DEMON WARRIOR

Through a clumsy exposition scene we learn that the old Willard property used to belong to some Native Americans. Old man Willard stole the property from it’s rightful owners and the Native Americans, none too happy about that fact, placed a curse on the land. Every ten years, for an unspecified amount of time, an ancient muscle-bound man in a monster mask materializes in the woods, hunting and killing any white man or woman he comes across.

A gaggle of college aged whities are about to have a really bad weekend as their hunting trip turns into an implied bloodbath, 90% of which happens during the daytime hours. Will Neal, the youngest member of the Willard family to ever return to the old family lands, be able to stop the marauding Demon Warrior before he can kill his lovely girlfriend, Sarah, and his friends Brent, Hassmiller and… sigh… a guy named Badger? Neal might be in luck, as an investment banker turned Indian shaman has arrived on the scene with a magic arrowhead, ready to do battle with the buff guy in the monster mask.

So yeah, Frank Patterson’s 1988 low budget slasher movie DEMON WARRIOR is yet another Native American themed horror film, just another romp about some well-to-do white people paying bloody reparations for the sins of their fathers. It seems this kind of film pops up from time to time. POLTERGEIST featured the typical Indian Burial Ground trope, a nicely done and lovingly cynical look at the underbelly of white suburban life. Tobe Hooper’s (or Steven Spielberg’s) film sits at the top of the list, a genuinely good large scale horror film. Much, MUCH further down the list you have tripe like Fred Olen Ray’s SCALPS and George McCowan’s SHADOW OF THE HAWK, and somewhere in the middle, there’s some fairly decent stuff, like William Girdler’s gonzo sci-fi/horror mash-up THE MANITOU and the Wendigo cycle of horror films from Larry Fessenden.

Where does DEMON WARRIOR fall on the list? Pretty low, to be honest. This is a film where virtually every detail of the script seemed to be dictated by the incredibly low budget. Although our cast of characters are all crashing at Neal’s family home, we spend very little time there, most likely because the production could only afford the location for a single day and the owners didn’t want their nice hardwood floors stained red with food coloring. As a result, the vast majority of the film takes place outdoors, but not in the woods or near any kind of eye catching scenery. Expect a lot of walking and running through wide open fields with characters simply crossing through the frame because no one could afford a Steadicam or any other kind of camera-stabilizing mount.

90% of the film happens during daytime hours, a good choice if you’re looking to save a few hundred bucks on lights and generators, but definitely not a good choice if you’re trying to create atmosphere or scares. The demon warrior is wisely kept off screen in these daytime scenes, only showing his poorly constructed face during the nighttime scenes that bookend the film. He’s a ridiculous creation, literally just an oiled up bodybuilder in a Halloween mask. He doesn’t even get a roar or a growl. He just shoots arrows and moves at a light jog so the actor in the oversized mask won’t trip on a log or a rock.

The only saving grace in DEMON WARRIOR is the cast of characters, many of whom actually have personalities, wants and needs, and emotions that go beyond the typical “must get laid” attitudes of 1980s slasher movie characters. There’s a bit of a love triangle between Neal, Sarah and Brent, her old boyfriend who still carries a flame for her. Patterson and his co-writers actually treat this element of the script with a lot of care. When Hassmiller calls Brent out for trying to hit on Neal’s girlfriend, Brent rightfully points out that Hassmiller is currently sleeping with, you guessed it, a woman in a relationship. This leads the two men to have a somewhat heartfelt ethical conversation about relationships and love and… I don’t know. It’s not poetry, but the fact that a film called DEMON WARRIOR has the audacity to stop in it’s tracks so two of it’s male characters can have a kind of heart-to-heart about their love pangs is, well, kinda neat.

