SCHIZOPHRENIAC: THE WHORE MANGLER

With a title like SCHIZOPHRENIAC: THE WHORE MANGLER, you would probably expect something shocking - electrifying even - like sticking a fork in a wall socket. What you definitely wouldn’t expect is for the opening X-rated warning card (a self imposed X-rating, no doubt) to give way to a lovely message dedicating the film to the director’s deceased father. If that wasn’t off-putting enough, the film then transitions from this heartfelt “we’ll miss you” in memoriam to an extended shower scene featuring not just full frontal female nudity, but lingering close-up shots of the woman’s crotch.

Now, I’m not entirely sure if this is the kind of film you would want associated with your name after your death, but I’m not exactly normal so… who am I to say? Maybe the late Harold Atkins would have been pleased as punch to see his name attached to a film which gives us gratuitous nudity, unsimulated masturbation, strangulation and necrophilia all within the first six minutes. Who knows? Not me, that’s for damn sure.

What I DO know is that I should not be referring to SCHIZOPHRENIAC: THE WHORE MANGLER as a “film”. What it really is is an 85 minute, shot on video migraine, complete with every in-camera visual effect the finest camcorders of 1997 could offer. It's a simple story of a low budget filmmaker/coke fiend named Harry that hits all the requisite “maniac on the loose” notes. Parental abuse? Check. Mother who dressed her son up in women’s clothing as punishment? Check. Frequent (and I mean FREQUENT) outbursts of misogynistic claptrap replete with constant f-bombs? Check. Incessant, droning music meant to hide the ever present whine of videotape noise on the soundtrack? Check.

But truth be told, although this is in fact a movie about a homicidal misogynist (among other things) raping and murdering women, I’m not sure SCHIZOPHRENIAC: THE WHORE MANGLER is actually trying to be a horror film or even a thriller. It might just be a very poorly calculated black comedy. After all, lead actor John Giancaspro is in full hyperbolic ham mode throughout the entire film, barking out his dialogue and occasionally even breaking the fourth wall for a cringe worthy in-joke. It’s not so much a performance as it is a rampage, carried out with all the grace and care of a back alley abortion.

Harry can’t sit still, bouncing his way through every scene. His profanity laced dialogue reminds me of a child who just discovered four letter words. When we’re introduced to Harry, it’s at the kitchen table as he pounds away on a typewriter, snorting off a mountain of coke while an ESCAPE FROM LA poster hangs in the background. He dances around naked to Bee Gees songs, dick flapping in the wind, and has conversations with his best friend, a ventriloquist dummy he calls Rubberneck. This is not a character that inspires fear or concern, just bewilderment.

Oh and Harry never shuts up, by the way, screaming and cursing through every single scene of the film. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, director Ron Atkins directs this whole mess with the subtlety of an atom bomb. Constant fast edits, long strings of unnecessary close-ups, quick flashes of Camcorder assisted color inversions or negatives… It’s just a non-stop barrage of screaming and editing and yelling and in-camera fuckery that doesn’t add up to anything but a nose bleed.

I suppose this was an exercise in purposeful offense making, like Atkins and Co. thought they were making some kind of outrage piece, a real outré slice of low budget filmmaking that would test the will of the audience, hence all the homophobia, racism, sexism, castrations, shootings and nipple slicing. But SALO, this is not. Hell, it barely rises to the level of AMATEUR PORN STAR KILLER, another grossly self indulgent movie made by a filmmaker who should have known better. It’s difficult to be offended when the film is all but mocking itself. This isn't a thriller. It's a bad joke told loudly.

It is remarkably difficult to recommend anyone seek this hunk of shit out for a quick and dirty watch. The fact that the film has a sequel is probably the most interesting and frightening thing about it. It is simply way too long and way too obnoxious to be anything but a waste of time, a routine story told better by a thousand other movies. There’s no reason to watch it or even acknowledge its existence. Far from being entertaining or outrage worthy, it’s just an overlong, dull slog of a film. It’s painful and unpleasant so… I guess in some ways it actually IS like sticking a fork in a wall socket.

