Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on May 2, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Back in my misspent youth in the early ’80s, Boardinghouse was the first movie I ever saw at a bona fide 42nd Street exploitation house. It was also playing in one of the tiny auditoriums down in the basement level of the now long-gone Criterion Center at Broadway and 44th (which my friends and I liked to call “the Criterion Dungeon”), but somehow I could tell that Boardinghouse was the kind of low-low-low-budget flick that would seem more at home in a true Times Square fleapit than in a respectable establishment. And so, a pal and I headed to the Lyric Theatre on a Saturday afternoon, took our seats and waited for the trailers advertising the likes of The Black Room to give way to the feature.
What we saw left us truly gobsmacked. We knew the movie was in “HorrorVisionTM” (“You don’t need glasses…only a strong heart!”), which seemed like it might be a fun gimmick harking back to the glory days of William Castle. What it turned out to be was a shot of a gloved hand against a color-distorted background, accompanied by a low synthesizer tone, which the movie’s opening informed us would appear before particularly graphic moments (but not all of them, as it turned out). This was followed by fuzzy credits that looked like they were generated on one of the primitive computers we had back at school, accompanied by ripoff #347 of John Carpenter’s Halloween score. Then the movie proper began, and proved to be shot on video (early-’80s video, remember), blown up into an almost unwatchable film image.
What could be discerned was an incoherent feature in which a guy with a penchant for bad clothes buys a house that turns out to be haunted by an evil force (represented by a cheesy chroma key effect) that bloodily bumps off the assorted, frequently naked women he invites to live with him. Mixed in amongst the amateurish acting and low-tech gore is a weird New Age subtext in which our hero possesses special powers of the mind, allowing him to do remarkable things like levitate a soap bar above his bathwater. I’d seen a number of no-budget SOV features before, but never anything like this. The audience reaction was far less rowdy than I’d been led to expect from a 42nd Street crowd; perhaps, like us, they were simply stunned into silence by what they were watching. And clearly, we’d chosen the right venue to witness a movie like Boardinghouse.
Somehow, watching it on Code Red/BCI’s DVD just isn’t the same. It certainly looks better overall, the fullscreen picture having been transferred from the video elements and not one of those godawful prints. The visual quality is still variable, though, and the screen goes almost or completely black during a few of the darker scenes (including expositional computer-text crawls at the beginning and end, for which the original beeping sound FX have been helpfully replaced with voiceover narration). A rather unique bargain-basement big-screen oddity two and a half decades ago, Boardinghouse is now just one of the many vintage DIY projects being resurrected for a fresh DVD showcase. That said, my hat’s off to Code Red for unearthing this bizarre chapter of my moviegoing history, and for tracking down director Johnn—yep, two n’s—Wintergate (who also stars under the pseudonym “Hawk Audley” and served a few other functions under a few other names) to tell us how it all came about in a commentary and onscreen interview.
According to Wintergate, there’s a good reason Boardinghouse is both such a mess and so ridiculous: It was originally intended as a “corny” spoof of fright films, but distributor Howard Willette of Coast Films felt horror/comedy wouldn’t sell and edited it to be “scarier.” (Why he would pick up a film that he felt needed such major alterations to be saleable in the first place isn’t explained.) Thus, Wintergate can point out that an apparent inconsistency in the film is, in fact, an example of its “subtle humor,” and his wife Kalassu (who starred in the movie, and joins him on the commentary with their daughter Shanti, her husband Gregory and moderators Lee Christian and Jeff McKay) insists at one point that “we wanted it stupid.”
You may or may not buy these explanations—and I certainly beg to differ when it’s claimed that Boardinghouse “looked as good as this” on the big screen—but you will learn a sufficient amount about how the movie was launched, cast and produced, as well as the metaphysical undertones Wintergate wove through the, ahem, story. There’s only so much that can be said about this production, though, and the longer the track goes on, the more the participants simply joke and comment about the onscreen action, though they’re an engaging enough group to keep you listening throughout. An amateurishly shot on-camera interview with Wintergate, Kalassu and Shanti largely just rehashes subjects covered in the commentary, and a couple of trailers are included as well. They don’t make Boardinghouse look terribly promising, and it’s probably a good thing I didn’t see them back in the day; I might have then avoided the movie, and been denied the one-of-a-kind experience that the DVD intermittently recaptures.
