Winterbeast

Winterbeast (released in 1992)

Dir and Written (and story by?) Christopher Thies

Starring Tim R. Morgan, Mike Magri, Charles Majka, Bob Harlow

            Sometime in 1986, a guy named Christopher Thies (no other credits) got together with some people, presumably his friends, and started to make a horror movie. Then they stopped. At some point in 1989, they possibly resumed for a brief period, and then they stopped again. And then years passed. And then in 1992, somebody else got ahold of the footage they’d shot and then released it like it was a real movie, under the title WINTERBEAST for what I’m sure are reasons which made perfect sense at the time.

            Well, there’s not a lot of Winter in WINTERBEAST, but at least the “beast” part checks out, because the first thing we see is some guy who appears to be a security guard but we’ll later find out is a park ranger, but we’ll also later find out this is a dream, so it’s possible that he’s actually a park ranger dreaming that he’s a security guard. Anyway, my point is, this guy’s a total beast. Check out that fly mustache:

(although sometimes, for example when the actor has clearly shaved it off in-between filming days, it looks more like this:)

             Anyhoo, either way, Beastiness confirmed. This is Ranger Bill Whitman (Tim R. Morton, WINTERBEAST), clearly the director’s most handsome friend, or at least the most handsome friend who was available weekends in both 1986 and 1989. But I suppose the title might also refer to the thing which is clearly right in front of him, but he doesn’t immediately see because he’s looking at another fellow who’s seated slightly to the right. Once he looks over, the thing he sees looks like this:

            I don’t know if that’s a beast or what, but it’s sure the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen less than 2 minutes into a horror movie. It wiggles around in its stop-motion glory for a few seconds, and then the other guy (possibly David Majka [whose real name, IMDB claims, is “David Mica” even though he has no other credits], WINTERBEAST) rips some skin off the gushing wound in his belly, and then Whitman screams, and... oh! It was just a dream, he wakes up in an undefined white space, clearly several years older. But just when you thought maybe WINTERBEAST was just fucking around, before this mustache guy can sit up and have a cup of coffee and consider the symbolic implications of this strange vision, or even reveal where he is or who he is or speak a single line of dialogue, whammo, out of the blue, there’s a little under five seconds of footage of some other guy (possibly also David “Mica” Majka?) somewhere else, with some kind of crazy muppet ripping its way out of his torso. This does not appear to be a dream, but it’s also not clear what it is or when it happened. If mustache guy is asleep, it’s probably nighttime, but the muppet-ripping is clearly a day scene. And we cut immediately from that day scene to another night scene, so it’s certainly not part of the same dream, and it’s also certainly not happening simultaneously, but that’s about all I can tell you, or will ever be able to tell you, about what the fuck is happening here.

            I have a theory, however, that the unfortunate victim of the fatal muppeting may be a man named, if the credits are to be believed, “Slappy Tello.” The reason I believe this is that in the next scene, the first to take place in any kind of clearly defined contemporary reality, we find forest Rangers Whitman and Stillman (Mike Magri, WINTERBEAST, here wearing Witness Protection sunglasses in every scene, even indoors at night) discussing a character named “Tello,” who will be referenced frequently and who appears in the credits but who will never definitively be introduced to the audience, making it likely --if far from certain-- that at least one of the two deaths we see in the first three minutes is the explanation for his disappearance.

            Or maybe not, because Ranger Bradford (Lissa Breer, WINTERBEAST), who was apparently with “Tello” when he “disappeared,” says nothing happened (despite the fact that she’s covered in blood), and that seems to satisfy Ranger Whitman’s curiosity (Ranger Stillman, for his part, seems content to peruse the ranger station’s surprisingly extensive collection of 1950’s era pornography through his ever-present cool guy shades). Content that they’ve done everything possible (nothing), and despite the fact that a man is apparently missing and there is a clearly traumatized victim of some kind of physical violence sitting in their office, Whitman and Stillman settle in for a night of small talk. Poorly-recorded community theater actors (at best) stepping on each others’ lines while sitting in underlit rooms framed in some hellish middle ground between a medium and long shot is, I admit, a pretty big part of WINTERBEAST. But it’s also kind of what you expect in an independent no-budget “American Regional Horror film” (as we now euphemistically refer to such things; see SATAN’S BLADE, for example). Some people find this sort of thing charming; most people who are not violent masochists find it absolutely stultifying. Either way, it’s par for the course. What WINTERBEAST has already done to shatter our expectations, though, is to throw two crazy gory monster scenes at us within the first minute that photographed images appear on-screen.* This establishes WINTERBEAST’s unique MO: endless scenes of mumbling nonactors stiffly reciting indecipherable nonsense, punctuated with almost completely random sequences where a cool stop-motion monster suddenly appears and eats someone we’ve never seen before and who is probably not ever going to be mentioned again.

