The History of the Amazing Schlock Film Factory

Learn the Past, Present, and perhaps..the Future of the Factory

The year was 1978. Dudes were getting butt-raped in Midnight Express and shooting themselves in the head in The Deer Hunter. It was a simpler time when people played Pong, wore “I’m a Pepper” T-Shirts, everyone still thought the Bee Gees were cool, and no one yet knew that Vader was Luke’s father.

It was into this world that Worm Miller was spawned in Minnesota (that state above Iowa and below Canada). Around the same time, give or take some months or years, other strange life forms, bearing strange names like Patrick Casey, Sean Hall, Nick Stukas, Matt Sell, Jack Shreck and various other monikers who would go on to form the Amazing Schlock Film Factory, also appeared on the landscape. They all grew up in a greenish suburb of Minneapolis, known to its inhabitants only as Bloomington.

It was during the third grade that Worm's family acquired a video camera and an electric type-writer for him; and so Worm’s career in film began. Soon Worm enlisted the “talents” of Nick Stukas, Nate Morales and Andy Kriss, found their acting to be slightly above terrible, and the first seeds of the Schlock posse were planted.

Elsewhere in the city Patrick Casey, Sean Hall and Matt Sell drew comics together, happy and totally unaware that someday they too would be forced to make movies.

Life moved on. Worm’s posse continued to grow when he met Jack Shreck, N. David Prestwood, Sarah K. Bizek and various others. Sean, Pat and Matt, meanwhile, wound up working on YRU-Up, Bloomington's “premiere” cable access show, which still airs live every Friday at midnight.

And for a while, things were good. But cruel fate would soon intervene...

For various reasons that involved a girlfriend, a planned beating and a failed TV show pitch, Worm, Stukas and Morales joined YRU-Up, with N. David Prestwood soon to follow.

Over the next four years of high school everyone had a wonderful working relationship at YRU-Up. People were ditched at the TV station while everyone else went to football games; Pat and Matt got in several violent fights that often climaxed in the breaking of equipment; someone’s yearbook was stolen; Matt was frequently forcibly removed from the studio; shows were sabotaged out of juvenile spite; and Worm almost killed Pat when he accidentally threw him from the back of a moving car.

YRU-Up aired every Friday night and was almost canceled on two separate occasions by parent groups who found the show’s content inexcusably crude and offensive. The show also received an amazing slew of negative comments from judges when it was nominated for a Minnesota Cable Award. During all of this the gang somehow managed to make five feature-length films, all of which seemed great at the time, but are in fact crap.

Then suddenly high school ended and everyone scattered across the country.

But the good fight continued. More films would be made during college. Good ones this time around and not the kind the instantly seemed shitty two years later. They ended up making four features, the first being Murder Made Easy, which thankfully doesn't yet seem shitty, but for which they ended up getting sued twice by two different jerks.

Nonetheless, the Amazing Schlock you all know and possibly love was born!

During their senior year of college, Pat and Worm wrote what they intended to be the last of the Amazing Schlock college films. It was a college sex comedy that they cleverly called, A College Sex Comedy, and they planned to shoot it in Pat’s dorm at BU. They shot one scene, which turned out so bad that they canceled the film and shelved the script. To make themselves feel a little better they wrote and shot Magma Head in less than two days.

Upon graduation time, spring 2001, Pat and Worm seemed to be the only ones who wanted to actively pursue film anymore. Stukas was going to become a money man; Prestwood was going to go to Law School; Sean was going to become an animator; everyone else was doing some manner of crap.

So Pat and Worm sucked it up and moved to LA to become superstars. They assumed they could just show up and sell a script through no actual work on their parts. It seemed like a fool proof plan.

For the next six months they sat around drunk, wondering why they weren’t famous yet. Pat went hysterically deaf in one ear out of depression and Worm gained twenty pounds. Their friends would say stupid things to them like, “You never leave your apartment,” “You haven’t even tried to get an agent,” and “You haven’t even shown anyone your scripts.” Friends also stupidly advised that they get jobs at movie studios or become writing assistants on a television show. Pat and Worm felt this was foolish and instead got jobs at Hollywood Video and Cousin’s Subs, respectively.

Then, in July of 2002, a strange man with a funny name came into Hollywood Video, renting a bunch of zombie movies. “Writing a zombie movie?” Pat asked the man. “We’re thinking about it. I’m a movie producer,” said the man. “Hey, my roommate and I write movies.” “Got any great scripts lying around?” “Hell yeah!” “Here’s my card. Why don’t you send over two of your best scripts,” said the man.

The man turned out to be Scott Hillenbrand, of Hill & Brand Entertainment, makers of such high brow fair as King Cobra and Pinata: Survival Island. Pat and Worm knew they had them. They had a great zombie script, Janitors Don’t Die. But Hill & Brand wanted two. So they grabbed the only other script they already had printed out that wasn’t riddled with typos: A College Sex Comedy. Well, the Hillenbrand Brothers didn’t even read the zombie script, distracted by the word “sex” in the other’s title. They promptly bought the script and moved into production on it. The film was renamed a nauseating number of times before becoming Dorm Daze and finally wound up as a National Lampoon film. Now the film stands in the ranks of such fine Lampoon films as Senior Trip and Last Resort.

Things are looking good for Pat and Worm. Pat can again hear out of both ears, Worm has lost the twenty pounds he gained, the long-promised Hey, Stop Stabbing Me! DVD finally came out, they are making enough money from screenwriting to keep themselves fed on Burger King and canned lasagna, and now they sit around drunk out of joy instead of crippling depression.

And for now, things are good…

It will involve two piles:

Think money
Think whores