BLOOD ORGY OF THE LEATHER GIRLS

"When the material and creative forces of women become corrupted by the brutality of the everyday world, a force of incredible violence is unleashed, it's blood lust insatiable. In this modern, enlightened, yet terrible age even religion seems powerless against the wrath of the female who is, it has been maintained, the deadlier of the species"

So says the opening narration of Michael Lucas' BLOOD ORGY OF THE LEATHER GIRLS, a 1988 shot-on-video catastrophe that has been largely (and thankfully) forgotten by all but the Trash Cinema faithful. It tells the sordid tale of four 20-something high school girls - dimwitted Fleabrain, pretty blonde Dorothea, sadistic virgin Rawhide, and their Jewish, Hitler worshiping leader Sarah - who go about their days drinking, smoking, beating up men and occasionally philosophizing about rebelling against the oppressive systems of education, religion, etc etc etc. Our four punkish layabouts stab a man to death for no good reason, steal a gun from a cop and, after Dorothea is raped, lay waste to dumb high school guy after dumb high school guy, all in the name of... well, we'll get to that in a minute.

Now, I need to get one thing out of the way right up front. While the above synopsis may seem like a movie narrative and while BLOOD ORGY OF THE LEATHER GIRLS has all the things movies normally have like a soundtrack, actors and special effects... it isn't really a movie. I repeat, BLOOD ORGY OF THE LEATHER GIRLS is NOT a movie.

It's an ANTI-MOVIE.

I don't know how else to describe a film so clumsily put together, so devoid of anything resembling traditional movie making. This is a shot-on-video “movie” made by amateurs so expecting careful framing, consistent matching eye lines and even audible dialogue is simply asking too much, but BLOOD ORGY OF THE LEATHER GIRLS feels like it was constructed of fragments of a dozen other aborted shot on video projects. It features an on-screen Detective character who fills in important blanks like how the girls got to one location from another or why they're suddenly breaking their own philosophical MO by bludgeoning a grandmother to death with a garden tool.

Halfway through the film, the voice of the narrator changes and I couldn’t be sure if this was supposed to be a second narrator or if they just couldn’t get the first guy back to finish the job. The direction of the film is so haphazard and sloppy that changes of location were not immediately noticeable. The film begins with freshman film student symbology and metaphor, moving from live birth to war footage, from blood covered breasts to castration. I was prepared for more of the same throughout the movie, but what I got was just a random assemblage of images which didn’t match, didn’t follow one another and didn’t coalesce into anything resembling narrative filmmaking.

Because much of the soundtrack was captured live, much of the dialogue was impossible to make out, the music blaring louder than the on board microphone could reasonably handle. In an attempt to be blackly comedic, we're treated to a pre-porno shoot bit of vaguely sexist exercise, a bizarre LSD trip and random bits of educational information about Aristotelian logic and the teachings of Thales of Miletus. Our characters are introduced working out, gazing lovingly at pictures of John Wayne and self-flagellating to drawings of Jesus. And what exactly does all this add up to?

Absolutely nothing. It's just a series of images. Characters don't speak in carefully weighted words. They speak in polemics. We're told that these women hate school, hate religion, hate their parents, hate their lives, yadda yadda, and that their actions against men are rooted in some kind of retaliatory rebellion against male tyranny

I don't buy it. Not for one moment. The shift from weird, Cinema of Transgression-esque clusterfuck to rape-revenge film is where the film earns the misplaced moniker of "female empowerment tale". I've seen that applied to this movie by other reviewers and critics. I just don't buy it. And the reason I don't buy the claim of "female empowerment fantasy" is because the actions of our cast of miscreants are not really a reaction to anything. They are, at the very best, little more than violent tantrums.

The characters flat out murder men for no other reason than they despise men. When we learn in the final moments of the film that Dorothea was not a victim of rape at all, that she simply passed out and this was all a big misunderstanding, it doesn't matter at all to our characters. "It was a beautiful experience", Fleabrain explains. Simply put, they would have carried out the violence anyway. Dorothea's rape, whether it happened or not, wasn't a cause. It was just a reason.

