Trivia / Bordello of Blood

• Creator Backlash: For Dennis Miller, though he has a sense of humor about it. Bill O'Reilly never missed a chance to remind him of the movie whenever Miller appeared on The O'Reilly Factor.
• Executive Meddling: Executive producer Joel Silver insisted on casting Dennis Miller and Angie Everhart even though the writer/producer and director had both agreed that Daniel Baldwin and Robin Givens were their choices.
• Franchise Killer: This movie brought down both the original Tales from the Crypt television series (which had just been Uncancelled) and the film series as well after its poor reviews and box office. As a result, an eventual third installment (Ritual) went straight-to-DVD and initially had its ties to the franchise edited out. Another film (Fat Tuesday) had a completed script, but was canceled in pre-production (Word of God, though, insists that was due to other factors, though according to some other rumors, Tuesday was finished...but was left unreleased).
• Hostility on the Set: Reports say that Miller, who had only agreed to do the film once he got paid a million dollars, did not get along with anyone on the set, even as far as being accused by Corey Feldman of stealing a set van to leave. He not only alienated castmates by improvising all his dialogue and then getting permission to skip out of shooting for the rest of the day, leaving them to try to work out how to react and act around lines he probably never said, he alienated the crew because all this forced them to work weekends. Apparently heat between him and Corey Feldman got so bad that Miller physically attacked Feldman after Feldman adlibbed a line referencing Miller's Weekend Update character on SNL. Afterwards the producers had to enforce a distance between the two on set in between takes.
• Money, Dear Boy: Miller considered himself to be a comedian and conservative political commentator, not an actor, and had no interest in doing the film, joking (without seriously believing that it would happen) that he would only do it if they paid him a million dollars (which was considerably more than he had ever been paid for any project up to that point). However Joel Silver wanted him badly enough to actually throw a million dollars at him (which represented a considerable chunk of the money that had been budgeted for the film). All of this didn't help his attitude on set any.
• Prop Recycling: The Key from Demon Knight returns in this film. Oddly, they never say what exactly it is, but the effect it has on vampires and the way it explodes in a red flash when destroyed suggests it might actually be the same item. Which has some disturbing implications...in both directions.
  • However, they do mention in Demon Knight that there was more than one key (in fact, SEVEN of them), and it's possible all keys look like that.
    • Also the end of the world was only if the demons got all the keys. Maybe this means we're permanently saved!
    • It is meant to be one of the keys, one was supposed to appear in each Crypt movie, but it didn't appear in the third film. The destruction of this key would also explain the Cryptkeeper's assertion in Demon Knight that Jeryline lives happily ever after.
• Recycled Script: The host segments here are almost the same as the ones from a fifth season episode, "The Assassin"—even reusing guest star William Sadler! (Though he plays a mummy here instead of the Grim Reaper.)
• Star-Derailing Role: This was Dennis Miller only lead role in a movie. The flopping of the movie plus his awful behavior on-set ensured that he would only be doing supporting and bit parts for the rest of his career.
• Troubled Production:
  • Neither A.L. Katz nor Gilbert Adler wanted to make the movie. They had planned on making a psychological horror movie called "Dead Easy" as the second Tales From The Crypt movie. While scouting for locations to film at in New Orleans they got a call from Universal to stop production and start work on "Bordello of Blood" which was originally a student script written by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis that Universal bought to prevent Zemeckis from joining Dreamworks.
  • After finishing the script, writer/producer A.L. Katz and director Gilbert Adler had settled on Daniel Baldwin as Rafe, Bridgette Wilson as Katherine and Robin Givens as Lilith. However, executive producer Joel Silver wanted Miller, Eleniak and Everhart, justifying the latter choice with his belief that supermodels were "the next big thing" that would make hit movies. So despite her minimal acting experience, she got the part.
  • Miller didn't want to do the film, and to turn it down without having to actually say no, asked for a million dollars. After the studio balked, Silver took $750,000 out of the film's special effects budget—a film about vampires, mind you—to pay Miller that amount.
  • Since he'd alienated all the industry's craft unions, Silver had the movie shot in Vancouver, which created two problems:
    • The Canadian crews were inexperienced, greatly annoying the cast who often had to work around them.
    • More importantly, shooting took place in July and August. During this time of year, Vancouver has maybe a couple of hours of genuine, full-dark night in every 24, which don't come until very late. This presented a real problem when shooting a vampire movie.
  • Miller made it abundantly clear that he absolutely didn't want to be making the film. He often had his assistant go and ask the producer and director if he could shoot his scenes first and then go,^note or sometimes not even show up at all a request they almost always granted, leaving the other members of the cast to do any takes which didn't require his presence dependent on the script supervisor and angry and resentful of him. The crew, too, came to despise Miller since his frequent absences from the set often meant they had to work weekends at the expense of their family time.
    • At one point he tried to steal one of the Teamsters' vans to leave the set.
  • Making these matters even worse, he disliked the script and ad-libbed much of his dialogue in its place, often using one-liners that hadn't made his cut for his standup act. So not only did the other actors have to rely on the script girl, they couldn't even rely on her to give them the line that Miller had actually said, resulting in some discordant scenes in the finished film.
  • Miller wasn't the only member of the cast to give the filmmakers problems. After shooting started, Erika Eleniak had her manager tell them that she wasn't coming unless they seriously rewrote her character. She had just left Baywatch with the hope of getting more serious roles, and didn't want the character to be so sexualized (i.e. not portrayed as a former stripper). The filmmakers say they complied, although Eleniak has characterized the dispute over merely one scene Silver wanted to add in which there was apparent Les Yay between her and Everhart. She was upset that the rewritten script took out a scene in which it was revealed that she had once weighed 300 pounds and been a fat-porn star ... she had even gone to the trouble of wearing special makeup for a poster that would have showed that.
  • While Everhart was generally in a better mood than her castmates, that changed briefly when she broke up with Sylvester Stallone—in her words she was an "emotional wreck". However, that allowed her to start playing Lilith the way she had wanted to, not the way he had been coaching her to, and after reshooting some scenes to make her performance consistent, she finished the film generally pleased with herself.

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