Welcome to the celluloid jungle. Guitar legend and Guns N’ Roses axeman Slash is getting into movies, producing a “requel” of the 1983 cult Roger Corman trash classic Deathstalker. The film has its world premiere at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland, where Slash – aka Saul Hudson – is talking up this new addition to his CV.
It turns out that Slash’s affection for Deathstalker goes way back. “When I was working at Tower Video, we had it on the monitors all the time. It was a real popular popcorn movie,” he says.
“I’ve been producing movies for a little while now. I work with these Canadian producers and I did another film [The Breach] with them back in 2020. They managed to get the IP for Deathstalker, and they asked me about it, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, yes.’ I thought the script was great and Steve Kostanski, a director I love, was into doing it.”
Kostanski previously co-directed the wonderfully Lovecraftian The Void and the utterly bonkers Psycho Goreman, which with its kooky comedy and OTT splatter is similar in tone to the nostalgic delights and gunky gore of Deathstalker. “It’s all practical effects. I’m not a big CGI guy,” says Slash. “Steve was totally into doing it that way. He had no interest in making it a CGI movie, so we hit it off right away. I knew that Steve could make it better than the budget.”
Other fantasy films from the period proved an inspiration. “I loved Krull and the original Conan the Barbarian,” says Slash. “And I loved Deathstalker. It was sort of tongue-in-cheek, exaggerated and low budget, and it had this great theme song. My whole interest in getting to do this new one – which isn’t a remake, it’s sort of another version of it – was really nostalgic for me. Once we got the script, I thought ‘Man, we could really make a great movie.’ And Daniel Bernhardt coming in and being the lead was awesome because he played the part so perfectly. It was really a passion project.”
Veteran stunt performer Bernhardt, who has more than a passing resemblance to Hugh Jackman, plays the not-too-bright hero Deathstalker with a straight face. In the original movie, Deathstalker goes on a quest to collect magical objects and defeat evil wizard Munkar. “It’s got a great sense of humour to it, but it’s still effective as an action movie with a sort of fantasy element to it,” says Slash. “It ticks a lot of boxes.”
Slash was born in the UK and spent his early childhood in Stoke-on-Trent before moving to the US at six years old. “I really grew up steeped in British Hammer movies. James Bond – seriously,” he says. “I loved horror from as early on as I can remember. That kind of film music was my first real introduction into scoring. And I don’t know if that had any influence on my tastes or not.” No doubt it did: Guns N’ Roses covered Paul McCartney and Wings’s Live and Let Die on their 1991 album Use Your Illusion I. “As far as visuals and storytelling, those were the first movies. And then there were the Edgar Allan Poe films of Roger Corman and more literary stuff that my dad turned me on to.”
Slash’s handlers say strictly no questions about music, so I ask him about how the movies influenced his work. “There’s a lot of different angles to how I got into music and movies and the combination thereof,” he says. “When I was a kid, I always loved movie theme songs and scores, and that’s always been a huge influence on me. I don’t know if it had any influence on me picking up the guitar, I was more of a straight ahead rock’n’roll guy. But when I started getting into the idea of producing movies, one of the things that I was really into was the fact that I’d have some say on the music for whatever movie I was working on.”
Slash’s first producer credit was on the 2013 Anne Heche horror movie Nothing Left to Fear; more recently he was involved in producing Scandi-thriller-adapted TV series The Crow Girl, and contributed score music for Nothing Left to Fear and the aforementioned The Breach.
“Prior to producing, I’d done a lot of recordings for different movies. So when I pick a movie to produce, the first thing I think about is what the music is going to be like, and whether there’s going to be a theme song; what the vibe is going to be. It speaks to me in a different way than when I just think about writing a rock’n’roll song. I use a completely different part of my musical brain. It’s very satisfying.”