The fact that some people have attached the label "feminist" to this film is a goddamn outrage. This isn't a feminist film. It doesn't have a feminist message. This is, at best, "straw feminism", a perversion of the ideology usually not found outside of angry male YouTube skeptic channels where feminists are considered little more than bitter, pathological women looking to subjugate and castrate men. CEMETERY GIRLS did this kind of thing better, getting the overall message across in a way that didn't make angry women look like bloodthirsty, psychotic monsters.

But honestly, I have no idea what the intended purpose of this horrible film was or what message it really is trying to convey. Trying to sift through the oblique visuals, ear shattering noises, constant diversions into poorly thought out black humor and general idiocy would take me weeks. Michael Lucas decided to use a pseudonym for his director's credit. He chose the name Meredith, the thought being that using a woman's name would make the film more palatable and perhaps avoid the claims of misogyny which usually accompany a film containing violence and nudity.

To that I say, congratulations, Michael. You may have dodged the misogyny label, but only by making a movie which not not only wallows in strawman feminism but blatant misandry as well.

NIGHT RIPPER

Here’s a tidbit of information about yours truly that you don’t know and probably don’t care to know. When the weather changes, I get sick. It happens all the time, almost without fail, and that’s pretty shitty, especially since the weather here in Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania has been fairly schizophrenic as of late. For the past two months, we would go from five days of 30s to two days of 50s to straight down to Siberia levels of wind chill. Three days of 60s gave way to a snow storm. All throughout the month, the weather would stabilize then stroke out. As a result, I spent much of mid-to-late December and early-to-mid January with night time sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever and couldn’t rest even with medicine.

As a result, I didn’t write very many reviews, mostly because it’s difficult to concentrate on writing complete sentences when snot won’t stop dripping down onto the keyboard. I did however watch a metric shit ton of movies, specifically shot-on-video slasher movies. I figured, I already feel bad so why not feel worse? And worse is exactly how I felt.

But as I was going over the list of films I had watched and checking them off on my “you’re wasting your life watching movies” Excel spreadsheet, I realized that a few had slipped through my sweaty, might-as-well-be-diseased fingers. Like this film, NIGHT RIPPER, a 1986 kinda-sorta giallo/slasher clusterfuck from director Jeff Hathcock. Hathcock is a director I’m quite familiar with. I also kind of fear the man. After all, he made VICTIMS, an absolutely abysmal film that, to my great shock, had a Blu-ray release not too long ago. I didn’t have high hopes for NIGHT RIPPER. Do you think the film exceeded my infinitesimal expectations?

NIGHT RIPPER is set in a world where everyone is cheating on their wife, fiance or significant other. It focuses largely on Dave, a soft-spoken chap with Eli Roth eyebrows, who runs a small photography studio with Mitch, a man we’re supposed to find creepy because he speaks very slowly and in monotone (Mitch is played by Larry Thomas, aka the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, and yes, that never stops being distracting). There is a murderer wandering the streets, slicing up models, a few of whom just so happened to be patrons of Dave’s studio.

One day, a pretty European woman named Jill shows up at the studio eager to have some risque pictures taken for her boyfriend. Dave is immediately smitten and begins pursuing her romantically, which is kind of a dick move if you ask me because Dave is already engaged to a woman named Karen. We’re let off the ethical hook rather early on as it’s revealed that Karen is having regular trysts with a man twice her age and four times her weight. Tossed into all of this melodrama is Janet, a slightly sinister lesbian delivery woman with some rather unsavory views of models. After the Ripper claims his fourth victim, Dave and Mitch are questioned by the police. Despite the fact that Mitch answers every police question sarcastically and grins like an idiot every time the coppers mention “murder”, “death”, “blood”, “mutilation”, etc, the cops let them go. A little later, Karen ends up dead and the cops turn to Dave, for reasons unknown, to help them catch their culprit, all while Mitch and Janet circle around Jill like two hungry sharks.

