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arthurlundquist
Reviews
Pledge Night (1988)
I'm Astounded that Anyone Has Seen This Film
I just wanted to thank everyone who has ever gone to the trouble to see PLEDGE NIGHT. We shot it for next to no money in a couple of actual frat houses at Rutgers University in the middle of a blizzard in January of 1988 (any brothers out there remember us?). My name's Arthur Lundquist, and I played Badman Dan, the frat brother pretending to be brain damaged, who gets to kill off half the cast until the demon who drives me takes on human form and bursts through my stomach.
It was just a cheap slasher film, but the blizzard gave us some extra atmosphere, the stuff about fraternity initiations is actually pretty accurate, and I think Acid Sid is pretty cool.
We lost a lot of stuff in order to keep an R rating. We actually shot the frat boy having to swallow a worm, and you never got to see me pour honey over the poor guy's face and then dump a pile of positively enormous cockroaches on top. And when I killed the girl with the egg beater, there was a moment when I study her face, examining the condition of death, which becomes slowly more disturbing to me. Alas, the censors decreed that we could show breasts and we could show blood, but we could not show breasts and blood in the same shot. So out went that moment. Too bad, 'cause I think it had my best work in the entire film.
Oh, the girl who I electrocute in the bathtub? You are seeing her in her last day as an actress. She never got a break, and had decided to leave acting, but wouldn't do it till she had at least one speaking part in a feature film. She got this part, and it wasn't great, but at least it had dialogue. She spent the whole night in a bathtub, which got progressively colder and colder as the (January) shoot went on. We shot the scene, it proved that someone liked her work enough to cast her in a feature film, and the next day she got on a train and left New York and acting forever. I wish her well.
Me, I'm still out there. If you liked PLEDGE NIGHT, you might want to give THE REGENERATED MAN a glance. As a kid who grew up watching ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS and RETURN OF THE APE MAN on late night TV, it feels nice to think that someone might come across my work late on a cold winter's night.
Arthur Lundquist
Invasion from Inner Earth (1974)
A dress rehearsal for SIGNS?
I saw this film on TV about 20 years ago, and while the film was pretty bad, I could not help but notice that in its basic premise was potentially a very powerful idea. There is something about the idea that some huge conflagration is consuming the rest of the human race, but the people in the film are isolated from it, and watch as it happens from far away. Every now and then they make contact with the force that is destroying the rest of the world over their radio, but they are not important enough either to be singled out or to be meaningfully communicated with.
I remember thinking, that's a pretty cool idea. Someone could actually make a good movie out of it. And finally, someone has, the movie SIGNS.