Here is the low down on this sick flick. 

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It was in the Spring of the 1989 when I first heard about a mysterious film shoot in Singapore shrouded in extreme secrecy.

I has just finished the Army and landed a job in a TV Commercial Production House holding the prestigious title of “Trainee Grip”.

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Singapore’s feature film industry was pretty much non-existent.  "Medium Rare" was not to come into existence until Dec 1991 and Eric Khoo’s first feature, "Mee Pok Man", not to be made until 1995.   Sandi Tan’s “eventually to be stolen” indie feature would not start filming until the Summer of 1992.

 

"Long Live the New Flesh" starting filming in Feb, 1989 in a supposedly haunted house in Siglap.  The filming was rumored to have lasted over 3 years with a more than 200 day shooting schedule.  

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The director, a Cambodian citizen who went by the name - Thaddeus Constantinople III, was obsessed with secrecy.  He banned his family and friends from the set unless they worked as labor.  Though the cast comprised of several characters, no scene ever had more that 2 characters at a time.  And the crew were limited to more that 2 other people besides the director.

 

The Cast and crew lived in perpetual fear,  constantly sensing an evil presence on set.  Swearing they saw “something” in the darkness.  Outside windows. Etc. 

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The crew refused to set up lights alone, terrified of the ominous jungle that surrounded the location.  Filmmaking was always at night.  The very dead of the night.  Acting parts had to be recast and scenes reshot as some actors abandoned the project due to their insurmountable fear.  Case in point, the character of the butler was not recast once, or twice or even three times, but a whooping 4 times!  Do you know how insane that is?

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Now, Thaddeus was a fiend.  He would spend all day, building sets, props, makeup effects, etc.  Then at nightfall, for several hours, he would slowly set up all the lights himself, only to be ready to shoot at midnight.  By 5am, they would wrap, and Thaddeus would sleep for 2 to 3 hours and begin the cycle again.

 

The blood, guts and disturbing acts of violence seemed so real to neighbors, the police were alerted.  So convinced were these neighbors that they had witnessed heinous acts of ritualistic evil.  

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Reporters from local yellow journalistic rag, The New Paper, approached, sniffing a juicy tabloid story.  But, Thaddeus wasn’t having any of it, and ordered them to fuck off.  His greatest fear seemed to be that people would get to know he was making a movie in Singapore, and did everything in his power to ensure any level of awareness was snuffed out like a bug.

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He was adamant that absolutely nothing pollute the purity of his project.  His vision.  He was on a different plane of existence.  With very different motivations than most filmmakers.  Heavily influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Thaddeus Constantinople III, had this hand written note pinned to the wall on the set for everyone to read, everyday.

 

"My film may seem like a filmed LSD trip, but I intend it to be much, much, more.  I wish the film be the pill itself.  That which, once, ingested, viewed, experienced, will trigger the hallucinations.  Like Cronenberg’s Videodrome storyline.  Generating visions within visions.  Hallucinations within hallucinations."

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After filming was complete, Thaddeus returned to Cambodia… and disappeared.  It has long been suspected he could not pay back the debts he had incurred in the making of his film.  There were some eye witness reports that his naked body was found in the jungle, bound to tree with barb wire.  His eyes gouged out.

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And for his film - it was as lost as he was.  Gone forever.  

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Until one fine day.

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I was living in LA.  And with eBay, discovered 16mm and 35mm film collection on ebay in 1999.  I first started buying as a collector but soon became a seller and dealer to fund my expensive habit.  What with one movie, like Blade Runner costing me $1500 to $2000 a pop.  I eventually was buying such large collections, I was selling film prints to Tarantino and the like.  And in these film collections, I occasionally would find long lost gems.  Like an American puppet show from the 60’s, feared lost forever, until I found it.  Or the time I discovered all the 35mm negative outtakes of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

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But, my biggest find, the discovery of all discoveries, the Holy grail - was the day I found Thaddeus Constantinople III, long lost film, Long Live the New Flesh.