NIGHT RIPPER is exactly the kind of film you think it is. Shot on what looks to be a commercially available home video camcorder, filled with terrible sound, questionable acting, and bad special effects, NIGHT RIPPER moves with the speed of a geriatric on downers. To the film’s credit, it keeps the cops off screen for the vast majority of the running time. I’ve said before in some review of some godawful piece of shit, shot-on-video slasher movie, that if you ever see cops in a film like this, run the fuck away. Cops in shot-on-video horror films don’t act like cops, don’t look like cops, don’t do cop stuff at all, and generally only exist to regurgitate information we already know. Oh, you’re going to tell us for five minutes that a woman was murdered last night? Well, thanks, assholes, I already saw that happen a scene or two ago. Thanks for wasting my time.

Not only does the film leave the cops out of this, it largely leaves Dave out of it too, which is odd because, well, he’s the lead character. The final confrontation in the film is a three way affair between every speaking character that isn’t Dave. He doesn’t get to reveal the killer or even have the killer reveal their identity to him. He shows up on the scene after the killer is already dead. What a goddamn hero!

The motive is just a generic “I hate models” cop-out with nothing else added in for flavor. The violence meted out is certainly bloody, but it’s not at all convincing. Most of the murders happen in single shots. We’ll see the knife coming down and then cut to a cheap effect of the blade sticking in someone’s face. Clearly, the special effects budget couldn’t support anything too elaborate. A knife is dragged across an already cut throat. A knife dragged across a woman’s skin leaves a bloody trail of grue, but doesn’t appear to actually break the skin. That sort of thing. Disappointing, but forgivable.

The highlight of the film is the way the killer dies. See, this isn’t called NIGHT RIPPER for no good reason. It ties, or at least tries to tie, itself to the infamous Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. The cops mention the mutilation of corpses (mutilation that we never see; in fact, we often see the killer leave the scene immediately after haphazardly stabbing their victims) and how the killer would have to have medical training to cause such elaborate wounds, just like the Ripper case. Mitch was once a butcher, a theory floated around for Jack the Ripper’s then-current or past profession. Of course, that means the models we see are, according to this film anyway, tantamount to prostitutes, a line of thinking that some might find distasteful.

During the final confrontation between everyone but our hero and the killer, the killer talks about mannequins being like the corpses they’ve been leaving behind. Hollow on the inside, mwahahahaha! AHEM In a moment I’m sure we’re supposed to find wonderfully ironic or woefully poetic, the killer gets their knife stuck in the hand of a mannequin as they tumble to the ground. The mannequin tips over, stabbing the killer to death. And thus the victims have risen from the dead to slay the beast and put their souls to rest.

Or some shit.

It’s a dumb ending to a dumb movie, but I will admit that the absurdity of the ending did leave me with a smile rather than a pained grimace. In fact, there are some really unintentionally funny moments in the film, like how numerous scenes of phone calls end with the actors looking slightly confused at the contraption in their hand, almost as though they’ve been suddenly and inexplicably dumbstruck by 1980s telephone technology. A displeased loved informs her paramour that their frequent sex meet-ups are not love, rather they’re “...just sweaty bodies fucking under flood lamps!”. Clearly the film’s composer never got to finish the job as the creepy synth score sometimes gives way to bubbly elevator music.

Depending on your mood and taste for awful movies, you might get a chuckle or two out of NIGHT RIPPER. You certainly won’t find your hunger for wanton violence and sexual mayhem satisfied, nor will you be at all surprised by who turns out to be the killer. As far as Jeff Hathcock films go, I can’t say NIGHT RIPPER is the worst, but it isn’t going to convert anyone into a Hathcock devotee. It’s just a waste of time, shot-on-video shitter. It’s pretty damn bad, that’s for sure, but it ends with such a delightfully stupid final confrontation that I’m almost – ALMOST – willing to not throw my VHS copy into oncoming traffic.