Not that anything really comes of it, as Hassmiller’s love interest exits the narrative as quick as she enters it and Brent is shot with an arrow before he settles on a course of action, but it’s the thought that counts, right? I mean, no one in the cast is a world class actor and all the characterization is in service of a plot about a shirtless man in a Halloween mask chasing people through a field for 26 minutes, but I have to say that in a world full of obnoxious, can’t-wait-for-them-to-die slasher movie characters, the knuckleheads on display here are actually really likable.

Unfortunately, everything else about DEMON WARRIOR is not so likable. All of violence (minus a few arrows to the chest and a nice, juicy scalping) is off screen, the Final Girl never gets to be a proper Final Girl, and the whole film boils down to a long scene of Indian magic and unconvincing lightning optical effects. There just isn’t a lot of movie here. Most of it is running through fields and making sandwiches. There is however a rather ludicrous car accident and at least one memorable nightmare sequence. So it’s not totally useless, I guess. It’s just not very good.

BLOOD FRENZY

The set-up is pure THE HILLS HAVE EYES. A camper full of people gets waylaid in the desert by someone – or someones – out for blood. In execution, however, Hal Freeman’s 1987 slasher flick BLOOD FRENZY is little more than a workaday blood bath with no social conscience in sight. It’s the kind of film in which every character is potentially the killer, a choice which greatly undermines any emotional investment it might have been able to muster up.

The folks in the broken down camper in the middle of the Mojave desert (of all places) are there for a weekend “confrontational therapy session” led by Doctor Barbara Shelley. Shelley’s motley crew of clients include traumatized Vietnam vet Rick, conniving lesbian Dory, middle aged alcoholic Crawford, gorgeous nympho Cassie, irascible asshole Dave, and Jean, a woman terrified of being touched. Immediately, things go bad. Dave is nearly knifed by Rick when the obnoxious prick knowingly triggers Rick’s ever-worsening Nam flashbacks. Dory’s temper flares when Cassie turns down her offer of a little girl-on-girl action. Things seem to be building to a fever pitch. When the group wakes one morning to find Dave dead in his tent, you can feel the film bracing for a descent into fiery confrontation, paranoia and bloodshed.

But then BLOOD FRENZY does something a bit unexpected. It dials itself way down and stays way down for the rest of the film. Just when things should be picking up momentum, Freeman grinds the film to a halt, eschewing any possible character driven, murder mystery angle for slow paced slasher movie theatrics. And ‘slow paced’ is not this film’s cup of tea.

The first half hour of the film is a parade of histrionics, beginning with a flashback murder set piece detailing the death of an abusive, drunk father at the hands of his child. Arterial spray galore. Once we move into present day, the arguments begin. Characters shout at one another endlessly. Rick stares off into the distance, all but muttering “Charlie in the trees...” over and over again as he recounts his time at war. Dave’s hyper aggressive masculinity results in frequent shouting matches with the equally predatory Dory. Cassie seductively licks a spoon while flirting with every man in the camper. Crawford’s drunk ramblings begin to sound like beat poetry. Once they arrive in the desert, everyone is at everyone’s throat and punches are not being held.

This first act is loud and ridiculous, verging on comedy, with performances so broad you'd need a whaler to cross them. So the sudden shift in tone from cacophonous and hyperbolic to slow and measured doesn’t quite work, especially since the characters don’t shift with it. They remain every inch the easily triggered, over emotional train wrecks prone to making bizarre decisions. After one of the group commits suicide via stick of dynamite, a shell shocked Cassie wanders over to Dory with a disembodied hand. Without so much as missing a beat, Dory whisks her away to an abandoned mine and swiftly seduces her. It’s the kind of scene that would leave even the most hardened of bad movie aficionados to question just what the hell they’re watching.

This weird conflict between tone and presentation never sorts itself out. The film remains in this strange limbo between genuine horror film and off-kilter black comedy. It’s like listening to a song played at three-quarter speed. It just feels… off.

