Well, it’s the middle of summer and I wasn’t planning on even doing a Rotten Review this month on account of how beautiful it is outside and I wanted to put in some quality beach time. However, after my trip to the Gulf of Mexico got a little too sticky for my taste I decided maybe we should stay at home and enjoy the 1978 classic, Malibu Beach.
This flick is an easy to swallow summer time treat with not plot to get in the way of the story. Tons of lovely ladies in bikinis, boys up to no good, and perverted clothes snatching dogs. It all take place on Malibu Beach! A place where EVERYTHING can happen.
Who among my fellow gore hounds has not contemplated the the scenario of watching some poor schmuck getting tossed into a fully functional woodchipper? We’re all seen these machines in action with their intended quarry but just what could that thrasher do to the defenseless human body and just what in the hell would it look like spraying from the other end?
There have been films that feature this scenario, most famously, The Coen Brother’s Oscar winning quirky crime drama, Fargo. Of course, we are seeing the end result after a character has already been murdered, quartered and fed through the human liquefier. We can’t forget Trash Cinema Classic, The Corpse Grinder, where this scenario was experimented with and there’s even Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx where some gang banger is devoured by this hungry, godless, machine.
And then there’s Jon McBride’s (Cannibal Campout) 1989 shot on video low budget opus, The Woodchipper Massacre. The first film to wholly exploit our morbid curiosity to see someone shot through one of these contraptions and do so right in the title! Hell, we’ve seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre, why not make the logical step to the woodchipper?
Going into this little film oddity I was expecting it to play much like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre as the title suggests. I went in expecting something much like McBride’s previous work, Cannibal Campout, a bunch of psychotic rednecks roaming the woods looking for terrible actors to eat. Except this time around the rednecks prefer their human meals after they’ve been puréed.
This kid looks like a cannibal to me.
Probably the most shocking aspect of the film is how different it is from what one expects. You go in expecting some kind of survivalist splatter yarn and what we get is a strange dark children’s film about three siblings–Jon, Denise, and Tom–who have to spend a weekend being baby-sat by their over bearing and psychotically anal Aunt Tess. She forces the kids into manual labor, won’t allow older brother Jon to go out on his dates, is a horrible cook, and refuses Tom the simple pleasures of rocking out the air guitar in his bedroom.
Aunt Tess’s greatest offense comes when little brother Tom receives his mail-in Rambo Survival Hunting knife in the mail and she makes the mistake of trying to yank it away. Tom and Aunt Tess struggle for control before Tom mistakenly/on purpose stabs the old bitch, killing her instantly. It’s an emotionally heavy moment as all three of the kids must face the reality that their Aunt Tess is now laying sprawled out, dead, in a pool of her own decrepit blood, and at the hand of their little brother to boot!
The children mourn the loss of dearly departed Aunt Tess.
After some soul searching and crappy comedy sketches involving phone calls from Dad and what not, the children come to a wise and educated decision. They chuck that unholy dead woman into the woodchipper out back. Sadly, this woodchipper scene leaves much to be desired. First off, Aunt Tess’s body comes off looking like a bunch of spare ribs with freezer burn, and worst of all, the only thing that shoots out of the chipper chute is what looks like potato chips. You call your movie The Woodchipper Massacre and you better deliver some fucking meat!
I recommend the dry rub on Aunt Tess.
Anyhoo, believe it or not, the kids are not traumatized by their own sadistic and malevolent actions and go about life as normal. There’s not a single moment of remorse over their actions. I guess we didn’t really know Aunt Tess as well as these kids did. And believe it or not, another person gets tossed in the Chipper! Aunt Tess’s son Kim! He was established earlier as being psychotic and shows up on the scene the next day after Aunt Tess’s date with the Chipper Man.
Kim:Psychotic Man of Action
What in the world does Kim want from the kids? Will anyone else gets thrown in the ‘ol wood chipper? And the biggest question of all…will the yard be cleaned up by the time Dad gets home?
The Woodchipper Massacre plays more like Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead than it does Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s an astoundingly chipper, quaint…even cute movie. The last thing I was expecting. I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all. In fact, it kind of works in the film’s favor. It has the feel of an old home made, backyard movie that the family takes out every Thanksgiving and watches and laughs at. In a way, it reminds me of the hilarious weird films my best buds, cousins, and I used to make whenever we had a long weekend or holiday.
