Rachael Robbins: Blondezilla

By Mike Watt

Actress/model Rachael Robbins hopes to make it big with her new character, Blondezilla. Really big. In the new promotional stills available at her website at http://www.fantasyartpages.com, Blondezilla is a cute bikini babe in gold boots and a long blonde tail sweeping behind her. She's also 600 feet tall, towering over a city like her reptilian cousin from which she got the latter syllables that comprise her name. Blondezilla: 'Half giant lizard, half glamour girl,' reads her presskit, 'she must learn how to put her new super powers to work.'

"Blondezilla is just a concept right now," Robbins explains. "We want to do licensing with whoever. We're willing to work with anyone who might want to take on the concept, artists who work in any type of medium. We're getting our ideas together to license them out to comic books or comic strips, tv shows, movies, books, computer games, whatever. Anything that's going to get it out there. I'd love to have a Blondezilla Barbie with Mattel."

The story so far, quoted from their on-line press: "Eager to get ahead of her meager position as lab assistant, Rachael stayed up late nights trying to develop a formula to promote hair growth. Unfortunately, too many nights spent drinking champagne made Rachael a little light on the brain cells. During one of her 'blond moments', she mis-mixed some chemicals causing a beaker to explode saturating her with her own concoction. After a painful transformation, Blondezilla was born."

"I came up with the concept," says Robbins. "It all started with this huge blonde hairpiece I have. When I put it on, I would transform into Blondezilla because I was all of 5'3 and six feet of hair. And out of some champagne-induced stupor it evolved into "Blondezilla the 600foot Lizard Girl". Then we just started to come up with funny ideas for it. I mentioned it to Robert [Milazzo] and he wanted to take some pictures, and reference photos, and from there the blonde tail was born."

Robbins and Milazzo joined forces with graphics designer Alex Kroke and established the Fantasy Art Pages website. And now, it's just a matter of attracting others to the project. "They're looking to get involved with other fantasy artists, promote them on the site. Everybody would promote everybody else. [Already on board are] Daniel Horne, who's doing a resin model; Age, who is a magic-marker comics artist, is doing a few interpretations. Dave Nestler is doing a big painting for us, which will also take the longest to appear on the scene, but it will be really worth the wait. The graphic artist stuff that Alex and Robert did went over so well at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors Convention. Fangoria was the first introduction to the world. We didn't know how well it would go over, but everyone loved it. We didn't know if the fan-base would love it, but they did. We've been getting a great response, we've been getting lots of email, it's been great."

The trio has big dreams for Blondezilla. The towering beauty-queen already has a nemesis: Dumbzilla. "[Dumbzilla's origin came from] Dimity Bourke, my best friend, who was here from Australia. We were taking some pictures of her for reference, and it evolved into her becoming this dumb, bubble-headed character. So we started thinking about possible names for her. You know how Godzilla has Mothra? Well, Dumbzilla was a really funny one, because she has this really dumb look on her face the entire time. It just seemed to fit."

The creation and licensing of a character is a new avenue for Robbins to explore. Though she's a full-time actress and model, she's made a pretty big splash already for someone who hasn't been in the game all that long.

"I've been acting for about three and a half years," she says, traveling down memory lane with the ease of someone used to giving interviews. "[Before then I wasn't] really doing anything very seriously. I grew up in Upstate New York, in a town called Kentcliff. At 16 I moved to Sydney Australia, lived there for two and a half years, finished up high school there and avoided college. I moved back to NY, went to Hunter College. Majored in Film Production. After college, I moved down to Miami for a year and a half. I got involved in modeling and a little bit of commercial stuff down there. And I decided that if I really liked doing this stuff, then I'd better not mess around with it down there, I'd better move to NY or LA. So I moved back to NY and I've been here doing it for the last three years, and I finally got bold enough that I'm moving out to LA next month to be with the big boys."

The move to New York yielded almost instant success for the petite blonde model. "I had a manager in Miami, who knew I was moving back to New York, and she said, 'look, I don't know if you're interested, but they're casting for this Marilyn Chambers movie [called Little Shop of Erotica].' So I went and actually got the part, and I just fell in love.

After Little Shop and a film called Sexual Intrigue, Robbins retired from the world of soft-core erotica, preferring to move forward with her career. From there, Robbins found the offers coming pretty quickly, appearing in such films as Troma's Terror Firmer (where she met good friend and P.R.-'oholic', Roxanne Michaels - "Roxanne is like the world's promoter. If she's your friend, she'll shout your name from the rooftops with a megaphone."), and On the Fly Productions' Vampire Lesbian Kickboxers. She learned about the auditions for the latter film in the back of Backstage Magazine. "Now, I never go on casting calls out of Backstage Magazine, but I could not pass up a movie called Vampire Lesbian Kickboxers [as principal character Raven Lavene]. So I went to the casting, and I got cast, though not as a vampire or a lesbian or a kickboxer, but I have a very comedic role in it, which is good. I think it's due out in the spring." [Visit the website at www.vampirelesbiankickboxers.com for more information.]

