By Peter Landau
"MrCreepo is not of this earth. Some say he is a demon in disguise, others say he was born as a space alien." That's how Tim Beckley describes his impishly menacing character who directs, produces, and stars in a string of Grade-Z horror movies with names such as Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires.
Mr. Creepo is on a quest to bring exploitation back to film where it belongs. Armed with a camera, a head full of sick ideas, and a legion of nude nubile nookie that never questions their master's demand for the most skinful scenes of degradation, Mr. Creepo may just be the man to herald in a brave new world of cinematic excess.
"I have to blame this all on Nancy Reagan," says the creepy one. Then Nancy Davis and a B-movie star long before becoming First Lady, she had starred in the schlock classic Donovan's Brain (1953). It was being broadcast on TV one night in Beckley's childhood home. "My mother wouldn't let the young Mr. Creepo stay up to see Donovan's Brian," he remembers. "But I could hear it from the other room; the sound of the brain being kept alive in a jar is, like, ba-boop, ba-boop, ba-boop. To the ears of an innocent young monster growing up it was shocking. For years I had to sleep with the lights on."
With the horror of Nancy Reagan as one influence and the sighting of a UFO over his New Jersey home as another, Mr. Creepo was born in spirit if not name. As a boy Beckley produced mimeographed fanzines on the paranormal, even publishing books on bizarre topics such as local boogeyman the Jersey Devil, before finding his calling as an editor of men's magazines.
In the mid-'70s, during the dirty heyday of Times Square, Beckley landed the plumb assignment of movie critic for a burgeoning slap mag called Hustler. This led to work for the reigning scum books of the time, Velvet, Genesis, Swank, and a job as editor in chief of Adult Cinema Review, which gave him unprecedented access to the talent of the time.
"Vanessa Del Rio, Sharon Mitchell, I had lunch with Marilyn Chambers one time," he remembers fondly. "You might ask was this all professional or did it lead to other things--well I can't tell you all of that. But I did find it an entertaining and interesting period of my life, certainly not easily forgotten."
He eventually forged a partnership with an editor at the popular porn-film periodical Cinema Blue. "We decided that possibly we could do something that might be one step beyond," says Beckley. That step was the bold, X-rated movie take-off on Michael Jackson's hit single "Thriller", which they called Driller (1984). The film stars Taija Rae, who fantasizes about her lame boyfriend mutating into a werewolf and having his way with her using a crazy dildo that spews green slime. There are zombies, women masturbating for monsters, gold-painted nudes with vibrators, and an orgy featuring studs in Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Abraham Lincoln masks. Needless to add, it's a masturbation-piece.
"That was the start of my film career, if you want to call it that, as an actor and pseudo-director," explains Beckley. "The character Mr. Creepo developed from the character I played there called Quasimodo, the hunchback. It's the face that we use in the corner of all our video boxes."
But it took more than fifteen years for Mr. Creepo to return with the release of Sandy Hook Lingerie Party Massacre (2000), which stars Scream Queen Debbie Rochon. "I first met Debbie at a film festival near Syracuse [New York]," says Beckley. "Debbie was on the program. We had a nice chat, and when I was ready to do Sandy Hook Lingerie Party Massacre I was looking for a leading lady or someone with a recognizable name. She helps to hold it all together."
Since then Mr. Creepo has been on a productive spree that includes Skin Eating Jungle Vampires, which was partially shot on location in Costa Rica, and the aforementioned Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires, subtitled The Curse of Ed Wood.
"Everything that could possible go wrong went wrong," he says about the shoot for Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires, filmed on the hottest weekend of the summer. "As things went on and weren't coming out right we decided to have a s?ce. So we went to the cemetery and called up the spirit of Ed Wood, which is in the film. I do believe there is a good possibility that we did call up the spirit of Ed Wood, because the kind of humor that was in his movies comes through in what we did."
And like Wood, who ventured into hardcore features by the end of his career, Mr. Creepo is not opposed to mixing sex with his violence. All of his films are cast with Mr. Creepo's newest nude discoveries, which he calls his "Creepettes".
"It seems to me today that everybody wants to be naked in front of a camera," notes Beckley. "Just finding someone that is willing to pose in front of a camera isn't exactly what I do. In addition to finding some hot young things that are willing to strut their stuff for all to see, I'm also looking for gals with a little bit of personality. I kind of look at it like the Andy Warhol of B-movies. He picked people off the street who had their own individuality, their own personality. Some of them were kind of warped, to say the least. I think I carry on in that vein."
Some of those warped and wanton women include Persephone, a well-known dominatrix, and the up-and-coming star of the fetish world Violet Sweet, who appears in Mr. Creepo's newest production, Blood Spurting Vampire Freaks, due out by the end of the summer.
"It has one of the most kinky and unusual fetish scenes," Beckley says of his film. "I can't really tell you that much about the scene, except to say when I previewed it recently that a couple of people faced away from the screen and a couple of older ladies walked out of the screening."
Looks like Mr. Creepo is making sure that today's young monsters keep their nightlights burning, too. For more Creepo-ness, go to: MrCreepo.com
