Doctor Death (1989), by Webster Colcord

* And yes, this is the best screencap I could get of the title card with my tech limitations.

"For some, the end of the world was just the beginning." So opens Webster Colcord's 19-minute Super 8 post-apocalyptic epic, Doctor Death! Kinda the message for the times, huh? Well, it was the message of the '80s, too, when Mad Max clones were all the rage. We were two years away from the end of the Cold War when this film emerged, but that didn't mean the ostensible nuclear threat was over. Still, I doubt that Mr. Colcord was taking the idea of nuclear armageddon overly seriously. How could he, when he turned out pure goodness like this? For only a teenager could imagine and actualize such cinematic glory.

Dr. Death is our football-helmet-wearing, schoolbus-driving post-nuke marauder. Because it's the end of the world, there's nothing to do but toss Molotov cocktails and grenades at all visible passerby, and at any cows unfortunate enough to have survived the fury of mutually-assured destruction. The Deathmobile is destroyed by an agent of the Mutant Police--are those cops who police mutants, or are they cops who are mutants? The guy Death runs into while running from the officer is definitely a mutant. He looks a surprisingly-better version of some of the alien extras from Turkish Star Wars. TVs remind our hero of the world before the bomb, so he smashes them with a pickaxe. Then it's down to more murderin'--this time, he runs down a fellow whose friend calls in a mutant bounty hunter. The bounty hunter dresses like the killer from Nail Gun Massacre and has a rocket launcher in his wheelchair. During his fight with the bounty hunter, DD gets knocked onto a nuclear bomb, which has an oh-so-convenient activation button right on the top. We get see to Doctor Death's face melt off. This doesn't kill him, as melty-face Doctor Death shows up at the end with the magic of (really good) stop motion.

Super 8 was an astounding medium, because it enabled kids and adults the world over to make movies with real film, yo. Hell, it let them make home movies in general! There's just something nice about Super 8's grunginess, a permeating nostalgia that affects even those of us who didn't grow up with it. A generally silent medium, many Super 8 movies are either dubbed or have music and sound effects only. Doctor Death is no different, containing only grunts, screams, explosions, gunshots, and an endless supply of homemade '80s Casio themes. Ultimately, a film like this needs no dialogue; just some labels and text cards to let us know where we are. For people who like their cinema straightforward, I'm not sure you could streamline a movie more than this.

Themes? What themes? These are teenagers we're talking about! Kids Goofing Off is enough of a theme by itself. There's a certain innocence to the gruesome violence of teenagers. Perhaps they are the only ones we can excuse for capital-W Wallowing. In some ways, teenagers are expected to Wallow. But Wallowing can get you far, y'know? Webster Colcord now has a pretty solid-looking visual effects career, having worked on the X-Men films, Minority Report, and Stranger Things. We all start somewhere. And this is a great debut.

For something this small and cheap, the direction, editing, and effects are all very top-notch. Shots are framed intriguingly all the time. The transitions are made of explosions or chilled fade-ins. The mutants look like mutants, and the explosions are astonishingly rendered via damaged/blown-up film stock, as if the flames of the blast are enough to burn the medium it's shot on. This movie is dressed to impress, and you really should see it. If I haven't "sold" this movie enough to you, I want to let you know that Colcord gives a role credit to his puppy, "Misty the Wonder Dog," even though she does not appear outside of the end credits.

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Octane (2003), by Marcus Adams

Those goshdarn hifalutin' whippersnapper young people! Back in my day we didn't disrespect or disobey our parents, no sir. Almost a relief when these young folks get kidnapped by random highway-dwelling Satanic cults, dontchaknow?

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The Abomination (1986), by Bret McCormick

SPOOKYWEEN HAS BEGUN!! I hope you're ready to get messy--with the gross and gory myriad mouths of THE ABOMINATION!

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3 in a Towel (1969), by Marty Rackum

And here we have another movie which I only enjoy a small percentage of. Like, the first third or less. And I like that short selection enough to try to do a full review on it, apparently. So, without much further ado, this is 3 in a Towel.

After a psychedelic opening credits sequence that shows off the director's prowess with 15-year-old colored gels, we meet our "protagonist" Romeo Bruno. Romeo, like his namesake, dreams of love, or more properly (both here and in Shakespeare), flesh. Romeo will reference his literary counterpart throughout the movie, though he refers to him as "Romeo Lothario," which I'll abstain from commenting on for now. Anyway, Romeo seeks to make his "dream" of banging multiple women a reality. He picks up a young virgin and brings her down to his yacht, but she's turned off by the fact that there are already three girls aboard. After she leaves Romeo and his three girls set sail and have a lot of sex. Then, they return to the harbor, Romeo uses "thought-waves" to psychically seduce women (no FX utilized), and he brings them back to his apartment, where he bangs them. Indeed, as prophesied, there are three girls who get in a towel together, specifically to give Romeo a (softcore) blowjob.

Doesn't that sound great? Doesn't that sound like a fun and entertaining movie? Well, it's really not, but in the beginning, as we learn the excuse for Mr. Rackum's softcore adventures, it's pure bliss. I'll tread over everything a little bit at a time, starting with what I've already brought up: i.e. "Romeo Lothario." Let's unpack this for a second. Even ignoring the fact that linking Shakespeare's Romeo to sexual promiscuity has its own problems, Romeo's last name wasn't Lothario. It was Montague. I'd say this is fine, but surnames are kind of a huge deal in that particular play. It's sort of about, y'know, a family feud. That would be like if you wanted to compare someone to Devil Anse Hatfield, but changed his name instead to Devil Anse Ethan Edwards. The sad thing is, Lothario as a name doesn't even have a Shakespearian origin--he's a character from a story within the story of Don Quixote. Yes, Shakespeare and Cervantes lived at the same time and share nearly equal fame, but there's no need to get their characters confused.

And then there's that whole thing about how Romeo was romantically and/or sexually successful. Um, what fucking play were you reading? The story opens with him getting rejected by Rosaline, then he shares a few days with Juliet, and then he dies! I can't imagine that his lady-bedding days were great in number prior to that, given that by most accounts of my professors, Romeo is about fourteen. If it wasn't for the fact that this movie absolutely reeks of pot, I would say this was some clever irony on behalf of the cast and crew. No, this movie is Kids Goofing Off at its absolute dumbest.


