As earlier promised, here it is, in all its glory. The original 1993 production from HanftPort pictures, Child Killer. A bit of background:
Dave and I started making movies as soon as my dad allowed us to touch the 8mm family video camera. We were around 10 years old. Naturally, much of what we shot was complete garbage. Not so naturally, my dad was completely frank in telling us this when we showed him our work.
“The lighting is terrible, you can hardly hear what anybody’s saying, the camera never moves – I mean really, this one scene is like 20 minutes long with the camera in one place – and there’s no plot. It’s awful!”
This encouraged us to improve production. Child Killer, filmed when we were both about 13 and, I believe, about to begin the eighth grade at George Washington Middle School in Ridgewood, NJ, represents the height of our output.
To be sure, the film is incomplete. As were all our films. Usually we would work on a project without a complete script, just filming as we went along, and taking scenes into the editing room as they were finished. Eventually we got bored and started a new movie entirely. We never finished a single film, to my knowledge.
Child Killer shows us in our prime, bringing all our technical knowledge to bear. We had saved up money for editing machines which we used to write text, lay over sound, and distort the video with primitive effects like strobe, paint and mosaic. We even added sound effects to amplify the punching, and of course, the gunshot sound was taken from Sniper.
When we laid this on our family, everyone, including my dad, was blown away. Everybody jumped at the part when Dave shoots Gia, with its vivid bloodtrail and loud gunshot (thanks, Tom Berenger). And then they all laughed and laughed, because the whole thing is just ridiculous.
The “plot” is pretty simple. Juvenile psycho Joe Didley (Dave) goes on a killing rampage in which he brutally murders his best friend Joshua (Rindy), Joshua’s sister Susan (Gia), Susan’s friend Cameron (Cameron Hanft, Dave’s sister) and some kid who witnesses Cameron’s murder, presumably her brother (Will Portfolio). There is no rhyme or reason to the killings, other than violence being the best situation in which two young, aspiring filmmakers could convey their teenage angst as well as their technical skills. Oh, if only we’d had iMacs in those days…
Major props are due to my dad, for letting us use the camera, for rightly deriding our poor intial efforts, thereby inspiring us to do better, and for digging this video up somewhere last year and burning it to DVD as a Christmas present for me.
UPDATE, Jan. 8, 2008: Child Killer has been removed from YouTube for violating copyright. A fine legacy for HanftPort pictures. For more read this.
UPDATE July 2012: At some point, they put the video back online but removed the sound, which offended the copyright lords: