1/11/07: RightWingTrashMan: Michael Berryman

The teaser trailer for The Hills Have Eyes II is out, and we’re feeling pretty good about it. The only real disappointment is that it looks as if the filmmakers have tried to put in a fake Michael Berryman. The original remake at least had the good sense to not bother with any kind of Berryman character. If you weren’t going to bring back the great character actor himself, then why try to sell a cheap imitation?

Berryman remains best known for the original The Hills Have Eyes from 1977—if only because of his glowering presence from the original movie poster. The guy’s done pretty well for himself, though. A rare medical condition could’ve gotten him stuck as the modern-day Rondo Hatton. In that spirit, Berryman followed up his debut in 1975’s Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze with a turn as a mental patient in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Berryman was pretty much set after his turn as a killer mutant in The Hills Have Eyes. He certainly cut a memorable figure, covered in scars from over 300 operations. (In a lucky break, his father was a brain surgeon.) A few smart directors have even taken advantage of Berryman’s subtle comic skills—although he was also wasted in one of the worst music videos of the ’80s.

Trash fans can also enjoy Berryman as a true outsider even among the outcasts of Hollywood. That’s right—he’s a political free thinker. The once-great Psychotronic Video magazine (which sputtered out after editor Michael Weldon began lecturing his readers on why they should feel bad for liking exploitation films) ran a fine interview with Berryman back in 1993. This was back when Psychotronic would run an interview with an actor who’d declare that he wasn’t a bleeding-heart liberal. Here’s more of Berryman’s wisdom:

I believe in capital punishment. I don’t think somebody can kill my family and say, “I’m nuts!” and write a book about it and go free. A police officer, off the record, will tell you if it happens to them, they’ll blow their heads off. Us private citizens, they don’t want us to have guns. If you kill my mother, I’m not going to sit there, you’re gonna get punished. Theresa Saldana was stabbed 20-some odd times, and the lunatic is going to be released. People say that I’m a barbarian about it, then I’m a barbarian about it. We need a little more frontier justice.

Berryman also made a good case for his belief in conservation, although his anti-fur stance was a bit much. He then closed the interview with some insight that’s practically a RightWingTrash manifesto. It’s a shame that Weldon wasn’t paying attention:

People get upset about exploitation in films. They make you think. What’s real horror? War, insensitivity, poverty—those are real horrors. Censorship, we don’t need it. If it’s criminal, lock them up. They don’t need an X rating. We need some common sense, We need more theaters. We need more drive-ins. I don’t want to live in Terminatorland, Blade Runner, or Robocop. I’d rather live in the woods and be old and cantankerous.

And while that rock video is pretty awful, Berryman made good use of it while working with the “Just Say No” program. As he told the kids, “Get real; life is what you make of it.”

Make him your own: Berryman is usually the best thing about any of his films, so it’s best to just enjoy him as a pleasant surprise whenever he appears. The original Hills Have Eyes remains his classic role—and it’s even more fun knowing that Berryman supports the original ad copy: “A nice American family. They didn’t want to kill. But they didn’t want to die.”

 

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