The odd concoction of serious tone and playfully inept execution might undermine the scare potential of many of the late game slasher set pieces, but BLOOD FRENZY most certainly isn't anemic. What it lacks in frights, it more than makes up for in viscera. Characters die and die bloody. Cassie’s long and torturous death scene is easily the highlight, a gratuitously violent bit of mutilation that might not be convincing, but sure as shit is effective. The final fight is a four way struggle for survival during which buckets of blood are spilled, characters scream unintelligible lines at one another, and someone tosses a mining pick through the air, embedding it in the killer’s back in a way that defies all known laws of physics.

Many times I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to be feeling. Am I supposed to be frightened? Worried? Thrilled? Amused? I simply couldn’t tell because the film had left the realm of reality for something approaching lunacy. The over the top violence of the final act certainly sent BLOOD FRENZY out on a high note, but for much of the film, I found myself rather nonplussed. I’m generally not a fan of the “just turn your brain off and enjoy” line of reasoning as I think actively watching a film is more enjoyable than merely passively swallowing whatever the film throws at you. But with BLOOD FRENZY, I think it might actually be best to just sit and drool through it.

THE INCUBUS

John Hough’s 1982 horror oddity THE INCUBUS opens in typical slasher style, with bikini-clad babe Mandy and her boyfriend attacked by someone unseen as they putz around the beach. Though the boyfriend doesn’t survive the attack, Mandy does, albeit with a ruptured uterus, the terrible side effect of a rather brutal rape. New-in-town doctor Sam Cordell, a distant and troubled middle aged guy with a vivacious teenage daughter, can’t find a drop of semen in the victim. With Mandy currently comatose, the chances of finding the culprit are pretty slim.

Thankfully (unfortunately?), the rapes don’t end there. The next victim is found dead and ravaged, her uterus positively overflowing with what appears to be red semen. The savagery and excessive bodily fluids lead Sam and the local Sheriff to believe these attacks might be caused by a vicious gang of brutish men. But the real answer might be something much more fantastical. Across town, Tim, the teenage boyfriend of Sam’s daughter Jenny, is having nightmares of a woman trapped inside what appears to be a medieval torture dungeon, replete with numerous robed Inquisitors. Tim’s dreams seem to correspond with the attacks on the local women. Is this a psychic premonition or is Tim somehow connected to a dangerous, supernatural force leaving a trail of mutilated and violated corpses all across the little town of Galen?

THE INCUBUS is a real mixed bag of nuts, emphasis on the nuts. It’s one part murder mystery slasher and one part supernatural monster flick, all wrapped in a kind of plastic reality nightmare film that instantly calls to mind other better plastic reality nightmare films like THE SLAYER and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. To say that these individual narrative styles abrasively rub against each other is a bit of an understatement. It’s the slasher elements that most get in the way. There are simply too many POV shot-laden stalk and slash set pieces going on here. THE INCUBUS was based on a pulp novel by the prolific author Ray Russell and I imagine the film works better as a 100 plus page tome than a 90 minute film, if only because Russell didn’t have to factor in the amount of theater showings during his writing sessions.

The supernatural side of things is pushed way to the side in the film so Hough can squeeze as many slasher set pieces in as possible. As a result, once we finally learn what’s going on in this little town, the solution doesn’t quite hold up. Tim’s dreams really do have a connection to the rape/murder spree, though the quick three and a half sentence explanation just brings up more questions. At this point, I don’t think it’s spoiling anything (I mean, the film is called THE INCUBUS after all) to say that the culprit is an ancient, magical rape monster with a major backlog of red semen to purge. But why exactly is this beastie roaming the streets? We learn that the town already had a rash of unexplained rape/murders 30 years ago. Why is the Incubus back on the prowl? Why does it choose to take the form it chooses to take and what exactly is the solid, concrete link it has to Tim? 

