The Introverted Detective: Films that were too dangerous

Did you ever think, "who thought this was a good idea"? Well, you will now. Take a quick look at this blog, video clips and all, to find out what movies were too dangerous to film - and were done anyway.

Courtesy of Blogger

Today we're talking about the films Roar, Waterworld, Apocalypse Now, The African Queen, Hell's Angels, Poltergeist, and The Conqueror. There are many films that cost lives out there, but we're just focusing on these. Many stuntmen suffered and died doing films. I would like to honor those who lost their lives or almost lost their lives working stunts on film sets.

Each movie will have a clip of a scene, some of them just normal clips and others show why it was dangerous. One of these is a scene I'll post a horror trigger warning of because it comes from Poltergeist, where a child was nearly strangled to death by a toy clown. The director had to save the child. I'll also note that I'm not going to be talking about set curses more than once, which are notorious on horror film sets. Yep, actors who act in horror films can be haunted themselves, but since I want to sleep tonight we're not going there. I draw the line.

Poltergeist

We'll start with the only horror one on the list. In this movie (1982 version) a clown toy goes behind a child actor and drags him under the bed while trying to strangle him. Speilberg had to save the child. The clip below is from a horror movie. Watch at your own risk. This is the clip where a child was genuinely in distress.

Okay, so I said we wouldn't talk about curses. This may be the one exception to my rule. I'm only looking at mishaps on the set itself or during the timeframe of the film, not the post-film ones. I will only touch on this in this section. Four people died during and soon after filming. Two are pretty weird. We'll name them off one by one. This was a series of films. 1986, 1988, and 2015 are the other years of the series' films.

Heather O'Rourke was already ill. She was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 1987. She was six when the first film was released. She suffered cardiac arrest, was airlifted to a hospital, and died during an operation to correct a bowel obstruction. This one may have nothing to do with filming. She died when she was 12. All the same, they think she was cursed. We'll really never know.

Dominique Dunne died the year of the first film. Her ex-boyfriend killed her in her driveway. He went to prison for it and then was released after three years and six months in prison. Again, not happening on set. May not be related.

Julian Beck died of stomach cancer after the second film. Will Sampson died after an unsuccessful heart-lung transplant, which isn't so mysterious due to the slim chance of survival doctors had predicted already. These two are not mysteries.

Frankly, not much of this says "cursed" to me, except for the death frequency. Basically, all these actors were dying of illnesses. This wasn't the only reason the rumor of a curse appeared. Using real skeletons was a set decision that may have influenced that. These skeletons were meant for classrooms, but were used as props in the film. "Cheaper than plastic", apparently, was the reason for this. Oh, and the medicine man actor actually performed a real exorcism in front of the cast (Sampson, who later died).

Roar

The film Roar was a dangerous endeavor that shouldn't have been attempted. It is about a family living with lions. Nobody died, but there were 70 cast and crew injuries. Noel Marshall, married to Tippi Hedren, put his whole family in the film. Melanie Griffith (Hedren's daughter) had to have facial surgery after being mauled. Hedren fractured her leg, got bitten, and got gangrene. Marshall was hospitalized with gangrene. John Marshall, Marshall's son, got bit on the head for 25 minutes. According to Ranker.com ' Marshall also had some harsh words for his father: "Dad was a f*cking assh*le to do that to his family." ' Tippi Hedren apparently shared that thought because this film ended their marriage. She continued working with big cats, but no longer supported the idea humans and big cats could coexist in a home.

The shoot was a big zoo, with 132 big cats (lions, tigers, leopards, cougars, and jaguars) and one elephant. The director and his wife raised cubs in their home. The final cut of the film had real documented incidents in it. Actors crying out for help didn't stop the director from getting his shots for the film. Melanie Griffith's mauling is left in the film. One man was scalped by a lion and still came back to finish this project. Five years of shooting were needed to finish it. In 2015 it was released in the US. The clip below doesn't involve blood, but does show you enough to know how scared all these people were.

Waterworld

It is known for being the most expensive film in history. Kevin Costner, the star of it, ended up editing it after the director jumped ship on the project. The whole movie is set on the water. The set building began at 5 million dollars, then ballooned to 20 million. The seas were rough, so there were days they couldn't even shoot for the film. Actors became seasick. The script work was already not good as it was. Creative differences weren't helping. One actor kept getting stung by jellyfish, which earned her the nickname "jellyfish candy" from Kevin Costner.