HOLLOW GATE

The trailer for Ray Di Zazzo’s 1988 slasher shit sandwich HOLLOW GATE namechecks HALLOWEEN right out of the gate. It’s clear that this was Di Zazzo’s attempt at matching Carpenter’s classic for shocks and thrills, even going so far as to give us a young child wearing a clown costume who grows up to be a murderer. That young child is Mark. The boy is celebrating Halloween with a bunch of his friends at a nice party his parents have thrown for him. Unfortunately, Mark’s dad is a bit of a dick and the party comes crashing down when little Mark proves useless at bobbing for apples. Enraged at his son’s pitiful chompers, the dad holds Mark’s head underwater, nearly drowning him before storming off.

A decade later, the bitter sting of a lousy Halloween party has exploded into near universal hatred for Mark. It seems like everyone in town hates his guts. A horny sleazeball and his hot to trot squeeze stop off at Mark’s place of employment, a gas station in the middle of nowhere. After enduring some verbal abuse and humiliation, Mark rigs their car to explode, watching impassively as the jerk and his girlfriend are immolated in the middle of the street.

Two years later, Mark harasses and attacks a pretty grocery store clerk, leading to his arrest, psychological evaluation and eventual release (for some reason, the girl didn’t press charges and the state doesn’t want to spend money on his incarceration). His parents long dead, Mark is handed over to his grandmother, an elderly lady who lives alone in a large estate known as Hollow Gate. Granny turns out to be more than a little naive, letting Mark out of his room one night. For her troubles, Mark rams a pair of scissors into her eye.

We then meet four idiots. There’s Al, the Lewis Skolnick lookalike, and his frumpy girlfriend Kim. Along for the ride are Billy, an asshole, and Mandy, Billy’s arm candy. “How does it feel to be alcohol legal?”, Billy asks his friends as they make their way to a Halloween party. This is meant to inform us that our quartet of 30-somethings are all celebrating their 21^st birthdays (I think…). Our hip kids stop off in the middle of the day for some “submarine sandwiches” and “alcohol legal suds”. After scarfing down their grub, Kim excitedly points out that there’s a costume store across the street. If I were Kim, I would be far more excited to learn that they’ve driven straight into some time distortion field as the insert shot of the costume store was taken in the middle of the night while just 10 minutes ago it was barely afternoon in the restaurant.

Kim finds a gaudy purple wig that she really wants but can’t afford. The 'hilariously' stereotypical gay store manager offers the quartet a trade. He will give Kim the wig if they agree to deliver a few boxes of Halloween costumes to Hollow Gate. They agree and off they go to the slaughter, unaware that Mark placed that order himself as a trap.

As you can tell, HOLLOW GATE is absolutely front loaded with narrative. It takes 40 minutes for the group to run into Mark, which is approximately halfway through the film. With such a small cast, the remaining 30+ minutes feels like an eternity as Mark clumsily stalks and kills our band of idiots one by one. Lifting it’s central gimmick from FADE TO BLACK, Mark dons a different costume for each killing, starting with a Vietnam soldier (which gives him plenty of opportunities to talk about “the gooks”) before moving on to a lawman, an aristocrat, and finally a doctor. Not exactly the most creative costumes they could have chosen.

Wait. What I meant to say is that these final 30+ minutes are filled with nail biting suspense. Just try not to sweat as our characters spend whole scenes huddled in the bushes. Try not to hyperventilate as our characters spend five whole minutes running across an empty field one by one. I dare you not to look away as our characters rush to start the engine of a golf cart, a vehicle which would do fuck all to bolster their chances of survival as they know full and damn well that the entire estate is surrounded by a seven foot high, electrified fence.

I am of course being completely sarcastic. There is nothing tense or suspenseful about this film. Pound for pound, HOLLOW GATE is one of the dullest slasher films around. I can’t quite tell if the film was meant to be a straight forward horror film or some bit of campy horror humor. Certainly the filmmakers were trying to be funny when Mark unleashes a pair of 'ravenous' golden retrievers on our heroes, right? There has to be a reason why Di Zazzo allowed his leading man to deliver his lines at such a fevered pitch that he appears far more unstable than the killer, right? The fact that all our characters, including a pair of coppers, talk about “submarine sandwiches” as if they’re the pinnacle of world class cuisine or that a character stands still as a maniac driving a thresher inches ever closer to her in an otherwise empty field… I mean, this is all a joke, right?

