The Wild Eye Releasing Fever Dream Marathon Part 2: Gothkill and The Bloody Ape

STOP!!!  If you haven’t read PART 1 of this transcendental journey into the world of modern low budget exploitation cinema, go do so now.  If you don’t how else are you gonna know that I was watching these out of my mind on codeine cough syrup (which might as well be orally administered heroin), tons of cold medicine, and a 104 degree fever.  How would you know that I had already watched Blitzkrieg: Escape From Stalag 69 and The Disco Exorcist?  I mean, if you didn’t read part one, you would have no idea that I was tearing through a stack of flicks sent to me by Wild Eye Releasing.  So you should really go read part one.  On, now that you went and did that, on with the movies!

If you watch a lot of indie horror cinema, you’ve undoubtedly run into a few of those “I have a bunch of goth buddies and a camera” movies.  You know, films like Goth, Hollywood Vampyre, and about half of any Pendulum Pictures box set.  I’m always rooting for these pictures, since I love that DIY sensibility and have a weakness for goth chicks.  The problem is, most of the time they’re impossible to get through.  Some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen fit into the “gothsploitation” subgenre.  Luckily, Gothkill was infinitely more entertaining than your garden-variety black lipstick flick.

 Synopsis: When Catholic Priest and Inquisitor Nicholas Dread finds out that innocents are being burned as witches he decides to do something about it. Unfortunately for him, his superiors don’t agree and he’s burned at the stake alongside two women he forced confessions from. While dying, Nick curses god and makes a pact with Satan to reign over his own kingdom someday at any cost. Now, in 21st century New York City, Dread has returned to finish the deal. His end of the bargain with Satan must be fulfilled, and many will die so Dread can take the throne in his kingdom of over one hundred thousand corrupt souls. He just has to find the right bunch of victims…and it just so happens the best Goth Club in the city is ripe for this bloodthirsty butcher bent on revenge! Can a group of Goths and wanna-be vampires hold their own when the real thing arrives?

I’ll probably alienate some of you with this statement, but I find a lot of the people in the goth and fetish scenes absolutely hilarious.  Not in a “oh my god, look at the freak” way, that would be pretty hypocritical of me, but the ones who take themselves deadly serious without any sense of humor or irony kill me.  The pretentiousness is just too much for me to take.  That’s one of the reasons I enjoyed this flick so much.  Far too often the “gothsploitation flicks” fall into that pretentious category.  Gothkill actually has a sense of humor.  These guys don’t mind poking fun at themselves and the more ridiculous aspects of gothhood.  It’s so refreshing to see the subculture willing to make fun of itself.  Anyone who knows a lot of goths will laugh that “oh my god, that’s just like so and so” laugh repeatedly.  Michael Day as Lord Walechia is especially hilarious.

The main thing that carries the flick is Flambeaux in the lead role.  Yes, his name is Flambeaux.  Freakin’ goths.  Anyway, asinine stage name notwithstanding, this dude has serious screen presence and a lot of charisma.  It’s a trip watching him throw himself into the role and go balls to the wall with it. He spends a good amount of time narrating directly to the camera, and he makes it work.  It may be the fever (or the drugs) talking, but I love this guy.  Why haven’t more filmmakers picked up on him?

The flick doesn’t really work as a horror movie, but it does as a horror comedy.  The problem is, it’s kinda hard to tell how seriously we’re meant to take it.  Flambeaux, the goth-skewering comedy, and a little eye candy are more than enough to gain my favor.  Hell, even if it wasn’t, at 75 minutes, it doesn’t really have time to overstay its welcome.  Punched up with more nudity and some more gore beyond the “throw some Karo around” minimum, this could have been a gem.  That’s not to say it’s not entertaining though.  You’ve most definitely seen a lot worse.  Those with ties to the goth community will enjoy this far more than those just looking for some horror.

By this time, my loopy-ness was reaching its zenith.  I soon realized that this put me in the perfect mindset to watch The Bloody Ape.  How can you not love a flick that advertises itself as “100% Pure Underground Trash?”  Well, it’s pretty easy, as 99% of intentionally bad underground trash isn’t nearly as much fun as this, but that’s a rant for another time.  The movie is shot on Super 8mm (mostly expired according to the bonus features), which normally imbues a flick with a grainy, low-fi, washed out look.  This day, however, it was more of a hallucinatory quality, like a spectral vision shown to me by the Ghost of Regional Exploitation Movies Past. 