Robbins found herself a home on movie sets. "I'm in front of the camera which makes me happy, and I'm talking, which makes me really happy. So now, while I do still want to be an actress, I also want to branch out into other areas I can get involved with. With this Blondezilla thing, I get to see the production of things, and see the other avenues you can take something down. I'd love to star as Blondezilla in a movie, but I'd just as much like to just live off the royalties from selling the concept. Be a producing or something like that. I definitely want to get into different aspects of the industry, and take on as many roles if I want to. I'm not going to put all my eggs into one basket."

Robbins is no stranger to the production end of a project, however. Having gone to school for film production, she learned the ins and outs of a project before she ever stepped foot in front of a camera. She loves film, she says "from start to finish. Just seeing something come out of nothing. Working with creative people, conceptualizing the idea - I still to this day get butterflies in my stomach when I walk onto a set and see all the lighting people setting up, and the camera crew unloading the equipment, the production people with their walkie-talkies - it's just exhilarating. Being in front of the camera is definitely where I want to be right now, though. I think if I went into production at this stage I'd be one of those bitter production people that didn't have the balls to become an actress, and just took a job as a make-up artist and was really bitter. I encounter those kinds of people a lot. If I had to pick some of the best moments of my life, spontaneous moments where I felt amazing, probably half of them would be when I was in front of the camera. The time that I realized that I was the master of my emotions - where they were there to do my bidding, or I could use them in any way that I needed them to. Just those types of moments. Moments where I could say to myself 'Okay, I'm doing the right thing here. This is amazing.' It's also really satisfying to see yourself on film and in photographs."

It hasn't been all fun and games, however. There was one bad experience she is hesitant to talk about. "I pissed off Lloyd Kaufman and got edited out of Terror Firmer," she says with a laugh. "Maybe the long cut is on the DVD and I'm actually in there somewhere."

There is a tinge of regret in her voice as she mentions the film, however, that extends beyond her character's fate on the cutting-room floor. "Working with Troma was a horror story from start to finish," she says, laughing again. "It was my first big motion picture and I learned everything that I didn't want to have happen to me ever again on a movie set. I shot on Terror Firmer for two- -and-a-half weeks. I played the wardrobe mistress for the film crew that was shooting the film within the film. I was sort of the Marilyn Munster type of character, where I was not a freak, and everyone else was a freak, but I didn't realize that I was the only freak. It was very normal for me to be putting makeup on a severed head, watching flying eyeballs getting stuck in people's cleavage, that sort of thing. [And] when we finished, I gave an interview to Femme Fatale magazine, and I just told the truth about [my experience with Troma], that I wouldn't want to work with them again after this and that I felt that I was taken advantage of. I didn't bad mouth them, say that Troma sucks or that Lloyd sucks. I just said that you couldn't get a hot cup of coffee after the first four hours on the set. And that they would keep you their for 18 hours then use you for five minutes as a background player. Troma's philosophy is to get as much out of you as they can for as little as they can for as long as they can. They try to suck you in with 'Come to Cannes, and be a Tromette, and humiliate yourself in the name of Troma'. That's just nothing I'm interested in doing. I have a little more self-worth than that. I didn't see myself as the typical "Tromette" and that I didn't want to be associated with them in that way. I just wanted to say that I did a movie with them - this passing moment in my career. And Lloyd got very upset at me. He couldn't understand why people get upset when you feed them a single meal of peanut butter and jelly - with no bread! - after the first week of craft service. It was definitely a stepping-stone, and it was good to experience at the time, but I could never work with them again."

Not the first time an actress has expressed this sentiment about the popular independent production company, and she certainly won't be the last.

Robbins has little to worry about, however, if she feels black-balled by Troma Entertainment. Her career continues to move forward.

"I have a movie in pre-production called Love Sexy. Which will be directed by Ricardo Scipio who did two SAG features prior to this one (Watershed and When - the latter starring Mackenzie Philips of One Day at a Time]. It was supposed to be shot this spring, but Hollywood got sense of it all the way out there on the West Coast, and some big producers are coming in to talk about producing it on a bigger budget. And my contract is signed, so they can't get rid of me. My character's name is Mercy, and she's a mess, which is great from an actress's point of view," she says, again with her lilting laugh. "This one is about relationships between women. Not lesbian relationships -though it does cover that - but all sorts of relationships that women have. And the interesting thing about it is that it's set against the porn industry, and Riccardo is a very naturalistic director, so he's not trying to sugar-coat it or make it into a glamorous Boogie Nights type of thing. He's been researching the porn industry. One of the characters in the film is a documentarian, so the whole film will almost seem like a documentary."

If Love Sexy takes off, Robbins move to L.A. might be bought and paid for. And then we might be seeing a whole lot of the actress in the future. "This one I have high hopes for. Of course, I have high hopes for every project I get involved in until they massacre it in post production or something."

More information about Love Sexy can be found at www.ricardoscipio.com/