Production
The film, under the working title of Hideous Mutant Freekz, was conceived around the time Winter and Stern had directed 1988's Bar-B-Que Movie, a short film starring and featuring the music of experimental rock band Butthole Surfers. Winter, Stern and Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes began work on the first draft of the script, envisioning it as an obscene, ultra-violent horror film once again featuring the Butthole Surfers, costing around $100,000. The idea was, as Alex Winter put it, "Beach Blanket Bingo meets The Evil Dead." The two fished the script around to various studios for years, but to no avail.
Following the end of production on Stern and Winter's MTV sketch comedy show The Idiot Box, co-writer Tim Burns was recruited to join the two in a number of rewrites. The film was completely revised, dropping the aspect of the Butthole Surfers entirely and turning it into a full comedy in the vein of the Monty Python and MAD Magazine-inspired humour that was present in The Idiot Box.
Winter and Stern pitched the idea to 20th Century Fox. Joe Roth, the head of the studio at that time, loved the idea and offered the two a twelve million dollar deal to direct it, despite the fact that neither of them had any experience directing a major Hollywood film and had never even shot on 35mm film before. The only condition was that the film had to be rewritten and toned down to fit a PG-13 rating; therefore most of the profanity was written out of the final draft to fit MPAA standards. Within a month of being picked up, the film began production.
The makeup effects requirements for the film were so substantial, and the lead time before filming was so short, the makeup effects characters for the film were designed and created by three different companies: Tony Gardner's company Alterian, Inc., Steve Johnson's XFX, Inc., and Screaming Mad George's Studio.
20th Century Fox had such high expectations for the film that they released a number of products based on it, including a line of action figures, a novelization and, most notably, a comic book released by Hamilton Comics (however, since the comic was drawn before most of the casting was completed, none of its characters look anything like their real-life counterparts). Four resin figures were sold at Spencer Gifts and Suncoast Motion Picture Company.
According to Winter, Jackass star Johnny Knoxville served as a production assistant on the film, and posed in full makeup as Ortiz the Dog Boy for a group photograph on a day when Keanu Reeves was unavailable.