Synopsis:  THE BLOODY APE is the most outrageous, drive-in movie take on Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" ever committed to film. A carnival barker foolishly releases his 400 pound gorilla, who then literally goes bananas on a rampage of raw rape and boffo butchery - leaving the low rent population of Long Island either sexually violated, slaughtered - or both! From maverick indy filmmaker Keith J. Crocker (Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69), THE BLOODY APE is a gore-soaked love letter to the sex and violence of the grind house movie era that pulls no punches and offers no apologies for wallowing in a skin-drenched stew of crudeness and camp! Banned from numerous festivals around the world, ignored by critics and loathed by the politically correct....but now there just is no stopping THE BLOODY APE!

I never went more than a couple of minutes without laughing hysterically.  The dialog is insane.  Almost every character is an over the top parody of a racist, and you will never stop being amazed at the things coming out of these people’s mouths.    If you’re one of those whiney, easily offended, politically correct types, stay the hell away from this movie.  The non-racial dialog is just as funny, with characters spouting lines like “My love for you is as deep and as wide as the expanses of your vaginal cavity.”   Just so you know, to get that quote, I decided to play a little game.  You just read that in the Jigsaw voice, didn’t you?  Couldn’t help yourself, could ya? Instead of going back to the flick to get the actual verbiage, I googled “bloody ape vaginal cavity.”  I was either gonna find the quote, or be irreversibly mentally scarred.  Luckily the quote came up first, but I don’t recommend gambling with your sanity like that kids.  That could have been traumatic. 

The acting is just as outlandish as the lines these “actors” deliver.  As far as I can tell, there isn’t an actual actor among the bunch.  Well,  perhaps the guy who plays Duane Jones, the token black guy named after the most beloved token black guy in horror history.  He was pretty good.  If you are the type who gets a kick out of bad acting, this flick just might be the holy grail.  Paul Richichi as Lampini is a study in awkwardness.  The scene where Lampini is running around asking people (who seem to have been recruited on the spot) about the whereabouts of his ape is hysterical.  George Reis, playing Detective LoBianco in a hilarious wig and fake beard, is a caricature of every 70’s New York cop movie cliché.  The moment when a naked woman is attacked by the ape, and shows her terror by looking directly into the camera and laughing just might be the most exquisite example of the fine art of screen acting that I’ve ever seen.  Second take be damned! 

The monkey mayhem is magnificent.  Among his other exploits, our simian friend castrates a hippy, tears a rabbi’s leg off, and rapes the rabbi’s wife (covering her in his seed, which looks suspiciously like whipped cream) before gutting her with his bare hands.  During the scene with the rabbi’s wife, the thought of the monkey intoning “Rape Ape” in the “Grape Ape” voice occurred to me.  At that moment, it was the funniest thing I had ever come up with.  I kept repeating it in my mind and guffawing.  Then I realized I was actually repeating it out loud.  I’m glad no one else was there to see that.  Anyway, this ape doesn’t limit his activities to the usual horny and homicidal stuff you’d expect from an ape.  No, monkey man actually steals a car and goes for a drive.  Yep, a gorilla steals a car.  If that’s not enough to sell you on this one, I don’t know what is.  The nudity perhaps?

The Bloody Ape purports to be a throwback to the days of the drive-in.  It’s notable that this movie was made back in 1997, a full decade before Grindhouse made these homages trendy.  While being shot on film does lend it the aesthetic of an earlier time, it comes across to me as a throwback to the 80’s DIY flicks that came out of the initial explosion of the home video market.  You know, those flicks where you can tell that someone decided to make a movie because they had a camera, an idea, 50 bucks, a bunch of friends and family to be cast and crew, and a weekend off.  I love the homegrown quality of those flicks, and I love the homegrown quality of this one. 

At this point, my brain could take no more input.  As the calliope music of The Bloody Ape’s title screen played, I stared vacantly at the screen trying to make sense of the last 8 hours or so.  It was a heady, almost psychedelic cocktail of naked women with machine guns, gorillas committing grand theft auto, vinyl dresses, Nazis, disco, tits, blood, fire, bad acting, castrations, sex, demons, hilarious dialog, and pure indie horror madness.  Later that night, my fever finally broke.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Brothers and sisters, I was healed by the power of gore and sleaze.  Hallelujah!