None of this is ever really answered because the film doesn’t have any running time to spare. And those are far from the only unanswered questions. We learn that Sam’s age inappropriate girlfriend had died quite awhile back, possibly even murdered by Sam himself. As a result, Sam is a big bundle of aimless sexual yearning, a fact that is most obvious when he spies his 18 year old daughter naked in the bathroom. As Sam begins his investigation, he meets a local reporter named Laura who is the spitting image of his dead girlfriend. But why? In a film where nothing is really a coincidence, I would expect something to come from Sam’s sudden face-to-face with his dead girlfriend’s doppelganger yet nothing ever does. It’s like there’s a whole other movie lurking just below the surface that the film keeps hinting at, possibly as a way to sell more paperbacks.

That isn’t to say that what is on offer here is worthless. There’s a lot of fun to be had with THE INCUBUS. If you’re looking for a film that truly embraces its inner sleaze, you’ll probably be disappointed. It might be a film about violent rape/murders, but it rarely indulges in graphic bloodletting (well, apart from a half-decapitation with a shovel and a most unfortunate errant shotgun blast) instead focusing more on an upsetting tone, and a nice, oppressive atmosphere. The performances are actually quite good all around and that really helps the film stay firmly in the realm of believability, even as the narrative takes a turn for the loopy. It also boasts a remarkably great final scene, a real shocker that sends the film out on a high note.

THE INCUBUS is a film best watched at 50% cognitive power. There are plot holes and unexplained narrative developments galore, but as a piece of understated supernatural horror, it’s actually a decent little film. I just can’t help but think it would have been a better film had it ditched its fang toothed terror for a true blood slasher villain or vice versa. It’s positively jam packed with enough shit to fill three low budget, semi-obscure horror films from the early 80s. When the film is at its peak, the schizophrenia enhances the absurdity and, as a result, enhances the fun. But that aftertaste… When it’s all said and done, it’s what isn’t explained or explored that really sticks in the mind after the credits roll. I'm not sure that's what Hough was going for.

SCREAM (1981)

A dozen or so rafting weekend warriors meet sticky ends at the hands of an unseen, and quite possibly supernatural, killer in Byron Quisenberry’s 1981 slasher flick, SCREAM.

I imagine that made several of you perk right up. After all, it’s a well worn tale, one loved by many a horror fan. It’s the engine that powered everything from FRIDAY THE 13TH to DON’T GO IN THE WOODS. Exceedingly simple and, if performed well, extremely efficient, the potent mix of isolated, often unaware characters and bloodthirsty masked killer drove many films right up the box office charts. Truth be told, despite being one of the most over used narratives in all of horrordom, it probably has a gallon or two still left in the tank. It’s the kind of story that just never gets old or goes out of date.

However. getting it to work well can be rather tricky. The concept is sound and exciting, but if the execution of the concept is garbage, you’ll just be left with nothing more than a reminder of how well it had been executed a thousand or so times before. It’s so simple. It’s so easy. So when a movie fumbles it as badly as SCREAM does… well, you have to wonder just how in the hell a full creative team failed to grasp the most basic of all horror film premises.

Here we have a dozen or so characters, many of whom blend together into one fleshy blob of stale characterization. I finished watching the film about an hour ago and I can only remember a few names. There’s Bob, the cranky, chain smoking asshole and Laura, the only member of the group who is at all creeped out by the decrepit ghost town they will be calling home for the next day or so. There’s Ross and his co-worker Al, and Lou, the stumbling, bumbling coward everyone bullies because he’s, of course, developmentally challenged. That’s it. That’s all the names I can remember. Everyone else is just cannon fodder.

Shortly after settling down for the night, three members of the party die mysterious deaths. One of the group is found hanging. Two others are found slashed to death. Fingers are immediately pointed and arguments begin to break out. When the sun rises, they find their rafts have been destroyed. A couple of guys on motorbikes show up and one of the group leaves with them to find help. When night falls and the clock strikes midnight, several members of the group are attacked by the unseen killer. The arrival of a tall stranger on horseback might lend a clue as to who (or what) is responsible. The stranger’s name is Charlie and the tale he tells stretches credulity for everyone involved. Old Charlie is a huntin’ and his prey just so happens to be the vengeful, rampaging ghost of a long dead sea captain.