It’s cheap, it doesn’t deliver the gore, and the performances are godawful. But it still manages to be a charming and fun viewing experience. It’s Trash Cinema for kids and would work well on a double bill with Jon McBride’s grislier flick, Cannibal Campout.
I’ve found myself obsessed with a waitress. Like a fool, I have become prey to the charms often piled on thick by waitresses in an attempt to garner more money from their tips. I come back to her every week, and I’m not the only one. Every Sunday night I, along with millions of other hopeless devotees, pay a visit to Sookie Stackhouse. The typical things a waitress might do to encourage repeat business are not at play here. She doesn’t feign the drop of a pen and bend over slowly when within our view, and she isn’t the most beautiful waitress out there. The reason we keep coming back to the gap-toothed waitress who works at a dive bar in the back country woods of Louisiana is because we like trash.
It’s in defiance of television’s best efforts to sell us the glamorous that we keep coming back to her. A flip through the channels will reveal numerous beautiful women with gapless smiles. These women will often be professionals. Lawyers and doctors and women with vast educational backgrounds who live in exotic or urban locales. These PhD having, highly trained beauties will walk the busy, much depicted streets New York City or sift sand through their toes on a beach in Miami, but we keep going back to a piece of shit hole in the wall bar to follow the adventures of a waitress. Sure, she’s telepathic, but that’s nothing new. Mediums and ghost whisperers alike have been featured on our television screens, but they weren’t trashy. They had degrees and money and qualifications and impressive contacts. They didn’t live in bum-fuck Louisiana and they weren’t resigned to wear short shorts and tight white shirts while delivering bar food to Southern folk.
Well, maybe its the vampires. Vampires are a big draw, right? Perhaps it’s despite the trash that we keep coming back to Bon Temps so that, nipples piqued, we can bask in the erotic glow of the vampire. But even the vampires of True Blood have a decidedly trashy quality. Unlike the aristocratic narcissists who pranced along the pages of Ann Rice novels, the vampires of True Blood are warriors and soldiers who often wear leather and choose their prey from a selection of bar floozies while sitting in the darkest corner of a cheap bar along a country highway. Twilight offers us a cute high school guy while Sookie Stackhouse finds herself choosing between a straight-laced confederate soldier and a sleazy nightclub owner.
And then there’s the sex. Sex is deeply embedded in pretty much everything you’ll see in prime-time, and True Blood is no exception, but the level of eroticism you’ll find here is the product a common interest in burly, barrel chested men that is shared by a middle aged gay man and a giggling Southern woman. Yes, there are lots of naked women, and Anna Paquin has my life-long respect for shamelessly baring it all, earning her place in a hall of heroes occupied by a beloved number of scream queens and final girls who had no qualms about showing us their boobs. But bosoms aside, the largest source of sex appeal in Bon Temps is found in musclebound men. Alan Ball seems to enjoy a strong upper body, and readers of the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries, on which True Blood is based, can tell you that author Charlaine Harris spends a good amount of time describing, in delighted detail, the naked male form. While most of Hollywood and television focus their depictions of sex steadily on the softer, feminine form, True Blood exposes us to a large number of often hairy men. A rougher variety of sex is also found here, with the more tender scenes often culminating in pools of blood. Sex in True Blood is different. You’re treated to several scenes of hard-bodied men pounding away at supple young women in fast-motion, like rabbits on steroids. It’s trashier, and it seems to be filling a void for us every Sunday night.
True Blood is something that would be right at home on the drive-in screen. If you’re a regular reader here at the Collective and you haven’t given it a chance yet, I don’t think you would be disappointed upon doing so. Join me and millions of others every week as we raise our hands and recite the Drive-In Oath as a new episode of True Blood approaches. But during this oath, it’s probably a good idea to keep your view at eye level, because while one hand is raised high, when it comes to True Blood I think I have a good idea what several of us will be doing with the other hand.
Dementia, our wicked Devil Girl of the Month, drew the inspiration for her dark and beautiful set from the cult comic book series Dogwitch.