Now, before I wrap up with the severed thumb scores, I have to mention that Wild Eye did a bang up job with these releases.  You wouldn’t expect smaller releases like these to have a lot in the way of bonus features, but they all come pretty packed.  Hell, The Disco Exorcist is the sparsest of them all, and it has a commentary track, deleted scene, and all of the flick’s various trailers.  Gothkill has a video commentary (which is cool, but the little box in the corner of the flick gets annoying at times), a Q&A with the director, a featurette on the live experience, and promo materials.  The two Keith Crocker flicks get the full on Special Edition treatment, with commentaries, retrospective featurettes, shorts, test footage, stills, trailers, promo materials, VHS covers, and more.  Kudos to Wild Eye for giving you this much bang for your buck.  Hit them up on facebook HERE to keep up with their releases.

Ok folks, the final verdict is…one severed thumb up for Gothkill and one and a half severed thumbs up for Blitzkrieg, Disco Exorcist, and Bloody Ape if taken separately.  Two severed thumbs way up if you plan on doing the same marathon I did, hopefully without the “sick as hell” part.  Nathan says check ‘em all out. 

The Wild Eye Releasing Fever Dream Marathon Part 1: Blitzkrieg: Escape From Stalag 69 and The Disco Exorcist

I’ve been sick for the last few days.  Not really sick, just a cold.  No big deal.  It did get me thinking, however, about the last time I was sick.  Back in September, just before Netherworld started, I got sick.  Profoundly sick.  Fever, chills, hacking up chunks of lung, can’t breathe, can’t hold food in either end, praying for death kind of sick.  It’s a miserable state of affairs, but an interesting situation that can arise only out of such illness sometimes rears its head.  There is a phenomenon that I like to call the Fever Dream; and while it may not be nearly as enjoyable, it is far more powerful than any psychedelic drug experience known to man.  This is what happens when lack of sleep, a high fever, and copious amounts of medications combine.  It’s a condition where you slip back and forth between being awake and dreaming vividly without knowing where the boundary lies or being able to distinguish which one you are doing at the moment.  I’ve only been sick enough to experience it a handful of times.  If you think I sound crazy or don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ve never truly experienced the flu.  Just wait.  Captain Trips is coming.  M-O-O-N, that spells Super Flu.

Well, on this particular day my fever kept bouncing back and forth between 103 and 104.  I hadn’t slept in two nights because every time I dozed off, I would cough myself awake.  I was full of Mucinex DM (which for some reason f**ks me up worse than a fifth of anything), that prescription codeine cough syrup (sizzurp – as in sippin’ on some - for my ghetto readers), and both the Daywalker and Nightbreed varieties of the mighty –Quil.  I was out of my mind.  There was no hold on reality.  In short, I was more or less tripping my balls off. 

It was in this state that I decided that I should delve into my screener pile, in particular a killer stack that Wild Eye Releasing had sent me.  These guys really hooked me up.  They sent me a box of flicks including Hack Job and I Spill your Guts (which I’ve already reviewed here on SOC), a cool documentary about Rock and Roll Comics, a XXX Thriller parody from the 80’s that I’ll review when the time is right (meaning I’m holding onto it for viewing in Jimmy Bickert’s backyard drive-in), and the four flicks that would comprise my hallucinatory journey through low budget Nazi-sploitation, sexploitation, goths-ploitation, and ape-sploitation nirvana.  What follows is a chronicle of this whacked out odyssey as best as I could reconstruct it from my nearly illegible and incoherent notes.  Let the “ploitation” begin!

I started off with  Blitzkrieg: Escape From Stalag 69.  Hell yeah, Nazi time!  For the record, “Hell yeah, Nazi time!” is an exact quote from my notes.  It took up half of a page.  I worry about myself sometimes.  This is the flick I initially contacted Wild Eye about.  As I’m sure you Cellmates are aware, I love me some Nazisploitation.  I’ve waxed poetic about my love for Third Reich cinema before, so I’ll spare you.  With a few notable exceptions, however, it’s a subgenre that is sadly neglected these days, so I was truly stoked to discover a new addition to the annals of Nazi nastiness.  The first thing that struck me about Blitzkrieg was actually on the back of the box. This movie is 2 hours and 15 freakin’minutes long.  To the best of my knowledge, that makes it the longest Nazisploitation flick of all time.  Yes, Schindler’s List was longer, but that’s not the kind of exploitative, offensive Nazi flick we’re talking about here.

