Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood is a 1996 American horror comedy film directed by Gilbert Adler from a screenplay by Adler and A.L. Katz, and a story by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis. Dennis Miller stars as Rafe Guttman, a private investigator hired by Katherine Verdoux (Erika Eleniak) to investigate the disappearance of her brother Caleb (Corey Feldman) which leads him to a bordello run by Lilith (Angie Everhart).
The film was developed by Gale and Zemeckis in the 1970s after their college graduation. The duo conceived the original script as an exploitation film designed to break the duo into the film industry, but it went unproduced. Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis wrote an early draft of Bordello of Blood, wanting to break into the film industry by making an exploitation film about "a whorehouse full of vampires". They pitched Bordello of Blood to producer John Milius in the 1970s, but ultimately was not produced at that time, and the three wound up making 1941 instead, but Milius described the scripts for Bordello and another proposed film from the duo entitled Tank as being "pretty darn good".
Following the commercial success of the Tales from the Crypt film Demon Knight (1995), Universal Pictures greenlit two more Tales films, planning to make a film trilogy. The original proposed second film was Dead Easy (a.k.a. Fat Tuesday), a zombie film set in New Orleans, which was shut down during pre-production by Universal. The producers also considered Quentin Tarantino's screenplay From Dusk till Dawn as a possible Tales from the Crypt film, During this development process, Robert Zemeckis was offered a contract with DreamWorks, and considered leaving Universal. To appease him into staying with the studio, it was agreed that a revised Bordello of Blood be produced as the second Tales film.
Production
The production budget was $2.5 million. and Robin Givens to play Lilith. Miller disliked his character's scripted dialogue and once he started filming, he proceeded to improvise nearly all of his dialogue. The Bordello of Blood shoot was rescheduled to work around the shooting of Dennis Miller Live, and the Canadian crew became angry at Miller because the filming schedule prevented their seeing their families on the weekends.
According to Katz, after filming began, Erika Eleniak's manager told the production that she would not travel to the set unless significant portions of the script that she found unacceptable were rewritten. Eleniak had left Baywatch because she wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, and allegedly did not want to play the character of Katherine as previously written. Katz claimed Katherine was scripted as being a stripper, and Adler and Katz frantically rewrote the script and changed these aspects of the character so she would travel to the set. However, Eleniak disputes this claim, saying that her argument with the producers was due to Joel Silver wanting to add a "sexy" scene between her and Everhart which had not been in the script, and that changes had been made to the script based on Eleniak's casting to make her character "sexier".