Daily News from New York, New York • 383

a a I REX REED The big Winner, off horror game ess 812 a es aats ss tiflss gjs a asa S3 as a a realistic rape scene in "Death Wish," did It again -by hiring real freaks from hospitals, freak shows, circuses and asylums to play the devils from Hell. "It took two hours just to make up John Carradine as a blind priest, and he looked like he'd had a rather late night the night before! To do 30 people in makeup with lights melting the wax would've been corny. All it says in the book the movie is based on is 'The armies of Hell rose I didn't want 30 extras with white faces wobbling about. I wanted something spectacularly horrifying! In Marlowe, Dante and the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, the creatures of Hell were hideously deformed, so I said, 'Let's get the real Universal knew what I was up to they got carbons of letters saying 'Dear Mr. Deformed, please come for an interview at three o'clock' but they didn't want it publicized." Freaks have been used before, in Tod Browning's repugnant classic "Freaks." Brian De Palma used them in "Sisters," but squeamish execs got cold feet and cut them out of the film.

Never has anything like "The Sentinel" been seen by human eyes, however. Some audiences leave the theater raving about the scary makeup, not knowing the truth. Unfortunates with their faces eaten -away, goiters, missing eyes and appendages, and worse they are all here, and one wonders why they did it. "Each one read the script, signed releases and got a promise they could leave if they were offended in any way. There was nothing sensational about it and I have a clear conscience," says Winner.

"The remarkable thing is that the creatures we used turned out to be the happiest, most professional group of people I've ever 'worked with in 20 years of making films. This was their moment in the sun. They photographed each other, got autographs from the stars, they were flown in from everywhere, and it really enriched their lives. "One man wrote me he had been a recluse who never went out of his home before the film was made because he thought he was the ugliest man in the world. The movie proved to him that there were others worse off than he was.

It also had a comic side to it, too. We put them up in hotels during the weekend of the Tall Ships, and the tourists were a bit mortified, I think. Then we gave them chauffeured Cadillacs and the crowds on the set would come around when the cars pulled up, hoping to see Ava Gardner, and out would pop these freaks! They had a sense of humor about it. Nobody had ever asked them to join in life before. Sylvia Miles had to play with them in the nude.

Her only complaint was that one of them kept pinching her on the bottom!" Sylvia Miles also had to munch the brains of a fresh corpse on screen. "It was bread soaked In chemical syrup, and she wasn't really supposed to eat it, but she got carried away and it seemed like HORROR movies, psychologists tell us, are just another visual, vocal and visceral way to tell we're alive. A scream a day keeps the doctor away. The public laps up hair-curling, bone-chilling terror like spaniels devour hamburger. "Rosemary's Baby," "The Exorcist," "The Omen" not to mention such low-budget classics as "The Night of the Living Dead" and "The Texas Chain-saw Massacre" have pumped fresh dividends into Hollywood's empty coffers.

Now there's a new horror on the horizon that threatens to break box-office records. Its called "The Sentinel," and it's hard to believe Michael Winner, the director, is the same man who last year turned out a dumb little dog picture called "Won Ton Ton." "It's quite simple, really," he says, sipping Coca-Colas and puffing Cuban cigars in his New York hotel suite while fighting off jet lag from a trans-Atlantic flight. "After 'Won Ton Ton, I certainly wasn't getting any more -offers to direct comedies! Besides. I like the idea of frightening people." Before our meeting, three people had warned me Winner was a feisty egomaniac whose first love was self-promotion. "Ken Russell and I both have that reputation," he laughs wickedly, "but I think we're both terribly charming! Of course, he raps critics over the head with blunt instruments.

I'm too much of a coward. Publicity is good fun. I don't go around knocking on doors to get my name in the paper, but as long as I've got a film I don't mind trying to sell it." The one he's selling now is "The SentineL" When he spent Universal's S3' -million quietly last year on location in New York, they didn't say a word. When he showed it to the executives In Hollywood after final editing, they "almost committed suicide by doing a two-foot fall from their padded leather chairs." They asked for a horror film, but they didn't bargain for this. "The Sentinel" is about a beautiful model who rents an apartment in a gloomy old building in Brooklyn Heights only to discover it is the gateway to Hell.