Synopsis: Enter Stalag 69, where torture is just the Beginning for this bloody band of Nazi Butchers! Germany, 1945. Stalag 69, a POW camp ruled by the sadistic SS commandant Helmet Schultz, is nothing but a blood-soaked playground for this perverse Nazi monster who uses his American, Russian, and British prisoners in cruel and ghastly biochemical weapons experiments. When a group of young, wanton USO girls are captured and fall into the hands of Schultz and his battalion of butchers, the brutality is turned up and the unsuspecting girls are gored, gouged and ground up - all for the pleasure of Schultz and his SS brothers and sisters. Now it's up to the rag-tag survivors of the camp to strike back against their captors and Escape from Stalag 69, alive or on a slab!

I came into the flick expecting all of the hallmarks of Nazisploitation, meaning nudity, torture, sleaze, and bad taste.  I definitely got all of that.  There are multiple castrations, flogging, nipple-ectomies, branding, humiliation, and various other tortures.  It also contains one of the greatest cinematic sequences of the past decade.  I won’t spoil it all, but it begins with an I Spit On Your Grave homage and ends with a bare ass naked woman running through the woods with a machine gun mowing down Nazis.  Read that sentence again.  If that isn’t enough to sell you on a movie, then the way your mind operates is completely foreign to me.  Violence and sleaze; check.

What I wasn’t expecting from this film was an actual story.  A lot of story.  A whole freakin’ lot of story.  This movie is HEAVY on the dialog.  For the most part it’s pretty well written, but it’s also pretty long winded.  As the movie progressed, however, I noticed something happening.  I was getting more and more into the story.  I knew exactly where it was going, but I couldn’t help but get swept up in it.  I don’t know if it was my altered state of mind or the deliberate way of building the plot, but I never had the urge to hit the fast forward button once in two and a quarter hours.  The last time a movie that long kept my attention that well was I Saw The Devil, and that was my #1 flick of last year.

The acting is all over the place in fact.  Some of the performances are outstanding.  Special credit goes to Tatyana Kot as Natasha.  She spends 90% of her screen time naked and being tortured.  This shoot had to be grueling for her, and she handles herself with a great intensity.  I enjoyed Steph Van Vlack as the sadistic Dr. Zuber a lot.  The very sexy Tammy Dalton was pretty good as Candice.  I sure do wish director Keith Crocker could have talked her into a nude scene, but I digress.  Then there are the others.  Charles Esser as Helmet Schultz fits in both the good and, um…”other” categories.  Sometimes he is so over the top that it seems like he thought he was in a comedy.  Other times he’s got such earnestness in his delivery that it’s obvious he’s playing it seriously.   It’s a really bizarre dichotomy that works…sometimes.  I’m not gonna name names, but aside from those I’ve mentioned, most of the actors and actresses in this flick either seem to be half asleep or are trying to chew straight through the scenery.  There’s no middle ground.  The mixture of the “upper and downer” acting schools makes these scenes the cinematic equivalent of a speedball.  Well, that may be stretching it.  A Jagerbomb perhaps.  Some of the best entertainment in the whole flick is watching them struggle with the various accents of this “international” cast of characters.

There is definitely some dopey moments here.  A 70’s style soul mama with a tramp stamp is doing in a WWII concentration camp comes to mind.  There’s also enough torture and sleaze to satisfy the prurient interests, enough of a story to engage those interested in plot, and enough camp appeal to make it all just plain fun.  Blitzkrieg is ambitious as hell in scope, and it succeeds to a point.  Yeah, it’s long, but it never stops being entertaining.  It’s dirty, sick fun with a little respectability thrown in; and it’s a worthy addition to anyone’s Nazisploitation collection. 

Next up I popped in The Disco Exorcist.  Right away I was torn on this flick.  On one hand, I’ve had just about enough fake film grain filters to last me for the rest of my natural life.  This flick is awash in digital attempting to look like analog.  It manages  better than many, but I still could do without it.  One strike.  On the other hand, it is a longstanding cornerstone of SOC film theory that, 9 times out of 10, boobs within the first minute of a movie means that I’m gonna like the flick. They actually occurred at 1:14, but let’s not get technical here.  At this point, my brain decided to argue with itself about what my expectations were for this film based on these two divergent facts.  Do boobs supercede fake grain, or vice versa?  This continued until the counter on the DVD player suddenly informed me that I was 20 minutes into the film and my brain was too busy debating with itself to register anything I had just seen.  Dammit.  Time to take more medicine (my mind can’t argue with itself if it can’t form coherent sentences) and restart the movie.