RIGHT?! 

Well, if it is, it ain’t funny. It sure as shit isn’t scary either. What it is is a borderline homophobic, slightly racist, and catatonically dull mess of a movie with a half hour of worthwhile material stretched out to damn near 80 minutes. Hardcore lovers of unintentional camp might be able to squeeze some enjoyment out of HOLLOW GATE, but everyone else should just keep on driving.

Oh, and that purple wig that gets everyone killed? Kim never even wears it. Bitch.

SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN

It happens from time to time.

A movie long forgotten will be released on DVD or Blu-ray, usually for a stupidly high price, and go on to be proclaimed a “lost masterpiece” by horror fans everywhere. It isn't unheard of. Strange thing is, most of the time those long forgotten movies were long forgotten for a reason. I was genuinely confused when THE MUTILATOR was released by Arrow and went on to become everyone's new favorite slasher movie. Same thing happened when CATHY'S CURSE, an abysmal demonic kid flick from Canada, was released earlier this year on Blu-ray. That little garbage movie was heralded by the horror community as a lost gem, a real shining example of under appreciated horror films. 

If the same thing happens with SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN, I'll swallow my own tongue in protest.

Because SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN isn't just a bad movie. It's a bad shot on video horror movie with a cast primarily composed of children. That's a recipe for suicidal ideation if I ever saw one. The release of SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN comes courtesy of Severin and their Intervision Picture line, purveyors of such fine releases as DREAM STALKER and DARK HARVEST, two films that should have been left to rot in the cellars of VHS collectors. This is NOT an early review of their release. I was not sent a screener to review nor did I get my hands on an early copy. If I did, I wouldn't have watched it. I would have burned it in my backyard.

The flavor text on the Severin website states that SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN was “refused a rating” by the BBFC, a claim for which I can find no evidence. There's no mention of it on the BBFC website archives. It states that the “British tabloid press called for it to be banned among the furor of the Video Nasty witch hunts”. I can find no evidence for that claim either outside of a few articles written by attention seeking hacks. In fact, the “Video Nasty witch hunt” was all but gone by the time this film received a VHS release from Films Galore Ltd. in 1985. The next bit of text reads that “many of the children involved in its production were never seen nor heard from again”. I'm not surprised. They probably went into hiding to avoid the shame of it all.

The text on the website goes on to repeat the bullshit “based on a true story” nonsense that starts the film as if it were fact and not just bullshit nonsense. I suppose when you're dealing with such a loathsome and dull flick like this, you have to stretch the truth (if not outright lie) to get people to watch it. That's what Severin wants you to do, fork over an insultingly high cost of 20 dollars to watch someone's lousy home movie from 1983. And yes, for a film like this, 20 dollars is $19.99 too high a price to pay.  

SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN takes place at the Sullivan Children's Home, an orphanage staffed by two people, a man with questionable taste in sweaters named Maurice and his attractive friend Jenny, a woman with a clear aversion to bras. A young, mute girl named Elizabeth is left on their doorstep one Sunday morning. Though her outward appearance would lead you to believe that Elizabeth is just another child from a broken home, the young girl is actually a demonic little nightmare, possibly even the physical incarnation of the devil himself. Another visitor to the orphanage is Mick, a rock star whose childhood was spent living at the Home. Mick takes a shine to Jenny, much to the chagrin of Maurice. But that is of little concern to us. No, what we're interested in is how Elizabeth seems to be driving the other children to commit terrible acts of violence.

That's the set up of the film. Elizabeth is the devil, the children are her minions, and the adults are their targets. The final ten minutes of SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN are the only minutes worth watching. The kids, all armed with kitchen knives, stab and slice some adults to ribbons. If there truly was any real controversy in the British press, it was likely about those scenes. And truth be told, if this were any other film, those scenes would have been memorable. Watching kids commit a wholesale slaughter of adults often is a memorable experience. That's why the opening of CHILDREN OF THE CORN is better than everything else that follows it. 