Yes, this movie is dumber than The Tony Blair Witch Project. This is dumber than A Clockwork Blue. This is dumber than Five Across the Eyes, Psyched by the 4D Witch, and Nosferatu in Brazil combined. But it's pretty easy for even someone like me, Queen of Sticks Up the Ass, to discount the fluff that pads out the majority of this movie. To be honest, whenever I see sex in a movie, I zone out anyway. And usually, if the movie is mostly sex, that means I'm gonna give it a paddlin', critically speaking. But here, I knew I wasn't missing anything in the long gaps wherein I jumped around: just more fake-accented Shakespeare quotes, which appear to come from every one of the Bard's plays except Romeo and Juliet. Some of these quotes I can't even properly source, so they may be made up, for all I know.

On top of all this, all of the dub actors are in their fifties while the actual actors (who appear in sweet silent Super 8) are in their twenties. Post-loops are recorded in bathrooms, because they have to splash water to replicate the sea, you see? This means everyone in the maritime sequences has echoes on their voices as the sound bounces off the shower walls. It's a good time.

3 in a Towel is probably a grievous insult to everyone who watches it, and is usually a tremendous waste of precious celluloid. However, I think it's hilarious, at least for a little while, and when I was trapped in the dark depths of my day job little flashes of this movie kept me going for days afterward. A glimmer of hope for a fallen film? Or a plea from the proletariat? You decide.

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Plaga Zombie (1997), by Pablo Parés and Hernán Sáez

A young man is wandering through Bubble-Lens Alley after midnight. He is jumped by a gang of skunk-striped punks with incredibly bizarre facepaint--thankfully, he is saved at the last minute by a mysterious beer-drinking interloper. It turns out, however, that said interloper is a zombie! Cut to the apartment of Mike Taylor and his roommate, former doctor Bill Johnson. Johnson is depressed after losing his license to practice following "the accident," and spends most of his day clipping the leaves off of ferns. As we meet Mike and Bill, we also learn the story of John West and Willie Boxer, two ex-wrestlers--the former wants to get back in the ring with his old partner, while the other just wants to sit in bed and smoke. Eventually Mike is abducted by aliens, who cut him open and rub bubble gum on the back of his neck. Okay, that stuff on his back isn't actually bubble gum--it's more that the skin on the back of his neck (and his whole back) is beginning to rot off. And the same thing is happening to Willie, which is the source of his lethargy, in fact. Bill and John join forces, along with Bill's geek neighbor Max, in a desperate struggle against the extraterrestrially-powered living dead. It is this struggle which will consume the rest of the movie until the inevitable downbeat ending.

Plaga Zombie may be Argentina's first zombie film, and if the efforts that follow this one are anything like it, my world just got a little bigger and brighter. It can be tough to watch a lot of horror comedies, especially from the '90s...and especially if zombies are involved. That even the analysis of the idiocy of the scores of thousands of bad zombie movies made over the years is now exhausted is a sign that unless someone does have that startlingly-good fresh idea, the genre is beyond dead, and indeed beyond any sort of topical joke about undeath as well. The one mercy of being bludgeoned with so many of these awful movies is that I've gotten used to knowing when exactly to turn something off. Plaga Zombie, however, looked like a positive outing at first glance, and I'm glad to say it lived up to my initial optimism.

The first realization I came to after watching the movie was how exactly it accomplished its blend of horror and comedy so nicely--besides being just an hour long, that is. Unlike the makers of a lot of horror comedies, directors Parés and Sáez are aware that the best horror comedies are ones where the comedy breaks the tension, and logically plays off of the story the horror parts set up. Rarely are there asides in Plaga Zombie--compare it to Poultrygeist, which will gleefully interrupt its own non-narrative just to bring us a close-up shot of a greasy butthole shitting on the camera. The goofiness comes out in the form of slapstick during the fight scenes, or the actors mugging; sometimes we do cut to something else, but it's always brief, like the cutaway to the zombie giggling stupidly as it tazes itself in the face with a defibrillator. As a result, the movie is actually funny. It doesn't explain its jokes; it doesn't repeat them until they lose all coherence; it doesn't dwell on any one bit for an uncomfortably long time. If you laugh, you laugh. If you don't, you wait for the next part. It's plain and simple.

While the movie never succeeds in being actually creepy, it is still an extremely professional effort. Plaga Zombie was made for a shocking $120, and it contains more actors and extras than movies I've seen made for a thousand times as much. If Parés and Sáez were not film students, they were auto-didacts from having watched a tremendous deal of movies, one of which was almost certainly Evil Dead. The cinematography is almost always appropriate in framing and mobility, and it's one of the few movies I've seen that uses a bubble-lens in a way that works. And the effects are suitably grotesque, as well. Partly-melted Neopolitan ice cream makes surprisingly impressive zombie vomit, while a lot of filmmakers could learn from how cake frosting can be used to make undead face-paint. There wasn't a single moment where I wasn't entertained by the movie, and that's not even getting into the weird shit.

There's one "weird shit" scene in particular I want to highlight, which is Max's introduction. Let's just that as much as this movie threw me, I wasn't expecting to hear Leonard Nimoy rasp out the "Final Frontier" speech as presented in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. What's confusing about this scene is that Max is in a chatroom on his computer, talking to someone named "Kirk"! These circumstances don't really justify themselves outside of establishing that Max, a mathematician, is nerdy, which is funny because Max has a relatively small role in the film.

But of course I'm ignoring the main thing I liked about Plaga Zombie: more than any other Kids Goofing Off movie I've seen so far, it reminded me of the movies I used to make with my friends. All those silly half-comedies about ninjas and bigfoot and Sausage Kings...those were the days. We knew what sort of movies we wanted to make ours like, but it was impossible to ignore putting in our own idiosyncracies as well. And in the case of the movies of my past, this meant a lot of dumb inside jokes which were nonetheless pretty hilarious at the time. But the makers of Plaga Zombie, as I've said, took a very professional approach to their work, and consequently their output is more soberingly fluid than anything I put together.

The production company responsible for Plaga Zombie, Farsa Producciones, has been generous enough to put the movie and its two sequels up on YouTube, so you have no excuse to miss this. I will probably never recommend a zombie comedy ever again, so this is a pretty big deal!

