BIOGRAPHY
Brett Piper was born in New Hampshire/USA in the mid-1950s. As soon as he laid hands on his first camera, a bargain Kodak Brownie 8mm, at the age of 11, he started filming clay dinosaurs and remaking his fave Hammer horror films in his backyard.
Though his first takes at filmmaking and animation weren't exactly groundbreaking (Brett recalls his attempt to remake Irwin Allen's The Lost World as being nothing more than "half-a-second of weird blur"), the young filmmaker didn't throw the towel but kept improving his skills and developing new techniques. At the age of 18 he shot a 45 minute version of Frankenstein which unfortunately got destroyed years ago and at the age of 27 he finally produced and directed his first feature film, the Jules Verne adaptation Mysterious Planet (1982). Made for only $5,000, this low-budget science fiction epic grossed more than $50,000 and got released on VHS and DVD not only in the USA, but also in other countries such as Germany, France and Poland.
After the success of Mysterious Planet, Brett went on to direct the zombie film Dying Day (which was bought by indie legend Sam Sherman and reworked as Raiders of the Living Dead, retaining about 15% of Piper’s original) as well as another two successful space sagas, namely the cult flick Galaxy Destroyer (1986) and its obscure successor Mutant War (1987), both starring Matt Mitler of The Mutilator and Deadtime Stories fame as fearless space scoundrel Harry Trent.
The early 90s marked a brief intermezzo with indie cinema cult label Troma Entertainment, who bought Brett's prehistoric babe flick Dark Fortress, changed the title to A Nymphoid Barbarian In Dinosaur Hell (1991) and put it out on VHS and collector's edition DVD.
In the mid 90s Brett shot a couple of horror films and creature features, such as They Bite (1996) and Psyclops (2000), before he joined forces with New Jersey based production company Ei Cinema in 2003. In addition to writing and directing four retro-styled drive in-shockers for them--Screaming Dead (2003), Bite Me! (2004), Shock-O-Rama (2006) and Bacterium (2007)--he also worked as an in-house editor and special effects artist on other Ei Cinema productions such as Skin Crawl, Kinky Kong and Bikini Girls On Dinosaur Planet.
In addition to that, Brett's special effects wizardry can also be seen in several films by the renowned Polonia Brothers, e.g. Hellgate: The House That Screamed 2 and Gorilla Warfare: Battle Of The Apes.
Brett's biggest trademark is probably his frequent use of well-crafted stop motion effects, inspired by the heroes of his childhood, such as Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien. To this day Brett has written and directed more than a dozen feature films and with the exception of Dying Day and Bacterium all of them feature at least a couple of stop motion scenes.
Currently, in 2009, Brett is working on new scripts as well as trying to set up new distribution deals for his films.
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