Corpses come to life, demons ooze and slither through the hallways at midnight, blood splashes across the screen shamelessly, and the audience shrieks its way home to a week of nightmares. Going to bed after seeing "The Sentinel" is like going to bed after a dinner of raw chili peppers and ground glass. Michael Winner loves the imagery of that. Every scream means dollars in the cash register. "Audiences are fairly unshockable today," he shrugs.

"If you're following in the footsteps of 'The where the big scene was a 14-year-old girl masturbating with a crucifix, you've got to go some to shock anybody!" But Winner, who already shocked folks with tha such a shame to disturb her. The makeup man whispered to me: 'She's gonna die of food and I said 'Well. I really don't need her after four o'clock, so it doesn't She was O.K. the next day, so she must have a cast-iron stomach!" Winner has never made a film in a Hollywood studio; everything was an authentic locale. Chris Sarandon's penthouse was really Michael Bennett's apartment on Central Park South.

The haunted houStt was a real building in Brooklyn Heights, inhabited by 40 irate tenants who had to be moved into hotels. "One man wanted $20,000 a day to vacate his room and said if he didn't get it, he'd run an electric saw all day and ruin the sound. We got rid of him by cutting off his electricity in the basement. Another group wanted $30,000, which I thought was quite a lot for Brooklyn. So I ignored them.

To my horror, I discovered they had a room overlooking the street. When Ava Gardner showed up as the real estate lady to rent the empty house, they hung a sheet in the window. We covered that up with foliage. During the night, they tore down the foliage. This went on for a few weeks, until we invited them to a cast party in the garden a very boring party, on the cheap, really but they were so overcome with joy that from then on they were very helpful.

We stripped all the furniture, knocked down the walls, and put everything back later. All the tnants did very well in the end. They all got free paint jobs." If Winner has an ego, it makes good copy. He's not one of those deadly dull directors who go around eating humble pie and boring the press to death because they don't know where their next job is coming from. Hes witty, opinionated, quick and, after 20 movies, still full of enthusiasm for the business.

Also, he's candid about the controversial stars he's directed: Ava Gardner: "I cast her as the reatlor in 'Sentinel' because every time I rent an apartment in New York I get it from a realtor who looks just like Ava. She keeps saying she's a lousy actress, but she's very good. She's a recluse. She lives near me in a old Victorian house in London and hardly ever goes anywhere or sees anyone. She hardly lead a film star life, to put it mildly." Brando, in "The "I saw a side of him you don't often see.

He was cheerful, dedicated, and worked for no money. That whole film was financed by a rich man for $650.000 a fraction of what Brando usually gets for his salary alone and he was very loyal to it. He made them delay 'Godfather' while he did my picture. He insisted on eating with the crew to prove he wasn't a snob, yet he drove around in limousines with an entourage. Curious contradictions in his character." Charles Bronson: "We were in Spain, doing Chato's and he had to cut the ropes that tied up a naked woman in the desert.

He stopped the film and announced 'I will not appear on the screen with a naked It was 9 p.m. in Almeria, and there was no point arguing. I shot them separately, then edited it together later. Years later he cornered me and said 'You still made it look like I was on screen with a naked Utter nonsense." Alain Delon, in "His English was so poor I asked him to speak slower and he stormed off the set. 'On all my other American picture, thly told me to speak fast so it would look like I understood what I was he fumed.

I said, 'all of your other American pictures were total So was "Scorpio." which showed before it was fashionable, the CIA doing naughty things. A former film critic who came to the fore making dreadful British rock musicals in the early '60s. Winner has small regard for today's critics. "If a cheap film comes out of Mesopotamia or Eastern Bengal showing an Indian peasant climbing 206 steps to get from A to B. they call the shot one of the greatest camera movements in cinema history, when all it is is five minutes of a man walking upstairs.

It's all nonsense and if these films attract an audience of five, it's a big day. Meanwhile, the people in East Bengal don't go to see these bores. They're all going to see American horror movies!" He says he's unfulfilled because he has yet to make a film that is both artistic and commercial, but he's got this philosophy, and he may be right: "The masses are looking for entertainment, not art. All they want is an hour and a half of light relief in a dark room, and if you don't give it to them you find yourself down the toilet." It's not likely to happen to Michael Winner. As long as audiences demand movies with pow-sock appeal, he's the man who delivers.

Critics scoff, but in East Bengal, he's sitting pretty. Director Michael Winner and Ava Gardner go over signals during the New York filming of "The Sentinel." 1.