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Blue Summer (1973), by Chuck Vincent

I don't know why this movie the impact on me that it did--which is kind of my way of saying I don't know why this movie left any impact on me at all. It's kind of like The Witches' Mountain, another movie I love which, frankly, has so little going for it that it's remarkable that it even still finds release. Really, there's little to separate Blue Summer from other softcore porn exercises of the early '70s, and I can think of little that makes it stand out against other "teen road trip" movies I've seen, to say nothing of the fact that it's not even that distinct from other non-teen road trip movies I've seen. But the High Concept premise sold me quick: "Two teens load up a car with beer and go on the road in search of sexual adventures." I think what made Blue Summer hook into my heart is it's cheap attempts to milk my nostalgia for the road trips of my youth. Sure, I never went on these trips in search of beer or sex--I went looking for ghosts, because I had this weird Gravity Falls-style youth--but the thrill of being young on the open road is something that fades away over time. Maybe it never goes away, but it's never quite the same again. So this crude little porno managed to stir up some strange emotions in me, managing to overcome another fault I had with The Witches' Mountain: I hated it the first few times I saw it.

Gene and Tracy have just finished high school, and soon, horror of horrors, it'll be off to college for the both of 'em. Thus they decide to spend the summer making the trip out to Gene's uncle's cottage, with plenty of stops along the way. The primary mission, of course, is girls, as many as they can bed. Once this premise is established and we've gotten our first few twangs of '70s guitar out of the way, our string of ostensibly erotic vignettes can begin. First our boys run into two girl hitchhikers of around the same age who turn out to be quite permissive. Of course, this is because they expect the boys to be permissive with their valuables. It's implied these two have been running this thumb 'em, bang 'em, and rob 'em for some time. Next, they run into a Manson-esque hippie leader and his two free-loving girlfriends, and that doesn't end well either. At last, they end up in some crap shanty town, where they're offered drunken sex with the village bicycle, Regina. Eventually, however, some thugs show up and butt ahead of the two on the train to Reginasville, and when they decide to fight for their rights to sex it looks like they're going to get their asses kicked. But back near the start of the movie, they ran into the world's most apathetic biker, whom they helped out when his bike wouldn't start. Ever since he's been stalking them with unclear intentions. Turns out he's just been looking to repay the favor, as he fights off the toughs so the boys can get away. When they reach the cottage, Tracy is reunited with an older woman whom he shared an attraction with earlier in the movie, and the two have sex, before realizing they probably shouldn't see each other again when Tracy meets a man older than him who turns out to be the woman's son. Finally, they pack it in, reflecting fondly on the new memories, but also lamenting what comes next.

Because Blue Summer is a porn first and foremost, it spends most of its runtime showing people rolling around and utterly failing at making out. This stuff is easy to fastforward through, unless you want to hear some purebred '70s guitar indulgence, including the occasional not-Beatles. The musical interludes are on par with An American Hippie in Israel for sheer ridiculousness. They highlight the fact that everything about this movie is pure '70s...it's just conspicuously free of drugs, even in the presence of hippies. I think I appreciated it initially by merit of its being a time-capsule film. It is a living memory of something that is, like the road trips of our youth, forever inaccessible. Hell, most of the buildings, forests, and mountains shown in this thing have probably been bulldozed by this point. One needs reminders that the world is always changing, and coming head-to-head with the past is one way of going about that.

There's some actual...heart...in this movie? Like, again, T&A, and tongue-on-tongue, those are the goals, but I get the impression Chuck Vincent, director of such films as Sex Crimes 2084 and Sexpot, actually had something of a personal stake in this film's story. Weird, innit? Any of us who graduated from high school knew it was a bigger step than anything we'd previously known, and that feeling is adequately communicated here. Growing up is scary. It does mean the end of a lot of freedoms that you may go on missing for the rest of your life. But it's also liberating. You get to have your own pets, you can feel the weight of your accomplishments, you can eat whatever garbage you fucking want. And you find that, after a time, you can even still find days to just sit around watching and writing about awesome movies. I can't help but wonder if there is a deliberate irony in that final sadness Tracy and Gene leave us on. One life's ending, but another is just beginning. I mean, if anything, I guess I don't get why they think there's not going to be booze, sex, and road trips in college.

And I think that theme--the fear of growing up--comes back in what is probably the most memorable thread in the film, the affair between Tracy and the older woman. I don't remember if the movie really explains why she ends up going for him; specifically, I don't know if she's meant to be predatory or not. But perhaps this woman fears the future as much as Tracy does, and therefore looks to younger men to help her feel youthful again. There's enough ambiguity that it gives the film depth it didn't have up until everything spills out about her twenty-something son.

I really don't think I can encourage you to watch Blue Summer. It's a relatively tedious run-of-the-mill skin flick, but with a few patches here and there that break up the ennui in ways that I at least found interesting. Let me know if it sticks in your head as well.

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Ax 'Em (1992), by Michael Mfume

Y'know, it's been awhile since I've reviewed a movie which has...floored me. Sure, there was Glen or Glenda, but that was a long while ago. I need some flesh back on my bones! Some blood back in my veins! I need something overwhelming, something which leaves me struggling for comprehension and comprehensibility. Oh, yes, I know what I want. I know what I need. Yes, it's time...time for AX 'EM!!

Ax 'Em is generally regarded as one of the worst movies ever released on home video, and it is admittedly tough to contend with as far as sheer production values. I have seen few movies, in all those which I've seen, with poorer visuals, cinematography, and sound mixing. And it is tough to watch a singular movie which features extensive scenes of people telling jokes, bickering, and urinating, especially if it also contains those aforementioned technical failings. But there is something charming about Ax 'Em--there has to be, as I returned (eagerly) after an abortive and hate-filled first viewing. Ax 'Em is, as they say, like a fine pair of shoes. It will be angular and cramped at first, but you eventually find that it will carry you well over the marshy terrain of the Scottish highlands, should you ever be presented with a situation wherein that would be a good thing. That is to say it's pretty awesome.

