a way I was playing my own ancestor, unbeknownst to the filmmakers or anyone. It was a coincidence, but it was a little spooky.”
Drago first hooked up professionally with Ingvordsen when he played Lucky Luciano in the director’s mob movie The Outfit, which cast him opposite Lance Henriksen as Dutch Schultz. “I love Lance,” he raves. “Lance, and I mean this in the best possible way, is a complete madman. So we got along great. At the time, we had the same agents, and that was one of the reasons I took that job, because I didn’t know [Ingvordsen and co.] when they first called me for that film. When I found out Lance was going to be in it, playing opposite me, I said ‘Oh, OK! Great!’ because I was always a big fan of his.” Drago has the same enthusiasm for the independent filmmaking experience in general: “The people are so creative, and they love making movies and I love making movies, so it’s like we all ran away and joined the carnival, and wherever we set the tent up, we’re ready to do the show.”
The Kansas-born Drago got his start in radio, playing blues and jazz records, and broke into acting when he learned that an advertiser on a Kansas City station carrying his show had a theater company. Drago auditioned for a production of Butterflies Are Free and won the role, leading to TV parts and then to features. One of his early big-screen appearances was in Richard Wenk’s 1986 horror/comedy Vamp, starring Grace Jones as the top attraction at a bloodsucker strip club.
“Wow! What a cool lady she is,” Drago raves about the statuesque actress. “She’s the greatest. We were shooting Vamp all night in downtown LA, and in the mornings she would invite the crew or whoever was there afterward up to her place in the Hollywood Hills. Everyone would go there, and she’d have the bathtub filled with champagne and ice and whatever, and she’d disappear! She’d give a party for everybody, only she was gone ’cause it was daytime and she was the vampire. I’d loved her since I saw her in Conan the Destroyer, so when I heard, ‘You get to work opposite Grace Jones,’ I said, ‘That’s the greatest thing ever.’ ”
It was the following year when Drago appeared in what is still his best-known role: gangster Frank Nitti in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, where he memorably guns down Sean Connery’s Jim Malone. “Every once in a while you get something where everything goes right,” he says of that experience. “Even the things that go wrong, it turns out they went right. I really believe that’s why I’m still in the business, because of that role and the visibility it gave me and everything working just right all the way down the line.” Not everyone was thrilled with the nasty Nitti, though. “My mother—bless her soul, she’s passed away now—she never forgave me. ‘You killed Sean Connery!’ That was, at least they told me and I believe it’s true, the first time he had ever been killed on screen.”
That act set Drago on the path to playing villains of every stripe in numerous features, though a few of his horror films found him playing sympathetic. In fact, Mirror Mirror III, the first of two entries in the direct-to-video franchise he stars in, even casts him as something of a romantic lead, given a few steamy scenes with sultry co-star Monique Parent. An advantage of also being the film’s associate producer, perhaps? “No, that wasn’t a perk of being a producer, but it didn’t hurt,” he laughs. “Monique was a real nice lady. And that was a real credit; I did help them out. The people who produced those movies are longtime friends of mine and had a very tiny amount of money, so I helped them scout locations, organized finding the cameras and that kind of stuff. I didn’t even ask for the credit; they just said, ‘Well, you’ve done exactly what we would have had an associate producer doing, so we’ll give you that credit,’ and I said, ‘Fine with me.’ ”
Drago also got the chance to play the hero—albeit a ruthless and not especially approachable one—in another straight-to-DVD sequel, Tremors 4: The Legend Begins. This period entry in the popular monster franchise casts Drago as Black Hand Kelly, a legendary gunslinger who shows up in the 19th-century desert town of Rejection just in time to help its residents fight off attacks by the people-eating, subterranean graboids. “I really enjoyed doing that,” the actor says. “They shot it like an old John Ford Western that just happened to be a sci-fi movie—big vistas, out in the real desert, with magic-hour shots and horseback and all of that. But from my point of view, the best part was that the armorer, who gave us our weapons, was the same man who had done that for The Untouchables. He had provided me with that great submachine gun to shoot at the end. So when we saw each other again, it was like old home week.
“Then he told me, because he has this huge private gun collection, ‘Billy, I got a real gun from the Dalton Gang.’ I had spent a lot of time in Kansas, so I was into the Daltons and all that stuff as a kid, so I said ‘Wow!’ And he said, ‘If you want, you can actually wear this real gunfighter’s pistol and holster in the movie.’ So I put it on, and obviously they had someone who was going to do the trick shots and the fast draw, but they were gonna cover me doing it in the master, then come in with the trick guy. But this real gun was so balanced, and the holster was so beautiful, that when the director [S.S. Wilson] called ‘Action,’ it just flew right out of the holster, I pulled the trigger and hit the targets I was supposed to hit. The director came up to me and said, ‘You didn’t tell me you were a fast-draw artist, Billy!’ and I said, ‘Well, you didn’t ask me.’ Luckily, they got it on film, because I never could have repeated it, and it made my stature on the set really cool. But it was only because the gun was so well-designed; I mean, that’s what the guy [Dalton] did for a living.”
Drago has also shown his more menacing side on TV, most notably in a recurring role as Barbas, the demon of fear in the long-running Charmed, and as Peattie, the black magic-practicing Appalachian medicine man in the X Files episode “Theef.” “I have an aunt and uncle who really live in the hills of the Appalachians,” the actor reveals, “so growing up, I had that accent. There was a period where our house had burned down, so we went to live with my aunt and uncle up there, and that’s how they spoke. It really brought me back to use that accent. Also, that’s a real Appalachian witchcraft figure we used in the episode.”
As it turned out, Drago could have used some positive mojo while doing the show. “We were filming the scene were the lady who runs the rooming house where I live comes to my door, looking for a poultice for her back,” he remembers. “I had the real voodoo doll in my hand, and the very first time, I said, ‘OK, I’ll get you something for your back,’ and I turned and my back went out. It just went—bam!—and I had to go get a shot and take a lot of painkillers. And it didn’t heal up the whole rest of the shoot. But in a sense, that added to it and made me concentrate more. And of everything I’ve done, I love that episode. It scares me.”
But perhaps the most unnerving thing Drago ever encountered in the course of a role occurred on a non-genre project, Menahem Golan’s Peruvian-terrorist drama Breaking the Silence. “We were filming in Belarus, in a prison that had been built for the czars and was still in use,” he recalls. “We were using the prison’s Death Row, and at the time—I don’t know if they still do it now—if you were sentenced to death, you didn’t get a date of when your execution would be. You could be there years, you could be there two weeks…one day they just took you out and boom! That was part of the punishment, in that you never knew when it was going to happen. And so walking by the Death Row cells, they would hear you go by and jump, like, ‘Are they coming for me?’ That was very uncomfortable, not only because the place was like a dungeon.
“So what happened was, they wanted to film in a cell where one of the Death Row inmates was,” he continues. “But the prison was built like a maze, because it was designed by the czars so that if anyone broke out, they wouldn’t be able to escape. And if they moved a prisoner, it was a big production where they turned the lights off and moved them in the dark. So they just took the guy out of the cell and bang! Popped him right in the head, right in the hallway, and said, ‘OK, shoot here all day if you like.’ That kind of put a pall on the rest of the production!”