Synopsis: Suave swinger and womanizer Rex Romanski loves and leaves evil black magic priestess Rita Marie. Naturally, Rex incurs Rita's lethal wrath by spurning her. Can Rex figure out a way to stop Rita's subsequent rampage of revenge, murder, and destruction as well as reclaim the soul of his new porn starlet gal Amoreena Jones before it's too late?

Despite my not liking the fake grindhouse look of the flick, it didn’t take it long to win me over.  Whereas Blitzkrieg tried to at least put up a front of playing it straight, Disco Exorcist gets down and revels in its cheese and sleaze.  There is copious nudity, some fairly messy gore, and some truly inspired references to classic 70’s horror and exploitation cinema.  They honestly didn’t need the filters, because the art direction is spot on in capturing a 70’s low budget feel. 

Many of the cast members come from stage acting backgrounds, which would explain why the acting is of a much better quality than probably any other film in this little marathon.  Ruth Sullivan steals the show as the evil and vengeful Rita Marie.  That scene of her writhing around naked and bloody in the center of a pentagram is a thing of beauty.  I found myself wishing that this flick had backed off of the laughs a little at times and gone for some more actual horror moments; but she is genuinely creepy, pulling off the whole Fatal Attraction meets Witchcraft thing beautifully.  I’d love to see her in some straight up horror flicks. 

Basically, this movie is an exercise in bad taste, humor that is goofy without being too stupid, tits, gore, and lots and lots of sex.  Ladies, for those of you who complain about the female to male nudity ratio, there is a lot of swinging meat on display for you in this one.  I can see this being a great party movie.  I would have enjoyed it a lot more if they had left out the fake grain and those goddamn “scene missing” gags that I loathe so much, but that’s just my personal preference.  Disco Exorcist is fun.  That’s the best word I can think of to describe it.  Fun.  It feels like the filmmakers had fun making it, and I had fun watching it.

Wanna know how many severed thumbs up Blitzkrieg and Disco Exorcist get?  Wanna know where this insane afternoon of exploitation took me next?  Wanna hear about some gorilla rape and back-from-hell goth bashing?  Of course you do!  Well, you’re just gonna have to wait until tomorrow when The Wild Eye Fever Dream Marathon concludes.  Don’t you just hate cliffhangers?  Look at the bright side though, I’m not making you wait ‘til freakin’ February to see how this turns out like someone else we all know…

Review: Dead Hooker in a Trunk

Ok, before I review this movie, which is damn good by the way, I have to rant for a minute first. It’s a tried and true rule in horror cinema, and cinema in general, that if someone stumbles upon a profitable idea, it will be taken, copied endlessly, ridden hard and hung up wet, done to death, and run into the ground. Currently, mainstream, big budget studio horror is riding the tail end (hopefully) of the remake and 3D waves. In indy horror, neo-grindhouse and exploitation flicks are currently all the rage. At least two thirds of the trailers I’ve seen for low budget, independent “genre” films in the last year have featured either fake film aging or an old school “coming attractions” screen. Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse may have been a box office disappointment, but it sure was influential. Actually, maybe a better word would be imitated. Fake age drives me nuts. I think it’s ridiculous to buy brand new t-shirts made to look like you’ve been wearing them for 20 years. You have to earn that vintage look. I feel the same way about the fake film aging. It’s just dumb. It was fine in Grindhouse, because it was unique. That hadn’t been done before. Now everyone and their mothers are making crappy slasher or “exploitation” flicks, artificially aging the digital footage, and calling it a “throwback.” It can occasionally work as a nod to the genre's heritage, but a little goes a long way folks! Lines, grain, lost reel gags, and that sort of gimmickry is not what draws us to these films. The best neo-grindhouse movie since, well, Grindhouse was Hobo with a Shotgun, and it had none of that. What makes this subgenre special is its spirit. The ideal that nothing is off limits, anyone with an idea can make a movie, and being as outrageous and potentially offensive as possible is the name of the game. It’s the manic energy, DIY aesthetic, and “up yours” to conventional standards of cinema that made these movies special in the 70’s and 80’s, and it’s what makes the good flicks of this new wave exciting. Which brings me to the flick at hand; Dead Hooker in a Trunk. Dead Hooker in a Trunk doesn’t employ the fake aging, but it is more spiritually akin to the exploitation movies it is inspired by than most I’ve seen.