The movie's sole authentic DVD release (which only happened nine years after the movie was made), drops us immediately, sans menu, into the movie's opening title cards, which explain that years ago a man went berserk and killed his family and himself. We will see this incident much, much later in the film in a pretty hilarious dramatization. Anyway, one of the kids, Harry, was "not ever found," and we meet someone whom we can presume to be Harry as an adult. The kid has made some of himself, namely by becoming a booger-faced machete-wielding zombie. (He's never explicitly referred to as a zombie, but most reviews I've seen seem to think he's one, to explain not only the booger-face but his immortality. C'mon, he could just be a leper afflicted with the Curse of Thorn!) Harry kills an old man, and we swiftly learn that said old man's grandson and his college friends plan on going down to visit the old man and spend some time at his house to relax in the woods. Another flashback tells us that some of these kids were childhood friends of Harry's, and that he, being "mentally Ill" blamed them for the murders. Why he didn't kill them then and there when confronting them about it, and why they apparently never passed this incident on to the authorities, must remain a mystery.

Anyway, shortly after arriving, the kids hardly notice the old man's conspicuous absence as they drink beer, play Game Boy, and cheat on their partners with each other. Much of this is filler and, aside from some non-linear flashbacks edited in to tell us the backstory in a surprisingly patient way, we don't really get to the horror aspects of the film until about 40 minutes in (of 70). From there it's just a matter of Harry hunting down the impressively large cast and killing all but three or four them. That's it! Director Mfume--known to his friends as "Mfumay" by the way--thanks his grandma, and the credits roll.

Most of what makes Ax 'Em memorable is the now-oft-aforementioned fact that it looks and sounds like shit. The acting is solid--I can tell that at least a few of the cast have gotten some kind of acting training, and everyone has enough energy that even those without talent still have something to bring to the table. The music, while usually ripped from public domain sources, is bearable, albeit weirdly placed. Ax 'Em is genuinely a shoddily put-together film: most of the dialogue can only be picked out with repeat viewings, which will make the plot borderline incomprehensible. Not only that, but it is pretty hard to see what's going on. But unlike a lot of films with these problems, Ax 'Em gains strength from them, becoming something of an experience in visual poetry, with some lines or images snapping out suddenly from a void of random nonsense. Lines like "You better lay off my beer, you big six-foot-nine motherfucker!" Images like one of the characters bobbing his glasses up and down.

Okay, I have to open that last one up. This scene has haunted me since I first saw this film, nearly ten years ago. There's a scene where three of the characters are bickering and two of them break off to leave the third, a dude with glasses, behind. At this point the killer catches up with him, and music starts playing that sounds like it belongs at a funeral. The bespectacled guy screams and we get a close-up shot of him wiggling his glasses up and down, before jumping to a shot of his dead body. I have never been able to determine why they decided to have this guy bob his glasses up and down. I assume it's supposed to be like Laurel and Hardy's hats jumping off their heads, or someone's monocle popping out--a slapsticky representation of the surprise of confronting something scary. Then why the fuck are they playing funeral music? These murders can't be simultaneous whacky and tragic!

Unless you want to get a dark humor effect, which is what they totally ended up with. This scene is hilarious: not merely because of the contrasting tone, but because I'm still not entirely sure that they were going for slapstick. Maybe the actor just felt like hyperactively adjusting his glasses, which I'm told is common behavior in those about to be killed by zombies.

I hope you can tell I'm in a good mood. This movie has brought me to it. Everything is wrong. Everything is awful. The title is awful. Only one person is killed with an ax; everyone else dies by machete, gunfire, or rotary telephone. Also, the film was originally called The Weekend It Lives, which adds to the notion that Harry is a zombie (hence "It") while also being more grammatically and contextually confusing. I cannot, for the life of me, determine why this was released, much less made, but I want more of it and any film distributor who wouldn't release this film is naught but a craven coward. I've praised the decision to make and release these films in the past, but for someone outside of the director's friend group to release this shows not only insanity but courage. It was a risk to try to find an audience for this film, but a risk well-played, because they found me. Except York Entertainment, which is responsible for the Ax 'Em DVD, no longer exists. Sorry, York--I should've gotten into the game before it was too late. Now the world will never again enjoy your releases of such films as An American Vampire Story or Laserhawk.




To wrap things up, then: sometimes I can't help but wonder if we trash-lovers are really just creeps who like watching people's home videos. Hell, I've bought tapes that really have been just people's home movies before, from the antique shops and garage sales who choose to sell such things, but I do so for a very specific: I watch these movies with the hope that they will turn out to be horror films. (And hey, if I find a snuff film or two in the mix, I get to be part of Internet history! Because that's what one should value in such a case.) This is simply because I'm sure movies like Ax 'Em, Psyched by the 4D Witch, and The Tony Blair Witch Project began their lives as home movies before plot suddenly intervened. A shitty excuse for a plot usually, but something in there that separates it from what would otherwise merely be clips of families seeing what the new camera can do. These films are separate from movies like Bad Magic or Weasels Rip My Flesh, which are made with the quality of home videos, but clearly had scripts of some kind. This is a weird sort of candidness crossed with the provision of genre tropes in a way that's uniquely magical; movie, but not movie. Home video, but not home video. These movies are trapped in a bizarre sort of quantum lock that returns to the old trash adage, that movies which reveal the hearts of their creator at their embarrassing worst are worth treasuring. To be honest, I don't know if Ax 'Em really says anything about Michael Mfume, but it said something for him. There was a reason why this movie was made--it surely couldn't have been for money. I guess I don't really care about that purpose. Everyone who made it looks like they had a great time, and I'm grateful they decided to let us in on that.

Book Club of Desolation #12: The Pepsi-Cola Addict (1982), by June Gibbons

My process for this site is pretty simple. I look for movies or books I think I might like, and if I like them enough, or find them notable enough, I review them. To my knowledge, that's just the general critical process for a site like this. A natural aspect of this process is the Holy Grail Development Event. When you know what you like, you know what you'll probably love. There's always just one more thing out there, one more score, that will bring you critical artistic bliss. The perfect movie. The perfect book. And it's a tricky thing, the Holy Grail Development Event, which, in all honesty, could probably stand with a better name. The Internet is a thing now. Unless it's like The Weird Ones or something and every print was destroyed in a huge fire, or it's some penny dreadful published back in the Victorian period, you can find basically anything if you're willing to dig deep, risk viruses, and take a blow to your wallet.

