I think I finally boiled it all down. People are nostalgic for their childhoods--or have a tendency to be. They want to see their childhoods represented in media, and this includes teenager-hood. The problem is there's a barrier between adolescence and adulthood, so that when one tries to represent one's lifestyle as an adolescent in adulthood, it comes out garbled, nonsensical, and embarrassing. It's best to leave representing kids to the kids themselves. That's where Kids Goofing Off comes along--the subgenre of horror-trash cinema that is magical and excellent. A lot of us made horror movies when we were kids, when we had no money but a reasonable number of friends, and a bottle of expired Karo syrup. Not a lot of us, however, had the courage and integrity to see to the release of their work. Welcome back once more to SPOOKYWEEN, my friends, and for the '70s, we'll be looking at white Afros, awkward 'staches, gore, and, of course, good ol' nihilism.
I'm so happy I get to talk about Nathan Schiff. In his late teens and early twenties Schiff decided to put together three backyard Super 8 horror flicks, beginning with Weasels Rip My Flesh and continuing into Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980) and They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore (1985). A later entry in a similar vein called Vermilion Eyes was made in 1991, and with the other three movies was scheduled to be released by Image Entertainment--however, it was nixed at the last minute, probably due to the fact that Vermilion Eyes is a hard fucking watch. You see, Nathan Schiff's films carry a very particular brand of nihilism. The seriousness of it is hard to discern. Here, in Weasels, philosophical musings take second place to yucky monster gore. Later, as we'll probably see, we see thematic arcs regarding the death of hope, the uselessness of dreams, the inevitability of an awful fate--but let's start light. Let's start with weasels.
We open with some pretentious narration a la Criswell from Ed Wood's movies. This is followed by a murder scene that has no bearing on the film that follows, a la the opening strangulation scene from Beast of Yucca Flats. A space probe from Venus collects some radioactive goo. The probe goes down near Long Island, and when a rabid weasel bites two New Yawk kids, they take vengeance on it by pouring the slimy contents of the crashed probe into the weasel burrow. The weasel mutates and begins to spread its rabies plague. Enter Inspector James Cameron, who must have directed Terminator 2. He and his partner investigate the weasels but are kidnapped by Dr. Sendam (put it in a mirror, then you'll get it), who promptly reveals that mutant weasel blood is the secret to eternal life. I dare not reveal more. It's a tight film and I leave its secrets to you.
Weasels Rip My Flesh is a fascinating movie on almost every front. It is a better movie than I could ever write or direct at 16 (and trust me, I know from experience), and yet it is also rife with amateur's mistakes that enforce a certain layer of charm. You can sometimes hear the direction ("c'mon!" most commonly), and the special effects speak for themselves. The weasels are blobs of clay and sausage, and occasionally sport tentacles. Sometimes they melt into puddles of gore for no reason, and sometimes they go all Night of the Lepus, biologically morphing into zoomed-in hamster stock footage. They add surrealism to the film, surely. But so does everything else. Especially the mustaches. We all remember the folks who would try to grow mustaches in high school. If you ever missed taking a hard look at high school mustaches, this movie will take you back. As will the Dirty Harry references.
Crowning off all this is the fact that it is captured on Super 8, which the late '70s equivalent of whatever the hell was used to shoot Five Across the Eyes. All sound is post-dubbed, all music borrowed from the library cues that haunt the halls of '60s Something Weird fodder. The auditory and visual crackling marks this as a relic from the past, a valuable glimpse into a long-gone era. All media is valuable, in its own sense, as signifiers of the things we lose with the death of generations. Now we can see what they were doing in Long Island in the summer of '79.
Weasels Rip My Flesh is mostly hilarious, and but also a touch spooky. I consider it one of my Spookyween classics. You can spare 63 minutes, can't you...?
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