Speaking of stuntmen from earlier, Costner's stunt double suffered a near-fatal embolism while deep-sea diving. He was lucky to recover and returned to set later. Time passes, weather conditions make things worse, more shooting days are needed, and we're at a 135 million dollar budget. Costner gave up some of his profits to keep it going. Then a hurricane hit. Make that cost 150 million dollars. This movie had a rough start and then didn't do well at all. It's done better as of late, but it was a hot mess to make. It's kind of an odd movie, too, which didn't really help its cause.

Apocalypse Now

This is a war film that takes place in lots of jungle areas, with a main character on a secret mission and itching for action. Martin Sheen, one of the stars, had a heart attack on set. Ford Coppola had put too much pressure on him psychologically. Sheen's hair was even graying. Coppola himself had a nervous breakdown and seizure. He declared his intention to commit suicide during the shoot. He was so dedicated to the film he pressed on despite the mental cost.

Sheen, in one scene, punches a mirror and gets blood on himself. That wasn't fake. Coppola had Sheen drunk and locked up some of the time, telling him awful things according to the cast. They didn't yell cut. It was a bad situation.

The locals agreed to work with them, and in doing this Coppola agreed to give them animals for ritual sacrifice, so when you see a water buffalo killed that's real. On top of that, a typhoon showed up to make things complicated. The military started to refuse cooperation, too.

They nearly used dead bodies, but then decided not to. They were going to string them up on trees. The bodies came from a grave robber. The police showed up and it got real awkward until they caught the graverobber.

Drugs were everywhere. Some used it to get through a day of shooting, like Dennis Hopper, who was provided the drugs in order to play his role. Nobody was okay. Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando also hated each other. They even used real napalm.

Did I mention one of the construction crew died? A log fell on a construction crew worker while the set was under construction. It was a freak accident and a tragedy.

The African Queen

One of my favorite Humphrey Bogart films is actually one that caused many actors to be ill. It is a WWI comedy and romance. The crew and cast were okay in Uganda, but in the Congo things got problematic. Snakes, crocodiles, mosquitos, and bad water were just the tip of the iceberg. They were living in a camp hacked out of the jungle. They had to remember to shake their boots out in case a centipede crawled into them. They washed themselves in the river daily.

Most everyone got dysentery - except Humphrey Bogart and the director, who drank more whiskey than water. It saved them this time. Between takes Katherine Hepburn puked in a bucket. Bogart only ate baked beans, canned asparagus, and scotch whiskey. "Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead" according to Bogart.

It hit well, so it all paid off. The film is fun to watch. Nobody died, but nobody had fun either.

Hell's Angels

This 1930's film killed four people. It was directed by Howard Hughes. Two brothers join the British Royal Flying Corps and a love triangle happens. It was completed in three years. It became a talkie instead of a silent film. With vintage planes and mechanics with him, he filmed shots as realistically as he could. Today it would have cost 65 million dollars to film.

Hughes, though advised not to, flew one of those planes and got the shot he wanted, with the added cost of a plane crash. He came out with a fractured skull and went into surgery. The professionals he hired didn't get so lucky. C.K. Phillips crashed while flying to the shooting location. Al Johnson ran into tension wires, ended up in the hospital, and died a day later. Rupert Macalister died, though it wasn't recorded why. Phil Jones died operating a smoke generator and not getting out of the way of a bomber crash scene.

The Conqueror

This is a John Wayne film. This is not a film curse situation, to be clear, but a film that caused later deaths due to where they were filmed. This film allegedly killed John Wayne. He played Genghis Khan, of all the roles he could play. It wasn't typical of his roles. This film was shot in St. George, Utah. It was 100 miles away from an atomic bomb test site. The federal government said it was safe to be there. Unfortunately, one of the filming spots had actually become a radioactive hotspot. Oops. Eleven atomic bombs had been tested a year before they filmed, blowing contaminated air toward Utah.

Fast forward a bit and many cast now have cancer. It was connected back to filming this movie. I will say that this movie is theorized to have killed John Wayne, who died of lung cancer (and he says it was because he smoked). 220 cast and crew went out there. By now 91 had cancer and 46 had died of cancer. I think we can conclude they shouldn't have been out there. Howard Hughes, who funded it, spent 12 million dollars buying copies of the movie and watching it out of guilt. He felt responsible for the damage done. He couldn't have known about the radioactivity, but he sure felt guilty about it.

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