The Pepsi-Cola Addict is basically the reason why I ended up doing the Book Club of Desolation. Yes, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman was the first hint I had that these books existed. Yes, Harry Stephen Keeler showed me I'd have enough material for it. But when I began my research I knew that this was what I would build to. And now that I've gotten it done less than a year...what do I do for an encore? Well, something that makes me feel less guilty. This is one of those books where a lot of the meat of it is in the story behind it, so without further ado...

You may have heard the story of June and Jennifer Gibbons. Known as the "Silent Twins," the pair refused to talk to anyone but each other, and people who listened in on them heard them speak a language of their own creation. They were hugely dedicated to each other and, in essence, had a death pact of some variety. The twins were separated and placed in a mental health facility after they went on a crime spree which included committing arson. Eventually they determined that of them must "sacrifice" themselves in order to "be free," and in 1993 Jennifer died of unclear complications possibly related to other health problems brought on by her antipsychotics. Afterwards, June became much more expressive, and has gone on to live an apparently average life.

Before their crime spree, however, the girls wanted to be writers. Jennifer produced The Pugilist, Discomania, and The Taxi-Driver's Son, along with a play and some short stories, while June wrote The Pepsi-Cola Addict. Their work appears to have been published by New Horizons, a vanity print-on-demand press in their native Wales. Only Pepsi-Cola Addict is known to survive--because they were print-on-demand titles the amount of extant copies would be based on the number of copies that sold. Consequently, if Jennifer's books never sold, or only sold a copy or two, they may be gone for good. But Pepsi-Cola Addict exists, floating around as a bootleg. And sure enough, my copy is a bootleg, because I don't have access to the British Library (for geographical reasons exclusively, of course). I can say that it is one of the most incredible books I've ever read, and the fact that it has an astonishing story of authorship makes it all the better. That's saying nothing of the age of the writer. Pepsi-Cola Addict is a rush of pornographic comic book action, featuring some truly odd plot decisions pulled off with a remarkable skill. It is a true lost gem.

Preston Wildey King is a young teenager in love. However, he is also an addict. Preston loves Peggy and yet cannot quit his fixation with Pepsi cola. He steals it and steals to buy more, and often fantasizes about drinking huge quantities of the stuff. At times, he channels both Burroughs and Cleland as his Pepsi addiction resembles that of heroin, while also taking on sexual dimensions. Preston is also joined in his ennui by his friend Ryan. His best friend. His...best...friend. Ryan wants to rob a store but he also wants to bang Preston. This is not a hinted thing--there is oral sex in this book, and it is not of the hetero variety. There is a long and detailed series of events, all extremely delirious and laden with snappy Bogartesque dialogue. (Casablanca is maybe just a little influence here?) The inevitable happens. Preston bangs his lusty 30-something teacher. Then, he goes to jail as the robbery catches up with him. And we sink into nihilism, as a handful of pills washed down with Pepsi carries sweet Preston from this world.

I've glazed over a lot but that's because, like Don't Go in the Woods, the book's sheer oddity is hard to summarize. Every sentence is crafted with an odd precision, stumbling over amateurish metaphors while also evoking actual drama and pathos for our characters. The weird magical awkwardness of early teenagerhood, better in memory than in real life, comes back to you while reading, even if you didn't run into quite as crazy of shit when you were fourteen. Think the experimental passages of "Adams Farr" combined with a hatred for living a la Nathan Schiff. And while there are some stumblings, Gibbons keeps things moving, and shows that she has a remarkable intelligence alongside being well-read. It supports the notion that there is a connection between intelligence and mental illness, and that this is literature (convincing literature) about mental illness adds a certain layer to it all.

Of course, that sounds exploitative, but I prefer to look at the Gibbonses from the perspective of a fellow mentally ill person. I wish to celebrate their work as triumph with or over their illness as well; it's an expression of what mental illness does to a person. It's pretty clear that it affected Pepsi-Cola Addict and we can't get away from that. As a person with anxiety and depression (with some stuff probably stretching deeper than that), I am fascinated by what other mentally ill people produce. Even something like this, which many would decry as wallowing trash, is part of our voice. It shouldn't be ignored.

Plus, it's an important artifact of writing from a teenage author. My criticisms of "Canon" from my Don't Go in the Woods review apply here--literature written by youth always needs a closer eye, so that more of them may be considered classics. The work that young people do astounds me, much in the same way (though not the exact same way) that first-time work by very old people does. I hope I'll get to do Old People Goofing Off sometime soon as well. (This isn't really "Goofing Off," of course. But it's Kids Doing Great Things and that's what counts.)

I do hope there is a new edition of Pepsi-Cola put out at some point, and I hope Jennifer's works are rediscovered as well. Of course, I won't accept anything that doesn't benefit June Gibbons, or whomever or whatever she wants the new editions to benefit. But this should not be a book condemned to bootlegs, bless those bootlegs all the same. If you can find this, read it. I have built hype and yet I have faith the book can own up to it. It must be read to be believed. Track it down.

Thank you for stopping by for Bookvember! We'll see you again soon in the Book Club of Desolation...for now, get ready for December, when we'll take a look back on some moments from the life of Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979), by Nathan Schiff

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...?

Five Across the Eyes (2005), by Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen

The 21st Century is a weird era for trash. While it does seem like a huge amount of movies that are absolutely crazy and delightful are concentrated in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, entertainingly idiosyncratic films have endured in the smallest of markets. Movies like The Tony Blair Witch Project, Ben & Arthur, and Hip Hop Locos are usually created with the means and tools of supreme poverty, and come in two flavors: If adults make them, they tend to be on the eccentric side, perhaps to the point of egotism, as can be seen in Sam Mraovich, Tommy Wiseau, and James Nguyen. Other times, as with the forces behind Tony Blair Witch, we are subjected to the power called Kids Goofing Off. I don't know if "Kids" is the right term here, but the characters are kids even if the cast and crew probably weren't. What we have here is a story of High School Adventure--for all its thrills and all of its mindless, naive stupidity. While far from perfect, Five Across the Eyes is best described as "unique," which is surprising, given its premise.