You would expect, of course, for there to be a reversal of the violence at the end of the film. You might even wonder if it would go as far, if not further, than BEWARE! CHILDREN AT PLAY. Alas, it doesn't. In the final five minutes, SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN suddenly becomes quite religious. The adults don't overcome Elizabeth through violence or sheer will. No, Jesus shows up and wags his finger at Elizabeth. Yes, that is literally what happens here. Jesus, complete with his crown of thorns (you would think he'd take that off), shows up and finger wags the antagonist to death.

I know, I know, that sounds great. You're probably thinking about pre-ordering the DVD right now, but wait, Dear Reader, because that is the only entertainment this film has to offer.

As previously mentioned, SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN is a shot on video horror film. It is also quite heavy on the dialogue. Those two things do not mix well. In some scenes, I could only make out every third or fourth line of dialogue. Then there were the long stretches of conversation, sometimes running for a full three minutes, where I couldn't make out a single word, let alone a complete sentence. There were times when characters would react to something happening off screen, but I couldn't hear what they were reacting to. The film devotes quite a bit of time to the burgeoning relationship of Jenny and Mick, but without subtitles, those scenes were total wastes of time.

And that's because SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN plays the same stupid game as virtually every other shot on video movie in existence. Because it's so goddamn cheap, it can't be atmospheric, and because it cannot be atmospheric, it feels the need to compensate by scoring every single fucking minute of the film. The score (if you can call it that) for this film drones over 99% of the film. Worse, it is twice as loud as the dialogue. The only time you'll be able to hear a character speak clearly is during the 30 seconds of silence between track looping. The most basic principle of sound in film is ignored here. What good is dialogue if you can't hear it?

Not that it would have made much of a difference. The entire film is a garbage fire. It was the brainchild of director Alan Briggs and screenwriter Meg Shanks, the latter being the owner and operator of a drama school in Britain, aka the production company behind this film. That should be enough to warn you off. The height of its acting is an unblinking, smiling child wearing eye liner. The height of its visual prowess involves a single stupid strobe light. I mean, it's a home movie, after all, confined largely to a single house. At one point, two characters are attacked by a desk and you can plainly see the person crouching beneath it as it moves. A character commits suicide by stabbing herself in the leg. Scenes don't conclude, they just end abruptly. When the film starts, there's an inter title telling us that the day of the week is “Sunday”, but there no further indications of time passing. Does the whole movie take place on Sunday? Clearly not, but if the film isn't going to play the RINGU game of counting down to some hazy mid-week end point, why bother telling us that it begins on a Sunday?

I could go on and on about the gaffs and the fuck ups and the inconsistencies and the illogic of the narrative, but why bother? I've said too much as it is. This is a home movie made by people who probably never intended it to be seen by the world. And now here we are with its digital home video release date looming while countless better REAL movies languish in VHS hell. There is no justice in the world, folks. It's all fucked. If there is a god, he's probably wagging his finger at us right now.

555

I rented 555 way back in 1988. I saw it sitting there on the New Release shelf of my local A-Z Video, right beside stuff like WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? and THE KISS. Move your eyes an inch or two to the left. Look at that box art! What gore hungry 10 year old wouldn't want to see that movie? But if only I paid more attention… if only I heeded the advertising warning that was printed on the original box art, the one that stated “Caution: Viewing may cause severe damage to your brain cells”… Maybe then I would have known better.

555 is a shot on video slasher film from

HEY, GET BACK HERE!!!

Don't you dare click away to go read a review of something decent. I sat through this film again for YOU, damn it. The least you can do is give me a few minutes of your time. Let this review be your advertising warning. Let me spare you my unfortunate fate.

555 is a shot on video slasher film from Wally Koz, a man who thankfully never made another *ahem* movie. It concerns a series of murders, all the victims horny couples. The MO is a bit strange. The men are all decapitated while the women are mutilated, killed then raped. The investigation falls into the laps of Police Sergeant Connor and Detective Haller. Their lives are made a living hell by Susan Rather, a nosy and obnoxious local reporter that just so happens to be banging the city Assistant DA.