Dementia: I was told in 2004 that I looked just like Violet Grimm. I had no idea who she was, but after I heard it a few times, I decided to check out the comic. From the first page, I was hooked, and she’s become a staple to me. Why does she resonate so deeply with me?
Violet Grimm: (Taken from the official website) “Her people expelled her…Her neighbours don’t like her…Her fans want to kill her…So why do they all keep buying her movies? Violet Grimm is an exiled fetish-witch superstar, strung out from spell abuse, psychic fallout and the dubious attention of her psychotic fans. A single girl with a bad rep in a bad world, this infamous outcast just wants to practice her art and find some decent intimacy…Guess she probably shouldn’t have made all those kinky home videos then.”
If you want to see more of Dementia, be sure to check out “Unconventional Wisdom”, a documentary that will premiere at Dragoncon Film Festival in Atlanta this Labor Day Weekend. She’s also featured in the upcoming 2011 Girls of the Con calendar, put out byhttp://www.girlsofthecon.com/
"Back in the day, we did horrible things, and laughed like hell." - Amelia Kinkade
a Primal Root Interview
Thanks to our friends over at FromDuskTillCon.com, I recently received the opportunity to interview the multi-talented actress, dancer, author, artist, animal activist and animal psychic, Amelia Kinkade. That’s right, the lovely woman behind one of the most blood thirsty and wicked femme fatales to ever ravage Trash Cinema, Angela from the Night of the Demons series.
Over the years horror film marketing campaigns have given us some interesting and cool music videos would play on the 24 hour cycle at MTV in an attempt to lure us, along with our wallets, over to the local googaplex and then over to the record store to purchase the tie-in soundtrack album. Freddy’s done it, Jason tried his hand at it once or twice, and even Ghostface made several tie-in music video ventures.
However, no horror franchise has ever made a musical single/video tie-in to their film like the one located in the special features of the Beyond Re-Animator DVD.
Seeing as the Re-Animator series has always been under the radar, especially now in it’s third entry released back in 2003, it seemed like the last film on earth that you’d produce a music video for. It was released straight to video here in the states, music videos were a dying art form by then, and it was the third entry in a cult franchise.
But somehow…they created a masterpiece.
Holy Crap! Now, not only do I want to see Beyond Re-Animator, I also want to dance my ass off!
Who exactly is Dr. Reanimator? I have no F-ing clue. I have done MINUTES of research and could find nothing on the guy. All I know for sure is this guy know how to throw a party! Dressed as a Doctor of medicine, looking like a gay Spanish pool boy, and crooning with a creaky, deep, sexy voice, Dr. Reanimator informs us as to what his “Green Color” will do for us once we ingest it. “Green Color” must be Dr. West’s experimental serum.
What exactly will it do? Let Dr. Reanimator explain…
“If you’re feeling dead i’ll be your re-animator
I’ve got a way to bring you to life
A superior existence with no one to control you
Where you can always do what you like
Let me give you some green color
And you will ask for more
You will see that you’ve never felt this way before
Party without limits, have sex and don’t be blue
Freedom is eternal for you, you, you!”
Hell, I’m sold!
Apparently, not only does West’s serum bring you back to life with super human strength and an uncontrollable rage to tear everyone in the room into dozens of mangled, meaty chunks, but it also is a liberator of the spirit and will allow you to have promiscuous sex without the threat of a guilty conscious. Quite the claim for a drug whose test runs have been far from stellar. It’s also not a far leap to take the title of “Move Your Dead Bones” and the song itself as a jingle for a male erectile dysfunction medication.
Move Your Dead Bones...with Viagra!
What I love about this video and the song itself is how off track it feels with the rest of the series. I always imagined some kind of indie new wave sort of sound representing Re-Animator, Something along the lines of Talking Heads (whose poster for Stop Making Sense makes a cameo i the original film) or Mars Volta. Never would I have attached the concept of a Pop Club Dance Song to Re-Animator and Dr. West’s sick experiments. On paper it sound absurd. But in glorious reality, this decision to go Disco worked in the films favor.
Re-Anmator is a strange, quirky, and unusual horror series. There’s none other like it. In a way, it makes perfect sense that the one piece of pop music attached to the series would be just as strange and quirky. Move Your Dead Bones is a classic. Now let’s go wiggle our butts on the dance floor!
trashcinemacollective.com 