SCREAM is dull as dishwater, the result of a writer/director with an idea for a film, but no real clue as to how to flesh it out. Most of the film consists of characters sitting around inside a single room with nothing much to do other than wait for one of their friends to go wandering aimlessly in the dark. That isn’t an exaggeration or a lie. The majority of the film’s running time is spent watching characters do absolutely nothing. Sure, they tie a few cans to a piece of rope as an early warning system of sorts but that’s about it. Hell, most of the deaths could have been avoided completely were it not for characters having sudden and momentous lapses in logic. Characters only die because the screenplay dictates that, for no discernible reason, otherwise terrified characters suddenly and inexplicably lose every shred of their survival instincts.

Our characters are completely, 100% reactive characters. And that’s a major problem, not just for this movie in particular but for any movie. You need your characters to be proactive. You need the characters to attempt some kind of escape or take some kind of action that will help them overcome their problems. But the characters in SCREAM just stay sitting inside a run down home. They might bicker every now and then. Maybe someone will say something encouraging from time to time. But no one actively tries to escape. No one actively tries to catch the killer or even fight back when attacked. SCREAM has both the weakest and most useless batch of characters I’ve ever seen in a slasher film.

The easy listening synth soundtrack certainly doesn’t help the mood, and neither does the slow and methodical directing approach Quisenberry chose for the film. The camera is either stationary or it is SLOWWWWWLY panning or tracking. There is no pulse here, no rhythm to the editing. At times, I got the impression that Quisenberry wanted the film to have an artistic edge to it. It’s as if he purposefully sacrificed excitement and audience engagement in an attempt to make a more serious minded film. Well, it backfired tremendously. All his careful attempts at framing and composition mean jack shit if the audience isn’t awake to see them.

I also get the impression that Quisenberry wasn’t just focused on theatrical success, but desperately wanted his film to reach syndication on television. Despite our characters all being on edge, no one ever swears. “You can take your positive attitude and stuff it”, Bob says to Laura. And how does she respond to this sexist, obnoxious asshole? “Listen, Mister, you can just kiss off”. There’s stronger language in Hollywood films from the 1950s.

No blood is ever shown during the multiple murder set pieces and almost all of the violence occurs off screen. There’s no sex, no nudity, no fist fights, no nothing. Absolutely nothing that would offend television censors exists in this film. If it weren’t for the fact that I know SCREAM played in theaters, I would have sworn that this was a made-for-television movie.

Now I’m not suggesting that a film needs viscera, nudity and fisticuffs to be worth watching. That’s simply not true. But their absence is notable when it comes to slasher movies. Even HALLOWEEN flashed a few breasts. So why should anyone watch this film? It’s missing the visual thrills, the bare flesh and spilled blood. It’s missing the proactive and likable characters that usually populate films of this kind. It has no forward momentum, nothing even remotely resembling a heartbeat. We don’t even get a concrete answer as to who was doing the killing. I think we’re supposed to believe that all these men and women were murdered by a ghost, but the film is so poorly put together that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what the film was trying to say.

So again, I ask, why should anyone watch this film? I’m genuinely sorry, Dear Reader, but I can’t answer that question. There simply isn’t a reason why anyone should ever watch this film.

FATAL PULSE

Shot-on-video horror films are easy to shit on. They're weekend projects, usually made because someone came into a little bit of money. You would gather up a few local theater group actors, toss together a quick script, and hope that what you ended up with filled a gap in the market. In the 1980s, those gaps were everywhere. If you managed to convince a few of those local actors to take their tops off, chances are rental stores would want your stupid shitty movie. Moreover, if your movie just so happened to fit a popular trend, people would actually spend their hard earned money to rent it. 

If you were born in the 1990s, this might be a bit difficult to believe, but yes, there was a time when supply didn't quite meet demand when it came to video rental choices. Nowadays, you have access to hundreds of thousands of films just by going online. But if you lived in a small town or were just a particularly obsessed video renter in the mid 1980s, chances are you found yourself far less than spoiled for choice.