Badass and Junkie, two friends, wake up after a wild night. Geek, Badasses sister, asks for a ride to pick up her friend Goody Two Shoes from his church youth group. It just so happens that they were on their way to score some drugs anyway, so they agree. When the four meet up, they make a discovery. I’ll give you one guess what it is. That’s right, there’s a dead hooker in the trunk of their car! You sure are smart. Anyway, what the hell are you supposed to do with a dead hooker in your trunk and no idea how she got there? Apparently you spend the rest of the flick careening through a madcap series of misadventures that seem like a “Pulp Fiction-esque” fever dream. All I’ll say is that it involves chainsaw dismemberment, drug dealers, a cowboy pimp, a serial killer, eyeball extraction, necrophilia, bestiality, power drill torture, tied up cops, and God driving a taxi.

Dead Hooker in a Trunk is the brainchild of Jen & Sylvia Soska, identical twins who, in addition to playing Geek and Badass respectively, wrote and directed the flick. The passion they have for films like this and the fun everyone was having making it is evident. It definitely epitomized the DIY school of filmmaking. They have been tight lipped about what the actual budget was, but in an interview on the Altered Realities podcast they said that you couldn’t buy a used car for what they spent on the flick. For a film this low budget, it looks great. The action scenes and gore are amazingly well done, and it has a definite visual flair. Everyone puts in a good performance. The four central performers in particular have a great onscreen chemistry and, in a rarity for movies these days, actual character arcs. The story is very creative and unpredictable. It moves along at a breakneck pace that keeps you constantly anticipating just what kind of outrageousness and weirdness they are going to throw your way next. The final line of the film is both a perfect coda to the ride you’ve just been on and a laugh out loud inside joke for lovers of this type of flick. In other words, this movie is just a whole hell of a lot of fun.

One other thing that deserves particular mention is that title. How could you not want to see a movie called Dead Hooker in a Trunk? That was a brilliant move on the part of the Soska sisters. It’s memorable, intriguing, attention grabbing, and makes it stand out from the glut of direct to DVD indie horror product. Plus, I’m a big fan of the whole “naming your movie after what’s in it” trend. Dead Hooker in a Trunk, Hobo With a Shotgun, Ticked-off Trannies With Knives; you know exactly what you’re in for with those. I wish more mainstream flicks would follow suit. I would love to walk up to the box office window this fall and say “One adult ticket for ‘Fish, Blood, and Tits’ please” instead of Pirhana 3DD. I would also love to see a marquee advertising “Sparkly Pretty Boy Vampires” or “M. Night Shamalan Presents: Obvious Yet Nonsensical Plot Twist.”

Anyone who regularly reads the blog and has seen the movie already knows what my one quibble with it is; the almost non stop jumping, shaking, bobbing camera. In this case, however, I’m going to be a little more forgiving than usual. That’s because in this flick it actually seems more like a stylistic choice than a crutch. The Soskas do actually have a grasp of the concept of shot composition. In a lot of those shaky shots it seemed like the camera was moving within a larger frame that had been carefully constructed. While it’s not a stylistic choice I like, I can dig what they were trying to do to an extent. Despite the wildly unsteady shooting, the violence and action is still fully visible for ample time and allowed to play out naturally, so it doesn’t feel so much like a cheat. The action sequences were also well choreographed, something you rarely see in conjunction with third person shaky cam. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not letting them off the hook for using a filming method that’s become trite and ridiculously overused, but with DHIAT is seems like they wanted to use it because for some odd reason they dig it, rather than used it because they needed it to cover up deficiencies.

Dead Hooker in a Trunk is the kind of flick that deserves and somewhat requires repeated viewings. You almost have to experience it again to catch everything it sends flying at you. I personally had a blast watching it. Sure, the story doesn’t make strictly logical sense, but it isn’t supposed to. That’s part of the fun. The sound is a little rough in spots, but come on, you have to forgive that kind of nitpick when people deliver a movie this good for the pittance they had to work with. It’s far more enjoyable than movies I’ve seen lately with 1000 times the budget. The problem with horror right now is that every movie either takes itself way more seriously than it needs to or is just regurgitating a tired formula. This flick does neither. Not only do I recommend this flick highly, but I welcome the Soska sisters as exciting new artists on the horror scene. I will be greatly looking forward to American Mary, their next project, and everything after. One and a half severed thumbs up just because, despite what I said, I can’t in good conscience give a perfect score to a flick with that much shaky cam. Sorry ladies. Nathan vehemently says check it out!