It would have paired nicely with House, House II, The Gate, Critters, and other PG-13 gateway horror movies of my youth, but when viewed for the first time today Cellar Dweller just seems hokey. Watching the film now, however, makes me wish I had seen this back in its heyday.
John Carl Buechler directing a Don Mancini script about an EC Comics-style monster coming to life with Reanimator-era Jeffrey Combs cameoing and Charles Band’s Empire Pictures picking up distribution duties? Stop it, stop it – I’m salivating over here. Mostly, Cellar Dweller is a horror curiosity. Oh, I so wish I could say this is the superior film, an overlooked classic unjustly ignored by the idiot masses, but I can’t. The Friday the 13th film, not surprisingly, is the one most people know, but Cellar Dweller is…
Cellar dweller movie#
(It’s not Buechler’s fault that Claudio Fragasso would later make the completely unrelated sequel and best worst movie ever Troll 2.) Two years after Troll, Buechler directed both Cellar Dweller and Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, aka, Jason vs. Ghoulies put Buechler on the map, and the next year Band let him step behind the camera and make his directorial debut with 1986’s Troll. Most notable among their earliest collaborations was 1985’s Ghoulies, a PG-13 Gremlins meets Garbage Pail Kids oddity that became one of the best sellers in Empire’s history and spawned three sequels.īuechler later directed 1991’s Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College Buechler joined up with Band and worked on most of the Empire’s horror and sci-fi films. Not too long after that, Charles Band – a Corman counterpart in the independent film industry – stumped off to Italy to take advantage of tax incentives and produced movies for his new company Empire Pictures. Before I go on, it might help, however, to know a little more about Cellar Dweller’s backstory.īuechler cut his teeth in the industry doing special effects and creature design work for early 80s Roger Corman films like Sorceress, Android, and Deathstalker. Did I Like It?Ĭellar Dweller is watchably wonky, enjoyably cheesy, but ultimately a lesser effort from Buechler and offers only the faintest hint of the supreme camp Don Mancini would later deliver to the world. Plus, with Jeffrey Combs in the cast and a young Don “ Child’s Play” Mancini responsible for the script Cellar Dweller seemed like a slamdunk. It ticked all the boxes: a John Carl Buechler film from his Empire Pictures days that I haven’t already seen and is available to stream. Or, to put it another way, a guy in the past caused a giant, killer bigfoot to leap out of the pages of a comic book and into the real world where it took extreme joy in causing mayhem. Today, I look back on his career by watching one of his lesser-known films: 1988’s Cellar Dweller.įrankly, I think she really captured my “essence”
Almost exactly one month later, that campaign turned into a memorial fund – Buechler had died at the age of 66. The family quick set up a GoFundMe campaign to help pay the mounting medical bills as the noted director/writer/SFX artist fought for his life.
It was thus a surprise to many when a tweet from Kane Hodder in mid-February of this year contained the sad news that Buechler had been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. He worked his way up from memorable creature effects on countless horror movies, stepped behind the camera for Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, and continued to work for decades, earning a reputation as the type of figure who would bend over backward to give young artists a chance to learn on the job. If you were a horror fan in the 80s, you might not have known John Carl Buechler’s name, but his films – Troll, Ghoulies, and Friday the 13th Part VII, to name a few – likely found their way into your VCR.
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