A group of high school girls try to dodge traffic coming home from a football game by taking a shortcut. I can't remember their names, but their personalities stick out: the screamy driver whose voice realistically cracks, the polite, lighthearted super-Southern one, the bitchy one, the vague one, and the one who dies (I thought she died, but upon rewatching no one dies). While they apparently already live in a small town, the "shortcut" leads them into an even more rural part of their state (presumably Tennessee, where this was shot). Here, while asking for directions, they decide to make fun of one of the girls by pretending to drive off, and in doing so ram a nearby car. This is their trespass of hubris, because this car is driven by an ever-nameless Crazy Lady. The crazy lady will chase the girls all throughout the rest of the movie, occasionally taking advantage of car stalls, nervous breakdowns, and sweaty hands to pull them out of the car and torture them. There is no small influence from the torture porn genre here, but aside from a possible screwdriver-to-the-vag, "small" is the operative word for scale here--the inspiration is Saw, not Human Centipede. This has to be the first "torture porn on wheels" movie I've seen, and that it manages to build atmosphere without being disgusting, while also being as naive as the characters it depicts, makes it a hard beast to describe.

The movie is best broken down in chunks--there is the first handful of minutes, which is separate from the main chase. It's in this first chunk that we start to see that the characters have individual personality, which they effectively carry through for the rest of the movie. It's hard for us to like these characters at first because they are all incredibly bitchy and incapable of speaking below sane and safe Inside Voice thresholds, which they also carry through the rest of the movie. This first chunk will be a test to see if you can do this movie or not, because it is probably annoying to most persons. Still, there are plenty of blink-and-miss-it scenes in it that foreshadow the coming events, such as when we first see the crazy lady's car. Tellingly, the lady exits the car long before they hit it, and instead of going into the nearby convenience store, she stalks into the shadows some distance away from it. This already sets up the admittedly fascinating characterization of this woman. When we reach the second chunk, it does seem like she's mad at the girls for hitting her car, but changes her reasoning at some point to the girls apparently having "ruined her family"--later on, she screams about them having "killed her baby," and even later on, she says something about "old men" (?). Of course, she keeps her van stocked with corpses, so it's clear she's just a motiveless serial killer, as in too many cheap horror pieces. I'm sold by this, though, because this movie's setting is amazing. There is nothing creepier than driving out in the countryside late at night, especially in the South. I can totally buy that there are people out in the rural area even in the North who will find any weird reason to stalk people and kill them. At least, it can be fun to believe, in its own problematic way. Because the crazy lady has no motive, it only makes the imposing emptiness of the setting even creepier.

I want to zoom in on that first chunk again, and how it will test you, because it exposes one of this movie's stranger angles. A lot of the dialogue here seems scripted, because it's not how people talk outside movies, but it's delivered like it's all improv. I get the impression that if these actresses were as old as their characters when they made this, they were the Theatre Kids. Either this is improv from some really organized heads or scripted lines made to sound like improv in an attempt at realism. It sticks out, with lines like "I feel dead all over the inside." If you're someone who criticizes how people talk (which you really shouldn't), the pre-chase chunk will sort you out. Because every line is awkward, the movie becomes much more entertaining--you'll always be wondering what someone is going to say next.

Then there's the matter of how this was shot. This camera seems to be the same model I had when I was in high school, albeit with better light detection. It's fuzzy, with pixelization seen at points. This is a YouTube movie, and I don't consider that an insult. In the beginning you may be led to believe this is a found-footage film, but there isn't a found-footage frame story, nor is the camera an actual prop in-universe. The camera just bobs and weaves around, and during one of the torture scenes, when we get a close-up of a jangling toolbox, we even see the camera flip upside-down! This, along with a blurry take wherein the crazy lady shoots at the girls with her shotgun off-camera, were both left in. Remarkable is the word, literally. If you've been suckled on good movies, leaving in a gratuitously blurry shot and a random amateurish desire to spin the camera around are both worthy of remark. Whether it's a good or bad remark is up to. What matters is this is a "quasi-found footage" movie, which I've seen before but have never found quite so damn fixating. I wish I knew why it drew me in...

Did I mention that this movie also has the girls throw feces at a car, piss on their clothes, and spill and eat funerary ashes?

This movie even has bookends, which is something this review doesn't. Instead of referencing the beginning of my words, I'll choose instead to say how charmed I am by the title. The in-universe drop is that the part of the country the five girls drive across is called "the Eyes." But it's also a clumsy pun implying that somehow being tortured and killed by a hick with a shotgun is like a slap to the face. And, they make a point of showing us that "Five Across the Eyes" spelled out..."FATE"! Spooky! There's a ring to that. A stupid ring. A ring I like.

Book Club of Desolation #6: The Fangs of Suet Pudding (1944), by "Adams Farr"

The deeper I've dug, the more I've found that there are a few author that are (in)famous for being particularly odd. Obviously this includes Harry Stephen Keeler and Lionel Fanthorpe. But the name Adams Farr was a moniker I kept coming upon over and over; it seemed to represent a semi-renowned, semi-respected literary anomaly. Though Farr's name is probably false, Farr was the writer of The Fangs of Suet Pudding, a book seen as something of a hidden classic--the title and general premise have bewildered writers ranging from Russell Ash and Brian Lake in Bizarre Books to Chris Mikul in Biblio Curiosa. I had to check it out for myself, and I've found that the legends are true: The Fangs of Suet Pudding is legitimately good while also being intensely idiosyncratic. It's an artifact from a world that couldn't be replicated, for reasons regarding the time in which it was written, and regarding the presumed facts about "Adams Farr."

Fangs centers around Loreley Vance, a young English girl living with her aunt in France during the German invasion. Her life is changed forever when a burglar named Pugg breaks into her house, an act which naturally leads to their friendship. He takes her to a dance and introduces her to another boy, wealthy aristocrat Bobby Treslin, and the three of them, along with an exile from "Troubania" called The Dictator, get caught up in the machinations of the Nazi officer Carl Vipoering, aka Suet Pudding, whose head resembles the beefy dish for which Loreley names him. While France falls apart around them, they stop each of Vipoering's schemes, while he seems to toy with them, insisting on playing snakes and ladders with Loreley and somehow escaping their every attempt to kill him. Did I mention he also smells like "crushed violets"? The good guys win in the end, but not before enduring some...legitimate trauma. For indeed, this is a book about war written during the war it describes. Adams Farr saw some shit. Whoever they were.

