Do-it-yourself moviemaking isn’t news nowadays, but in the 1980s, it was rare to find directors who self-financed their own tiny-budget feature, found a distributor, built a cult audience and made a tidy profit in the process. That’s why Mark Pirro became known at the time as the king of the Super-8 indies, and after 20 years of successful no-budget efforts, two of his most memorable horror/comedies, A POLISH VAMPIRE IN BURBANK and CURSE OF THE QUEERWOLF, are making their way to DVD December 17, courtesy of MTI.

The writer/director is also hard at work on a new project called RECTUMA, a monster-on-the-rampage spoof being shot on digital video. Though the medium has changed, RECTUMA’s plot is still pure Pirro. “It’s about a giant ass that terrorizes the country,” he explains. “A guy returns from a Mexican vacation, and his butt is hurting. It breaks off while he’s sleeping, commits some crimes and ultimately, it starts growing and goes on a rampage, à la Godzilla. It’s just as wild as anything we’ve ever done before, but for the first time, it actually has production value. Yet it’s shaping up to be the most inexpensive movie I’ve ever made. There are no costs on this project, other than the videotape. I’ve got my own editing setup, my garage is a bluescreen stage, the locations are free, the talent is free.”

Pirro has actually been out of the Super-8 game for over a decade, since the 1991 production of his horror/musical NUDIST COLONY OF THE DEAD. While he was shooting that feature, in which zombie nudists feast on teens at a religious retreat, working on Super-8 proved increasingly difficult. “Camcorders started to spring up, labs were closing down or strictly doing 16mm and it became tougher and tougher,” he recalls. “The other problem was that the cameras we were using were so incredibly unreliable. They would break down twice a day. After that, I vowed never to touch a Super-8 camera again.”

Pirro hopes to finish RECTUMA sometime in late 2003, and adds, “We’ve probably got the best cast and crew I’ve ever had, mostly because they enjoy doing it. I guess it’s like what Ed Wood had with his ensemble, but without the cross-dressing, and preferably without the bad filmmaking.”

Cross-dressing served Pirro well in CURSE OF THE QUEERWOLF, however, and the cult followings enjoyed by that film and POLISH VAMPIRE have led to their current rebirths on DVD. The discs will be stocked with extra features: “I produced documentaries for both,” Pirro reveals. “POLISH VAMPIRE has ‘Behind the Fangs,’ which runs about a half-hour, and for QUEERWOLF we did a behind-the-scenes piece called ‘CURSE OF THE QUEERWOLF: Completely from Behind.’ Whenever I had screenings of these films, I would get up and talk, and the same questions would come up. These documentaries answer a lot of those questions. I also thought it would be fun to talk to the original performers and get their slant on the movies.

“We’re including commentary tracks on both films,” he continues, “and POLISH VAMPIRE has clips from USA Network [airings], plus deleted scenes, the trailer and an early teaser. I also went back to the original one-inch videotapes that we created from the Super-8. I made digital video masters and cleaned up all the bad splices and scratches, sharpened the images, brightened up the colors and fixed things that were never right. The quality is better than it has ever been; it took about four months per picture.”

If that sounds like a long time, it’s nothing compared to what it took to finish POLISH VAMPIRE originally; equipped with a budget of only $2,500, Pirro spent two and a half years making his first feature. “The actual shooting process was over a year, since we worked around people’s schedules,” he recalls. “When no one is getting paid, you have to work around their schedules. We’d also be at the mercy of the locations. Then the postproduction took another year, because we were doing all of the sound after the fact. We didn’t have anywhere near the technology that’s available today to filmmakers.”

The final product proved quite salable, however, and when it came to seeking distribution for POLISH VAMPIRE, Pirro admits, “We didn’t tell anybody that it was Super-8. Nobody was really shooting Super-8 feature films, so people assumed it was 16mm. A company called Simitar picked up the film, and a couple of years later we made another deal with USA Networks. I don’t think they knew the budget or the format. Then it started to pick up a following. It was good timing, because home video was just coming into play, and we became one of the first made-for-video movies—even though that wasn’t the intent when we made the film. My whole goal was to make it as inexpensively as possible—but to be honest with you, the $2,500 was killing me. It was guerrilla filmmaking at its dirtiest.”

With Simitar paying nearly $50,000 for the video rights, POLISH VAMPIRE became a surprisingly lucrative venture for Pirro and led to bigger-budgeted work, such as DEATHROW GAMESHOW (1987), where Pirro made a (temporary) leap to 35mm—and encountered obstacles along the way. “Crown International made over a million dollars on that film in the home video market,” he recalls. “We had a deal that they’d pay us a bit after the movie made money; but of course, on paper the movie never made money, so we had to sue Crown to get what we were entitled to.” After GAMESHOW (and before being ripped off), Pirro made another deal with Crown to write and direct MY MOM’S A WEREWOLF, but walked away before production began; his script was ultimately helmed by Michael Fischa. “I think they offered me something like $4- or $500 a week to direct the film, which I thought was insulting,” Pirro frowns.

Instead, Pirro went back to Super-8 for another lycanthropic spoof. “CURSE OF THE QUEERWOLF is sort of a spinoff of a character from POLISH VAMPIRE,” he explains. Despite the outrageous plot—a straight stud is bitten on the behind by a “Queerwolf” and becomes cursed to transform into a gay transvestite during the full moon—Pirro reveals, “The homosexual community has endeared itself to the film. I can’t tell you how many e-mails I get from members of the Gay and Lesbian Society. It always cracks me up, because they’re always analyzing things in the film—like making a statement against homophobia—while I was only making a movie to be entertaining, without any message or moral.”

Pirro first switched to video with his 1998 feature COLOR-BLINDED, the satirical story of a black girl who turns white. “It was shot on Hi-8 video,” he says. “I did some tests, and I saw that by doing a few manipulative tricks, you could make it look like film.” He continues, “Anyone who would consider shooting on film today has got to be insane, because you can get such incredible results with digital video. That’s the format of choice now for low-budget filmmakers—but of course, everybody with a camcorder is trying to grab that brass ring.”

Some of those up-and-comers have been inspired by Pirro’s success, and he notes proudly, “I get a lot of letters from people who decided they wanted to get into filmmaking because they saw POLISH VAMPIRE, and knew the backstory of the film—how it was made for nothing. Some people even said it was the BLAIR WITCH of its time. It has been a fun ride, and we’re hoping the DVDs will create a whole new life for these films.”