A little further up the chain of quality were direct-to-video releases. I don't know what the real statistics are, but I would bet my left nut that the majority of titles sitting on the horror shelves of video rental stores back in the 1980s never saw a theatrical release in the States. They were usually cheap films, probably made for half a million, but unlike shot-on-video atrocities, these films were actually films, shot on celluloid and edited using a flatbed instead of a few VCRs daisy chained together. For every five films that featured no one you've ever heard of, there would be one or two that starred a recognizable scream queen or a washed up actor, usually Cameron Mitchell. They felt like real movies, looked like real movies, but… Well, there's a reason these films were made for quick rental store turnaround and not the multiplex.

If you're looking for the best example of the worst kinds of direct-to-video horror movies, FATAL PULSE is a damn good place to start. I rented this movie back when I was a kid. It looked stupid. It sounded stupid, but like I said, sooner or later, you just found yourself without a whole lot of options back then. The films I wanted to see were all rented out. The films that weren't were the films I had already seen. What the hell was I supposed to do? Not rent a horror movie? Rent a movie from some other genre? What are ya, fucking nuts?

FATAL PULSE is a direct-to-video slasher movie. The end.

I don't really need to say anymore, do I?

The film takes place on a college campus. Or so we're told. We never once actually see a college campus, just some nondescript streets and a three story house that we're meant to believe is a busy sorority home. Jeff has just recently decided to get back together with his girlfriend, Lisa, a decision that necessitates Jeff blowing off some hot blonde with more tits than brains. Shortly after Jeff ends their brief fling, the hot blonde is attacked in her home, strangled to death by a black gloved killer. After a few more sorority girls end up dead, the police really start ramping up their investigation, eventually targeting Jeff as their main suspect, all because Brad, Jeff's ex-friend and Lisa's ex-lover, saw Jeff leaving hot blonde's house the night she was murdered.

Remember those gaps in the market? I bet you can see them right now, can't you? The sorority house girls under attack from an unknown killer. Perfect for slasher fans. The brutal violence meted out by a black gloved killer evokes memories of great Italian and European horror-thrillers. The Hitchcockian pull of a story about a wrongly accused man. On paper, the film is conceptually quite strong, easily marketable and sellable. On screen, however, the whole thing falls apart.

For starters, the slasher film bits don't work because the victims are not even a part of the damn story. They're side characters, only introduced a scene or two before they're murdered. Despite knowing every single victim, Lisa doesn't seem to really acknowledge their deaths, let alone the fact that she's clearly swimming in the “possible victim” pool. Much of the on-screen time between Lisa and Jeff is spent on their relationship issues, not the fact that someone is bumping off their friends with alarming speed. No real effort is made to uncover the killer's identity, let alone avoid the killer altogether.

The slasher and Euro-thriller angles might have fared better had this film been made in the very early 80s, but FATAL PULSE hit video store shelves in 1988. The film feels horribly dated (and not just because everyone has massive hair, and the soundtrack is non-stop synth rock and hair metal). All of the problems this film suffers from were solved six or seven years before it ever saw its first day of production. Slasher films quickly learned how to squeeze blood from a stone to make the absolute most of the reductive narratives their tiny budgets would allow. Look at FATAL PULSE with its love triangle and slasher running amok, and think about just how well MY BLOODY VALENTINE played those same cards. Think about how many fantastic gialli used Hitchcockian tricks to play their well crafted games of cat and mouse. FATAL PULSE feels like a film made in the earliest days of both the slasher film and the giallo. It feels like the kind of film we would have seen before folks like Carpenter and Argento came along.