The intro and back cover of the Ramble House edition speculate that Loreley Vance is a self-insert character, and that "Adams Farr" was an English teenage girl. This ties in handily with the realism of how the character of Loreley is depicted, and with the weird prose eddies that marble the book. In the case of the latter, there's an odd blend of eternal Britishisms, inside-jokes, and words used incorrectly but with meaning. Consider the following: "Aunt Sophie sniffed. It was the kind of sniff that said: I TOLD YOU SO, DEAR BOY! in Hindustani." Or how about the fact that Loreley says she was introduced to Bobby's "blond size," or her reference to someone possessing "that pre-Boer-War spirit"? These are signs of an overly-cryptic and inexperienced but otherwise talented writer. While I never could and never will be able to write something nearly as charming as Fangs, I see the same mistakes I made when I was a teenager. It's youthful ambition, raw experimentation, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Assuming this theory was true, I wish Adams Farr, whoever she was, wrote more. It's entirely possible she did--we would never know.

My mind flooded with comparisons as I read this book. In terms of literature, I was reminded of Shirley Jackson (extraordinarily charismatic prose) and R.L. Stein's Goosebumps (bizarre/hilarious chapter cliffhangers). Jackson and Stein's vastly different works show worlds where the supernatural exists, and this other world is sometimes a benefit, answer, or sublime experience for the protagonists. Oftentimes they learn that the weird powers they've encountered are evil. It's a simple story of the innocence of youth being taken away by a brush with something beyond comprehension, or explanation: the mirror that makes you invisible also replaces you with an evil mirror double, or the trip to the beautiful old house, escaping your mother at last, ends with suicide at the base of a tree. In this case, the supernatural is replaced by the circumstances of War. Loreley is at first excited to live in France, thrilled by the notion of war, and charmed by the Chateau her friend Bobby lives in. Slowly, the War becomes both terrible and omnipresent, and takes away whatever enthusiasm she has. Over time, we learn that Pugg's family was killed, and we see civilians run in fear as the Nazis overrun Paris, bombs erupting around them. For all the whimsy, there's a chilling seriousness beneath.

I came up with movie comparisons too. The honest innocence of the work and its infringement by maturity made me think of an entertaining version of Valerie's Weekend of Wonders. It shares its "extreme European-ness" attribute as well. Of course, in terms of style and prose, this is like Nathan Schiff's Super 8 movies. Again, youthful experimentation. Kids Goofing Off. In terms of Nathan Schiff, I primarily mean Weasels Rip My Flesh and Long Island Cannibal Massacre--nowhere does this film get as dark as Vermilion Eyes. Once again: dark but whimsical, not graphic and stomach-churning.

Ultimately, this is a legitimately good book, even outside of trash terms. The writing is good, the plot is fun, and the characters are wonderfully memorable. Not just Suet Pudding, he-of getting Aunt Sophie drunk on cognac as part of his master plan to conquer Europe--but everyone. The Dictator, who learns the meaning of freedom in the course of fighting an evil bigger than himself. Bobby and Pugg, who form a charmingly clumsy attraction-triangle with Loreley. Aunt Sophie, who gets a piece of the action with a few chances to clobber some Nazis. And Loreley herself, who is self-aware, witty, and mature but with youthful imagination and inexperience. If you can stand having your brain twisted around now and then, this is a classic. Check it out.

A Clockwork Blue (1972), by Eric Jeffrey Haims

I shoulda known what I was getting into. As soon as I opened up the case for the Vinegar Syndrome DVD of Eric Jeffrey Haims' twin wonders, A Clockwork Blue and The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio, I noticed that the lefthand side of the case contained a brochure on how to activate a free trial for Skinaflix, a site which apparently contains "the finest and rarest classic erotica, in beautiful 1080p"! I'm sure someone out there will be greatly pleased by it, but unfortunately I think even the mighty Skinaflix has been reduced to naught but a mote of dust besides the other guest of the clamshell its brochure lives in. A Clockwork Blue, this little-known '70s sci-fi sex comedy, will satisfy any fan of anything for eternity, whether they like trash cinema or not. It is a shocking display of pure insanity that neither Kubrick nor Burgess could've ever hoped to keep up with.

Of course, that may send the impression that A Clockwork Blue is a ripoff of A Clockwork Orange. There are no droogs or milk bars on display here, however. Instead, there is a time-traveling Jerry Lewis clone named Homer who goes on an epic quest to avoid sex with historical figures as much as possible. Said quest specifically begins in Heaven, where we are introduced to a character who will appear often in a variety of unrelated inserts, a black man named, what else, Blacky. He spies on Homer and his misadventures using a TV made out of a watermelon. Yes, it's true, this movie is rather offensive. God gives Homer and Blacky each one wish. Homer wishes for a time-machine watch, whereas Blacky makes the mistake of wishing for a million dollars. It's hinted that Blacky wants to take revenge on Homer, as his useless wish is apparently his fault, but never pursues this revenge so I guess not.

Homer's great-great-grandson, also named Homer, is a lab assistant for a pretentious bearded professor whose actor seems unaware that he is in a comedy, and similarly unaware that his voice is often drowned by the soundtrack (no less than "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"). Homer stares at a girl's panties for what seems like eternity, but eventually he travels back to the American Revolution, finding himself having become George Washington. And that's when the madness begins...

A Clockwork Blue is always riveting, even during some of the sex scenes, which is a rare feat in a lot of movies having to do with sex. It reveals a handful of startling truths about our universe, including the fact that Heaven is full of pot-smoke, Louis XVI dated a man named Bitch, and the truth behind the Father of Our Country worded so eloquently put by Blacky: "For the intellectuals in the audience, if there are any, let it be known that the Founding Fathers frequently indulged in cuh-NAW-bis sativa." It's bizarrely historical, featuring factoids about presently-obscure figures like Madame du Barry, while also warping realism and reality in the wildest ways possible. The fact that it's not that poorly written of a film (the race humor is pretty lame, but, well, duh) and that it's a well-acted film heavily builds this effect.

The movie is a lot like The Tony Blair Witch Project, in that its random attempts to educate make it seem like a school project gone off the deep end, and in that the intoxicating substances shown on screen were really consumed by those actors. Specifically, as Betsy Ross entices "George Washington" with a fresh bowl, he says to her in wheezy stoner voice, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." When she replies, "And how do the Romans do it?" he simply shoots back, "I don't know!" And...scene. We cut back to Paul Revere screwing a girl. I assume this part was still scripted, by certain chemicals got in the way of remembering the lines. What a sight. God fucking bless America.

