Dave talks to Eduardo Montes-Bradley about his brief dalliance with the world of direct-to-video movies.

“I didn’t really have any desire to direct, but I needed the money – and I was being paid very handsomely to do it. We were also doing drugs at the time. A lot of cocaine! That was the scene in Los Angeles, and the whole idea of straight-to-video was very attractive.”

Brutal honesty isn’t something Eduardo Montes-Bradley has an issue with.

An acclaimed documentarian, the Argentine was bitten by the desire to create moving pictures early on. After relocating to New York in 1979, Montes-Bradley flirted with passion projects that revolved around the changing political landscape of Central and South America; but with bills to pay, a career as a sales agent for European film buyers proved to be a lucrative opportunity too good to pass up.

“One of these guys was Javier Gracia,” recalls Montes-Bradley. “He offered me a five percent commission on anything I bought. But then all that did was present me with the dilemma of whether to pay more money for films, in order increase my cut. ‘That’s the moral challenge,’ Gracia would say – and I kind of liked that. He was the only honest guy that I met in the world of B-movies on Sunset Boulevard.”

In fact, Gracia was responsible for Montes-Bradley entering features, with the serviceable thriller SMOOTHTALKER (1990). And as we’ve heard so often when it comes to the ’90s DTV scene, opportunities materialise from the most unexpected places. In this case, it was via Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989).

“Javier phoned me to say that Halloween 5 was coming out, and that he was prepared to pay half-a-million dollars to secure the rights for Spain. ‘Get the fuck out of here…’ I said [laughs]. So I went to London and met with Moustapha Akkad.”

“’Do you have a script?’ I asked.”

“No.”

“Do you have any talent attached?”

“No.”

“So what have you got?”

“The title. Halloween 5.”

“So I paid half-a-million dollars for the rights to a film that didn’t exist, with no cast, in the hands of someone I didn’t even know. When I went back to see my producer, he suggested that I seemed quite uneasy with this. I said, ‘I think you’re an idiot! For half that money I can make a film and you’d have the rights for the entire world!’.”

“He goes away, and then comes back with $250,000 in cash! ‘Go back to Los Angeles and make a film that will generate a million dollars in sales. If you don’t do it, don’t come back.’.”

“And that is how Smoothtalker started.”

Carl Waters (Joe Guzaldo) is a cop with a lot on his mind. His attorney wife, Lisa (Blair Weickgenant), just left him; his boss, Lt. Gallagher (Stuart Whitman), is ready to fire him; and there’s a twisted serial killer on the loose who happens to have a thing for the women working the 976 fantasy phone lines. To further complicate matters, Lisa gets the gig prosecuting the chief suspect – which is already a seriously shaky case – and promptly falls head over heels for the defence lawyer, Jack Perdue (Peter Crombie).

Director Tom Milo had chalked up a couple of years as a first AD on the likes of Hide and Go Shriek (1988) and American Rampage (1989), and had clearly amassed enough experience to make Smoothtalker an attention-holding watch. Montes-Bradley, meanwhile, opted to co-script and produce.

Guzaldo is a solid bit of casting. He’d risen to prominence through a couple of Chuck Norris films (Code of Silence (1985), Hero and the Terror (1988)), and brings credibility and authenticity to Waters, playing him with a pitch perfect noir affectation. It’s Crombie, though, who gets all the best lines. His character’s ambiguity is a delight, and dialogue like “Sometimes she gets so wet, I think I’m gonna drown” enables Smoothtalker to punch well above its weight in the entertainment stakes.

Admittedly, the mystery’s unravelling lacks the level of surprise you might have hoped for, the perp barely concealed in plain sight. Still, if you consider the unsettling yet absorbing nature of Tony Roman’s fine score, and Stan Lazan’s evocative and era-epitomizing photography (dust-coated desk lights, rotary telephones…), then Montes-Bradley should look back on this picture with a modicum of pride – even if, in reality, he’s reluctant to actually do so.

“We were a bunch of kids, doing blow, and getting the attention of girls,” he shrugs.

“I made a trailer with the strapline, ‘If he loved them, he will kill them’, and decided that we should get people who have value attached to their names. The concept was brilliant. Then, while we were having fun and acting irresponsibly, the sales agent got in touch to say that they’d sold over $750,000 using only the trailer!”

“The only problem we had was that one of our potential stars, Adam West, wasn’t suitable. He was so arrogant. He was living in Montana at the time. He was poor! But he had this long list of demands of stuff he wanted. I hung up the phone, turned to my co-producer Craig Shapiro, and said ‘Fuck Batman. Let’s get Robin.’.”

“So we did. And that’s why we cast Burt Ward [laughs].”