Director Chris
Munger, like so many people in the film industry, mainstream or not, appeared more or less from
nowhere (the little we found we supply further below) and disappeared into nowhere.
This long-gone
Munger should not be confused with the currently active music-minded Chris
Munger, the composer of the music to the D-2-DVD flick Aliens vs. Zombie
(2017 / trailer). Unlike so many "filmmakers", Munger the First at least left behind two intriguing projects: the
Blaxploitation sleaze fest that is Black Starlet, and the Georgia-shot cult creepy-crawly chiller Kiss
of the Tarantula (1976 / trailer), the latter "a Willard
(1971 / trailer) inspired movie with
spiders in place of rats, a female protagonist, and a much lower budget". The
end of his known directorial career seems possibly to have been an episode of Grizzly Adams in 1978, after which one can
only say, "Oh Munger, Munger, wherefore
art thou Munger?"
While we don't know
where the Chris Munger the First went, we were able to find out a little about whence he
came: as per the Los Angeles Free Press, Vol. 6, Issue 244
(3/21/1969), Chris Munger was one of six UCLA student filmmakers — the other
five being John Gufiderson, Bill Haugse, Jim Martin, Kent Smith and future
bad-movie auteur Jim Bryan — who, as a self-help
cooperative called "the Venice Film Group", hosted a program at the
Los Angeles Cinematheque to earn money to
finance their own projects. Considering
the year, it might be feasible that the screening included Munger's
not-but-almost forgotten experimental short X-Ray Movie (filmed 1968, released
1971, according to the Library of Congress Catalog: Motion Pictures and
Filmstrips), which "makes a cynical comment on our romantic naiveties
of our bodies, particularly in terms of lovemaking. [alternative projects]" The music is
from the Dutch composer Hank Badings. "In Chris Munger's X-Ray Film (1970, 4:20 mins, 16mm), the entire arc of life, from
birth to death, is played out with medical footage. [bampfa]"
Chris Munger's 1968 short,
X-Ray Film:
[X-ray film] from
I•HATE•THIS•FILM
on Vimeo.
Speaking of
Munger's fellow UCLA film studies classmate, the bad-film auteur Jim Bryan, Chris
Munger — or, rather, "C. E. Munger" — was an associate producer of Bryan's "low-budget
crime film with a lot of soft sex thrown in", Escape to Passion (1971 / full
film), featuring the Babes of
Yesteryear Kathy Hilton ("Oh Kathy, Kathy, wherefore
art thou Kathy?"), Barbara Mills (23 Feb 1951 – 15 Dec
2010) and Bambi Allen (2 May 1938 – 21 Jan 1973, billed as Holly Woodstar). Three
years earlier, in 1968, Munger was the
cinematographer on Bryan's equally sleazy The
Dirtiest Game — Bryan: "My budget was well under $20,000. [love
it loud]" — which
didn't get released until 1971 (full film)
and is "all near-hardcore
exploitation until the wife goes berserk, leading to a bloody, violent ending
with razor blades and a gun". Bryan's most notorious film is probably the
disasterpiece that is Don't Go in the
Woods (1981 / trailer), but his last
directorial effort was Jungle Trap
[2016 / trailer],
starring the infamously untalented Renee Harmon (see: Frozen Scream [1975]), with whom he
collaborated regularly. Unlike Munger, Bryan managed to carve himself a niche
as a jack-of-all-trades in no-talent independent filmmaking....
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