But in a more significant parallel to Tony Blair, Clockwork is made by no less or more than a group of friends clowning around. It wasn't intended to make a lot of money, and no money was spent on it. It becomes similar to Nosferatu in Brazil by Ivan Cardoso--a way to fill time, and doing so unprofessionally but memorably. It's something of look into the time it was made to boot, because it's very '70s. Watch it, and you'll know what I mean. You want to know what I mean, right? So watch it.

This movie has two cuts available right now, both from Vinegar Syndrome: the DVD has some (but not most) nudity cut, whereas the Blu-Ray apparently has some hardcore sequences. I reviewed this from the DVD because I owe a lot of money to some loan companies, and if I fail to pay they will remove my teeth (I assume). As such, I can only buy a couple of Blu-Rays per year or risk having to have aspic for the rest of my life.

It's a see-it-ta-believe-it sort of thing--the movie, that is, not me being forced to eat aspic. I've given some glimpses into its heart (even if I didn't tell you about the jarring dub work they do for Paris and Helen of Troy...oops). And I'll give just one more, in case you're not convinced: the words "By Odin" are spoken not once, not twice, but three times in this movie.

The Tony Blair Witch Project (2000), by Michael A. Martinez

Since 2009, I've made about a dozen horror movies of various lengths (about thirty minutes to an hour). Some of them are easy for me to appreciate--others are rather embarrassing. Some are neither, or a fusion of both. Apparently there are some bootlegs of them floating around, and I've even found a few reviews, for movies both nostalgic and cringe-worthy. Right now I'm working on something kind of serious (as serious as I get anyway), which will hopefully avoid the blush-worthy category and be legitimately entertaining. I raise this point so that I can talk about my fourth movie, which I called Bigfoot Resurrection. Unlike my past three movies, this one involved quite a few levels of collaboration with people who weren't my immediate family members. I turned to my friends, and together with three people plus my brother and my dad, we made our Sasquatch epic. It was one of those fusion movies, both glorious and shitty. There are a lot of "gags" in it, and some weird tangents. The acting is mercurial. There was no script, except for the fact that we knew he had to have a scene where Bigfoot disembowels me and hangs me with my own intestines.

I can say, despite my mixed thoughts about it, that Bigfoot Resurrection has higher production values that The Tony Blair Witch Project. And, at face value, the latter film is much more meta than the former. And that is why the latter film is so cool to me.

The Tony Blair Witch Project is infamous by way of its placement on the IMDB Bottom 100. I don't entirely know how it ended up there, as I have never located any sort of release for the film. No home video, no theaters, no filmfests. I don't even know how I have my copy--it's an .avi file that just happens to be on my computer, and has been on it for years. CREEPYPASTERS TAKE NOTE. I sincerely doubt that so many people have seen the movie. All the same, I hope a lot of people have seen it. And I hope someone knows something about the production. If you do, please talk to me about it. How was this made, and what happened after?

So basically, Tony Blair and a bunch of other British personages, including film critic Alexander Walker, go to West Virginia in search of the titular Tony Blair Witch. They are played by a bunch of West Virginians wearing masks made of printed-out JPEGs of the faces of these people. The noble Prime Minister also pisses off a bunch of mall employees who may be either awkward friends or terrified/enraged strangers. In any case it is striking, in a slightly squirmy way. They also make fun of Americans basically all the time, calling them faggots 'n' whatnot. This goes on for quite awhile--it is, in fact, most of the movie. In the woods, they stumble across an abandoned town, which they smash the windows of. This also makes up a sizable chunk of the film. However, the magic truly begins when they are set upon by a gang of hicks. Suddenly, a whirlwind of amazing images and noises arise! Dicks are cut off! People vomit lime Jell-O! Slow-mo appears for some reason! As does the soundtrack from Nightmare City! And finally, in a tearful confession to the camera mirroring that of the main girl from Blair Witch, Tony Blair declares the resurrection of the monarchy and the re-implementation of droit du seigneur. Throughout the entire thing the characters insert factoids about 1980s British culture, as if this was made for a class. A class where the teacher was fine with property damage, underage drinking, castration, and Umberto Lenzi references.

That would be the WORLD'S KOOLEST TEACHER.

I mentioned that this movie is meta. Well, at multiple points in the movie, several potential outtakes are shown in the movie. Outtakes that show the actors making fun of their "characters," while speaking in American accents. These scenes are part of the story, and as such, these characters are actually bizarre American hipsters who mock both their own culture and that of Britain. They also have a psychotic dedication to their satire, implying something of a nihilistic outlook on life and death. It doesn't matter that your friends are getting killed by hillbillies in the woods. It's for art, bruh. That makes them even more over the top than a lot of other found footage entities, including the relatively dumb Blair Witch kids and the disgusting assholes of another movie this film rips off, Cannibal Holocaust. Which brings me to my next point...

Obnoxious or not, it is kind of neat that a bunch of high school seniors decided that the movies they needed to rip off included, yes, the then-super relevant Blair Witch Project, but also Cannibal Holocaust and not one but TWO Lenzi films, Nightmare City and Cannibal Ferox. (I'm guessing that's where the dick-cutting is from, though it's not like Holocaust is unlikely to have schlong-slicing in some cut of it or another.) It's sort of a last hurrah to a kind of exploitation movies from decades past. The early 21st Century was a transition period in horror spoofs. The Scary Movie franchise marched on and on into increasingly lazy and cheap things like A Haunted House 2. I know some people who liked that stuff at the start of the '00s, but rarely have I met anyone who will support a lot of the stuff that makes it to theaters these days. Perhaps their source material is flagging too and that's the problem, though nostalgia does paint one's glasses rose, as my mother's cousin's late brother-in-law Herbert used to say. I don't have much of an opinion on the found footage craze (it's kind of an easy target), but in the density of it, Tony Blair Witch is more relevant than ever. It is a found footage spoof not only of the granddaddy of the 21st Century found footage piece, but of at least one of the great-granddaddies of the genre in general. One that, by the merit of its own ambition, is actually rather funny and charming.

Yes, it will probably take a couple views to enjoy this movie. Teenage boys are still annoying even here. But there is muted creativity and great fun all around, even without intestine-gallows. I watch it every British election season. (That's a lie. But I have started watching it a couple times a year. Which is more than I can say of a lot of my own movies.)