And speaking of the Hitchcockian thriller angle, FATAL PULSE drops the ball here as well. Jeff is only targeted by the cops late in the film. The only piece of evidence that would suggest Jeff, a model student with no criminal past, is the killer would be the fact that he was the last person to see hot blonde alive. That's literally all the cops have on him, but in this films universe, that's enough to warrant them chasing Jeff through the streets like the angry mob chasing down Frankenstein's Monster. But what is the real reason the cops are after Jeff in the first place? Well, it's because Brad, the pudgy dickhead with the Robert Smith hairdo, wants Lisa back and is therefore willing to frame Jeff for the murders.

See, that's an interesting bit of narrative right there. Why not have Brad be the killer? Why not have Brad slicing and dicing girls (and even slashing one girl's neck open with a vinyl record) in some twisted play for Lisa's heart? That would make so much more sense and be way more satisfying than the explanation we actually get for the murders, something to do with a man using an experimental treatment to cure his terminal illness, a treatment which unfortunately gives rise to misogynistic, homicidal rage. But no, the film only plays this card so we can have a chase scene and a fist fight. The Hitchcockian angle is never given much room to grow. It's pretty much dead on arrival anyway.

And that's because there really isn't a pulse to be found in FATAL PULSE. At 90 minutes, it feels terminal, chock full of every tired cliché in the book. The only time the film manages to be entertaining is when it focuses on characters that feel like they've wandered in from some other slasher movie going on just down the street. Joe Estevez's crazy Vietnam vet and Herschel Savage's frothing police detective are both wonderfully sketched characters, all bug eyes and histrionics. They're great, just total joys to watch. Shame then that everyone else, all the characters that actually matter, are such personality vacuums. Maybe if the characters seemed at all interested or worried or scared or even just annoyed at the horror going on around them, the film would have been mildly amusing. It simply isn't, primarily because the film can't do a single damn thing right. It emphasizes the unimportant, lavishing attention on personal, petty drama rather than the emergent drama of its slasher narrative. It's a paint by numbers affair, the kind of film done a thousand times before. Problem is, FATAL PULSE lacks even the most basic discipline. It can't even seem to match the right damn paint to the right damn number.

SPINE

Back in 1983, Sony released the Betamovie BMC-100P, the first consumer class camcorder. It was bulky, heavy, used Betamax cassettes instead of the more popular VHS tapes and cost a damn pretty penny. True consumer friendly camcorders had to wait a few years to become commonplace, but once they did, they proliferated rather quickly. Once people got over the kick of being able to embarrass their families on vacation or film themselves masturbating into the kitchen sink, people starting trying to film whole movies using these low quality contraptions.

And thus, shot-on-video movies were born. Hoorayyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Back in the mid-90s, my high school pals and I made quite a few short films, usually mock commercials, but we did try our hand at making a feature length film. It was a corny, in-joke filled romp called LITTLE PLASTIC DEMONS. I was the writer, director and special effects guy. No lie, it was fun. We were making a movie! Many laughs were had.

Then it came time to edit the goddamn thing. Now, this is how you had to do it back in the day. You hooked one VCR into another VCR. The first machine was your playback and the other was your recorder. If you somehow managed to sync up the play delay of the first machine with the record delay of the second, you could, in theory, put a movie together. You could even dub the film or add sound effects using the camcorder microphone. Easy peasy, right?

Nope. It was a fucking pain in the balls, but it was what you had to do unless you could afford something more professional. We tried just filming in continuity, pausing the camcorder when we needed to change angles, but there was always a weird two second rewind that happened between hitting the pause button once and hitting it again. Of course, we didn't know this until we went back to watch the footage and realized that lines were getting cut off, actions were being truncated, etc. But who cares? We were making a movie! And it wasn't like shot-on-video stuff was even getting distributed, right? 

Every video rental store in the 1990s was full of shot-on-video movies. It's a testament to just how hungry for content video renters were at the time. We would walk into a store and plunk down our hard earned cash just to watch someone's home movie. Quality didn't matter. We just wanted entertainment. We didn't care how it was made or where it came from. We wanted more, more, more, more, more. So to keep up with demand, distributors started grabbing whatever they could and vomiting it out into every A-Z Video they could find. And I watched 'em all, from SPLATTER FARM to 555. I didn't care, damn it. I just wanted stuff to watch.