 

I ran ads in local papers and on the internet, letting people know I was a dealer looking to buy entire film collections.  One day, the phone rings,  and on the other end, in broken English, an old Cambodian lady tells me her tenant has passed away, and he had a garage full of stuff, including what looks like a lot of film.

 

So, I head to Cambodian town, and enter this dark, dingy garage in a neighborhood festering with Cambodian gangsters.  I rifle thru boxes and get a pretty clear picture of this man who has recently passed.  He was a gangster - The full body gang tats and the gun I found were the dead giveaways.

 

This was the kind of man, you could see, killing another man and strapping his body to a tree with barb wire.

 

Most of the stuff in the garage was worthless.  Family pictures.  Clothes.  And boy was there a shit ton of porn. 

And then - 5 boxes of pure gold.  And when I mean gold - I mean the artistic vision of one Thaddeus Constantinpole III.  

 

Beta SP tapes of rough cuts of Long Live the New Flesh.  Film Negatives.  Scripts.  Notes.  And his Diary.  Direct access into this man’s mind.

 

How was it possible?  For this man’s baby.  To travel from Singapore to Cambodia to Los Angeles… and into my hands.

 

But, here I was.  Like someone's oceanic message in a bottle returning 30 years later.  The odds are staggering.  

 

So pissblood.com is truly proud to present - “from the mind of one Thaddeus Constantinpole Iil” - Long Live the New Flesh.

 

Thaddeus diaries seem to suggest he was possibly an escapee of a mental asylum in Malaysia.  He talks of receiving painful shock treatments and expresses in his diary, desires to kill his father when he was 15.  He successfully framed his father, falsely accusing him of a crime that sees him arrested and imprisoned.  Growing up, the father would often threaten to kill Thaddeus, his siblings and his mother before committing suicide.  Eventually, his father did indeed commit suicide.  Thaddeus also spoke of wanting to kill his entire school in a shooting spree, but said getting guns in Singapore was next to impossible.  Unless he figured out a way to rob the cops.  He also added that his time with the shrinks at the asylum thought him a thing or two about the power of suggestion, synopsis and subliminal messages in the arts.

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He spoke of his grandmother as being notorious for being part a covenant of local witches who prided themselves as the practitioners of some of the darkest black arts Asia had to offer.  Theirs were an alchemic hotpot cocktail of Cambodian, Thai and Indonesian Black Magic along with a perverting of both Christianity and Islam.

 

Religious priests of Taoist, Islamic and Cristian faiths and well as paranormal investigators were actually brought to Thaddeus’s grandmother’s house, prior to shooting, to analyze the “vibes”

 

It was concluded by some the these “professionals” that there were dark forces abound and that Thaddeus may run the risk of trapping some of this dark energy into the very film stock itself during the making of the movie.

 

Key members of the crew who worked on the film, later, were convinced, evil was actually truly being trapped in the film and begged Thaddeus to stop filming and actually go as far as to first burn all the footage shot up to that point and then buried the ashes deep in the ground during a religious ceremony.  

 

Oddly enough, now that I am in the possess the footage and have had some limited screenings, there have been times when the audience reaction has been “surprising”.

 

Thaddeus, in his diaries, speaks of his own "test screenings".  He says he once screened the film one night to a girl he had just met in a Thai disco.  A stranger, a one night stand.  During the screening, she seemed passive and not really afraid or partially deeply moved by what she was watching.  But, during the dead of the night, in post-coitus slumber, her body violently jerked up in the bed and the most horrifying SCREAM emitted from the very depths of her soul.  Her hand snapped up to cover her wide gap mouth, to muffle another Scream.  Her eyes were stretched open WIDE, riddled with sheer TERROR.  Her state of terror, terrified Thaddeus.  He asked her what happened.  She said she had dreamt of the movie.  And it was the scariest, most evilest dream/nightmare she had ever had.  Her reaction reminded Thaddeus of the way Jack Nicholson wakes up screaming over his typewriter after he has had a terrifying dream where he chopped his wife and son to pieces. 

 

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