On Campus

On Campus from DeeDee Halleck on Vimeo.

 The Bloody Crime Crusher, starring Abe, Milton (Lefty) and others. This was an epic that took months to shoot and even includes a scene at a nearby airport. The "super hero" in this case is a vampire who sucks the blood from his criminal victims. It occurred to me that this was pretty much a metaphor for these kids' lives. They provided the nutrients for the upstate economy that built the youth prisons such as Otisville. As the boys' inter-title asks "What happens when Crime Crusher runs out of criminals?"

In this film the "Crime Crusher" is a vampire that sucks the blood of criminals. This perceptive script asks the
question-- how to keep the monstrous prison industry alive? You are next! 

This one is called "Escapism". Many of the films are about escaping the confines of Otisville. They especially connected with the popular song by the Temptations, Runaway Child.  This film was by Darrell and Lovell.


This film is another escape fantasy. The Breezer. The boy looks at a picture of his girlfriend and decides to run. He is chased through the snowy woods by the other students. The landscape of the Catskills was intimidating to these city youth.

This film is about a bad trip. Milton conflates heroin and LSD into a drug experience in which the user dies, attacked by a "Doctor" in a white coat. Milton was a terrific actor, who played a safe cracking burglar in The Bloody Crime Crusher. After Otisville he lived for a while with my family.

Hey There Lonely Girl The girls in this film were friends of the Otisville Film Club. They had their own film group at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center at the AME Zion church of Middletown, NY. In the film Flora is caught looking at her friend's test and kicked out of the classroom. She retreats to the girls bathroom where others are congregated smoking cigarettes. The lookout warns that a teacher iscoming but Flora is caught and taken to the office where she is expelled from school. But it is lunch time and she joins her friends in sliding down a hill near the school. These girls do not eat in the cafeteria and are sort of outcasts in the school, but they all return when the bell rings, except Flora who walks away from the school across a snowy meadow. With Flo Hasbruck, Flora Hunter, Gretel King, Rosalind King, Connie Martin, Bonnie Wilkins, Bay Scott, Cathy Walter, Michele Jackson and Paul Mara. Shot at Middletown middle school, in Orange County, NY. Flora was in reality kicked out of school and this was the story of her expulsion. We had to get special permission to allow her to return to make the film.