Tom DeSimone, Director of ‘Chatterbox,’ ‘Hell Night’ and ‘Reform School Girls,’ Dies at 87

Tom DeSimone, who emerged from the world of 1970s gay adult movies to direct such mainstream cult films as the Linda Blair-starring Hell Night and the women-in-prison flicks The Concrete Jungle and Reform School Girls, has died. He was 87.

DeSimone died Oct. 17 in a senior care facility in Palm Springs, his younger brother, actor, comedian and drummer Bob DeSimone (Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), told The Hollywood Reporter. He had terminal cancer and opted to end his life with medical assistance.

Tom DeSimone also is known for directing the notorious comedy Chatterbox (1977), which starred Candice Rialson as a hairdresser whose vagina talks and has a mind of its (her?) own and featured turns from Rip Taylor and Professor Irwin Corey.

The slasher-haunted house film Hell Night (1981), also starring Vincent Van Patten, marked Blair’s return to the horror genre following 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic. (Fun fact: Frank Darabont worked on the movie as a production assistant.)

After he helmed The Concrete Jungle (1982), starring Tracey E. Bregman and Jill St. John, DeSimone figured he might as well parody the women-behind-bars movie, so he wrote and directed Reform School Girls (1986), starring Wendy O. Williams, Sybil Danning and Pat Ast.

He later moved to television, helming four episodes of the anthology series Freddy’s Nightmares in 1988-89 and calling the shots for such other shows as Swamp Thing, Dark Justice, Acapulco Bay and Pensacola: Wings of Gold.

The second of three kids, Thomas DeSimone was born on July 1, 1939, in Revere, Massachusetts, and raised in Newton and Weston. His father, Amodeo, was a chef and restaurateur, and his mother, Angela, a beautician who owned salons.

He studied directing, writing and theater arts at Emerson College, then earned his master’s degree in film production at UCLA, which led him to his first feature, the nonunion, ultra-low-budget Terror in the Jungle (1968).

Hamstrung by a producer who “was a rank amateur who knew nothing at all about making films,” he said in 2022, he quit the picture after about a month, “never thinking he would keep my name on the project. Little did I know, unfortunately.”

Under the pseudonym Lancer Brooks, DeSimone directed The Collection (1970), considered to be among the first gay adult films with a plot and dialogue. His credits in this arena would also include Lust in the Afternoon (1971), Confessions of a Male Groupie (1972), Erotikus: History of the Gay Movie (1974), Catching Up (1975), The Idol (1979) and Skin Deep (1982).

“I was interested in exploring gays in love or at least relationships,” he said in a 2019 interview for the Bijou Blog website. “My stories pretty much gravitated to those situations. I was tired of all the films that started with the pizza boy delivering and ending up on the couch. That’s not to say I didn’t make a few of those, too. But when I really wanted to do something creative and when I got juiced up to do something, it always seemed to go to the relationship stories.”

Many of his movies were distributed by the New York-based gay production studio Hand in Hand Films.

Chatterbox was produced by Bruce Cohn Curtis, who then hired DeSimone for Hell Night. He then reunited with Blair on Savage Streets (1984) but left early on that film before directing and co-writing Angel III: The Final Chapter (1988), starring Mitzi Kapture.

In the mid-’90s, he spent about a year in Mexico City and Acapulco, where he directed every episode (believed to be 60 in all) of the telenovela Acapulco Bay.

In addition to his brother, survivors include his sister-in-law, Lisa; his nieces, Amanda and Gianna; and his great-nephew, Ori. His sister, Carlene, died in May.