As their “investigation” (there's a reason I put that in quotes) continues, they discover that this series of murders closely resembles other murder sprees, all happening every five years on the fifth day of the fifth month (hence the title of the film). The coppers interview, harass and threaten a single witness/suspect during their investigation, a retired military man they feel is suffering from Crazed Vietnam Vet Syndrome. But keeping an eye on one middle aged man is too much work for our intrepid coppers and their suspect goes missing. All the while, more bodies are being found, mutilated and violated by some nut job dressed as a 1960s hippie.

From the opening credits that look like they were done in Windows Movie Maker to the obviously-dubbed-by-a-man screams of a woman, this film wastes no time in telling you, right there in its opening five minutes, that it will be a rough, miserable experience. Do not be fooled by its ghoulish box art, folks. 555 is NOT a slasher film. It is a police procedural through and through, and if there's one thing you need to know about shot on video police procedural movies, it's this: they suck, long and hard, and without mercy.

Prepare for endless scenes of people sitting around an obviously fake room, reading obviously blank pieces of paper meant to be police reports. Expect no real investigation to be done, just scenes of cops getting phone calls telling them expository facts (which they will repeat out loud for the sake of the audience), all because the filmmakers didn't have money to actually shoot these characters doing something resembling real police work. Expect characters to discuss the same seven or eight things endlessly just to pad the film out to feature length. Expect an ending that features all the action taking place off screen because making a good movie is too much damn work. Maybe they didn't expect anyone to actually watch this film all the way through. Maybe that's why we don't ever get a satisfying explanation for all this idiotic shit, just a lazy ending that barely makes sense.

555 is a boredom parade, only occasionally livened up by the cheapo murder scenes. For as hilariously fake as they are, some of them are really quite nasty. Had the movie been properly budgeted and filmed, it might have even rivaled films like MANIAC in the “needlessly brutal murder scenes” department. Unfortunately, none of the killings work well enough to escape their poverty row production origins. It's difficult to be shocked when the actresses can barely contain their laughter as they're cut to ribbons by a man dressed like Jerry Garcia. I don't know why you would zoom in and hold on the chest of an actress who can't even be bothered to hold her breath as she pretends to be dead. It kinda ruins the mood when a single stab wound causes a tidal wave of blood to splash all over the walls. Moreover, if you're going to use a fake knife rigged with blood tubing, at least instruct your actor not to squeeze the handle when the knife isn't touching the supposed victim's flesh. Still, all problems aside, the murder scenes do at least offer something of interest to slasher film fans, which is more than can be said about the characters.

Simply put, every single character in this film is a shit human being worthy of a slow, painful death. Not only do our three leads argue every single time they're on screen together, they throw histrionic temper tantrums at a moment's notice. They don't just bicker with each other either, they flat out go for the jugular. Our hero cop calls our hero reporter a “cunt” in their very first scene together. Instead of simply sharing information with our hero cop, our hero reporter starts off with “listen to me, you stubborn Irish cocksucker”. Every single character in this film is a fucking prick and their constant bitching and moaning and fighting and whining just made me want to finish watching this ungodly bag of puke with the volume off.

For a long, long time, 555 was my go-to answer whenever someone asked me to name my worst film of all time. Back in 1988, it took me the entire two day rental period to get through the film. I kept stopping it, ejecting it, cursing it, threatening it with violence… But today, I decided to power through the entire film in one sitting. I won't lie, it was rough. I found myself drifting off, getting up, wanting to do anything other than suffer through the tedium of it all. I did it though. I made it from opening credits to closing credits. I even watched the awful trailer for some other awful movie that was attached to the end of the film, another way for the filmmakers to pad out the overall running time.

Is it still my choice for the worst movie ever? No. I've seen thousands of films since 1988, many of which are far worse than anything Koz put on tape. But make no mistake, 555 is a cinematic atrocity. It is dull as dishwater and as appetizing as shit. It is barely competent, horribly written and full of actors less capable of delivering convincing dialogue than a whole Roomful of Tommy Wiseaus. It's no DON'T GO NEAR THE PARK, but man oh man, it ain't no TROLL 2 either.

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.