This was back when I wanted to be a film director so watching these shot-on-video abominations was strangely inspiring. I mean, they could do I so why couldn't I? But watching any of these movies today is like pulling teeth. It never occurred to me back then that just because someone COULD make a movie, it doesn't mean that they SHOULD make a movie. Most of these films are terrible, but it isn't really because they're shot-on-video. John McNaughton could have shot HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER on video and it would have turned out more or less the same (in fact, the most chilling moments in that film ARE shot-on-video). No, the reason most of these movies are terrible is because they try to be more than they possibly could ever be.

Case in point: SPINE, a 1986 slasher film written and directed by an ex-pornographer. It is routine and uninspired, just a sordid little tale about a nutjob with a hang-up going around slicing up nurses and plucking out their spines. That's not exactly the most exciting premise, but it gets the job done. All writer/director John Howard (and his co-director/co-writer Justin Simmons) had to do was keep it uncomplicated. Just deliver on the premise. There's no need to complicate things. With shot-on-video, your grasp should never exceed your reach.

Now, here's a word of advice from me to you, OK? Pay attention. If a shot-on-video film has a cop as a lead character, TURN IT OFF. Just do it. Turn that shit off and throw it away. Nothing good will ever come from it. SPINE, mostly because the film turned out to be far too short, has an entire throwaway plot line dealing with a few police detectives tracking down our mumbling, poorly written killer. I have absolutely no idea why the people making these kinds of films don't just rent police costumes from their local costume shop, but they never do. They slap toy badges on a couple of idiots dressed in street clothes, pin a map of the city onto a cork board in the middle of a room and think that we will all be convinced that these people are boys in blue. Any shot-on-video police character will speak in exposition, smoke multiple cigarettes in a single scene and grit their teeth anytime they're in close up. The shot-on-video cop is the single worst character in film history.

But thankfully, these characters only show up sporadically here. They mostly pop in from time to time to say “all the victims are nurses” or “I'm gonna get this guy” before pissing off for 15 minutes. The rest of the film is spent with our lead female characters, Carrie and Leah, as they're terrorized in their home by Lawrence, the one-eyed nurse hating psychopath. Problem is, the horror elements here are as weak as the police procedural elements. It's sloppy and disorganized, overwritten yet somehow also underwritten. Lawrence mumbles like a poor man's Frank Zito and his explosions of violence are laughable at best. Carrie and Leah are both nicely sympathetic and likeable, but they're never really developed as characters. They're just women in peril and that's not enough to earn our apprehension.

SPINE quickly deteriorates into blathering inanity before exploding once again in pseudo-off screen violence, and while I appreciated its willingness to ruthlessly kill off the central character, the film blows the whole damn thing by revealing that its final 20-25 minutes were all just a dream. Worse, this revelation doesn't end the film. It just adds a quasi-supernatural element to the proceedings. It feels profoundly out of place and frankly idiotic. Don't get me wrong, the entire damn film is idiotic, just a poorly written mess, but had this revelation started the film rather than ended the film, the circular nature of the climax would have had some kind of purpose behind it. It would have completely changed the nature of the film itself, but it would have been much, much better. In fact, it's the kind of thing this film needed to have working in its favor. As it stands, it's just a frustrating development that goes nowhere.

Had that change taken place and had the police procedural angle been removed (Howard and Simmons should have just expanded the time we spend with our true leads rather than complicating it with the worst cop stereotypes in existence), SPINE could have easily been a decent shot-on-video slasher flick. Slasher flicks can operate well enough within the confines of shot-on-video productions, but SPINE didn't want to be just another decent enough slasher film. It tried to be too damn much with too damn little and as a result, the film suffered. I have seen worse shot-on-video films in my life, but make no mistake, this does come close at times to scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel. 

Not a good film at all.