For example, in-between two scenes of excruciating mumbled nonacting, suddenly we see a woman in an unidentified cabin (not specifically credited, which seems wrong considering this nice young lady was willing to take her top off for WINTERBEAST) take her top off and stand awkwardly in the middle of the room, like you do. Then, without warning, some kind of god damned crazy 20-foot tall anthropomorphized tree lumbers out of the woods in stop motion. She looks out her window and screams, then the damned thing reaches into what is clearly not the same cabin and pulls out an adorable fabric dolly which very clearly has its shirt on, smashes it against the wall, and splits. Scene over! Cut back to grueling chit-chat. We will never know who this woman was, we will never see the tree again, and none of this will ever be explicitly mentioned. As far as we know, this may be a completely unrelated event which just coincidentally happened to involve a giant stop-motion monster, and this is just a NASHVILLE-style series of vaguely interrelated vignettes about small-town life in Winterbeastville. Something like this happens once every 10 minutes or so of this 76-minute movie, so you’ve always got a new weird monster to look forward to, even if you’ve got to slog through a punishing volume of harrowingly dull dialogue scenes to get to them.

            This seems a completely reasonable trade-off to me, but it does make describing the plot an exercise in total futility; suffice to say, Whitman gradually becomes concerned that something unsafe is happening without ever specifically coming to the conclusion that the danger is related to stop-motion monsters, and his solution to this little problem is the classic JAWS approach: close the beach. Or in this case, shut down the building alternately called “Wild Goose Lodge” or “Wild Goose Lodges,” which he inscrutably seems to think is the source of the problem, or at least that shutting it down will somehow mitigate the danger. This canny strategy is understandably greeted with a sustained level of astonished fury from “Wild Goose Lodge(s)” owner and operator, Mr. Sheldon (Bob Harlow, in what is, to the indescribable detriment of mankind, his only known film role).

            Now we need to pause for a moment and talk about Mr. Sheldon. In a one-star review on IMDB user “vertigoboy1981” complains, “the villain is a gay Jewish guy,” two assertions for which I see no textual evidence. His other complaints, “It makes no sense… they all wear flannels, the acting is so bad, there is no plot,” all check out, so I have no choice to assume he’s writing in good faith from personal experience, but at least as far as the dialogue is concerned, Sheldon is neither gay nor Jewish. But I understand his confusion, and his blind, groping search for adjectives which convey what this guy’s deal is, because he’s quite a character. Let’s have a look at what we’re dealing with here:

          

            I have absolutely no idea how to categorize someone like Mr. Sheldon, but between his wild wardrobe, his enthusiastically high-camp line readings and his general appearance of being an aged and wizened Alfred E. Neuman, I wholeheartedly support whatever it is you would call whatever it is he’s doing. He’s the solitary source of human entertainment here, and so we’re totally on his side even as it becomes increasingly clear that he’s not just a greedy capitalist objecting to an overzealous Park Ranger shutting down his livelihood on vague suspicion that there might be monsters in the woods or something, he’s definitely up to no good. Our suspicions about his possible villainy stem from a sequence wherein Sheldon, dressed in some sort of remarkable plaid suit jacket, procures the recently deceased body of Ranger Bradford, suspends it with wires into the hostess stand at his lodge (?), assembles a group of never-before seen mummified corpses, and then proceeds to put on a record and sing the entirety of a creepy children’s diddy entitled Oh Dear! What Can The Matter Be? Just in case we had any lingering doubts about this concerning but not necessarily damning behavior, he then puts on a creepy clown mask.

So, definitely he’s part of the problem and not the solution here. When Whitman and his spectacularly uncharismatic friend Charlie who I’ve put off mentioning as long as possible considering he’s basically the co-lead here (Charles Majka, WINTERBEAST**) confront him in the middle of this production, he admits that it is his intention to bring demons “through the gate” (there has been no talk of a “gate” before, and there will be none after). Whitman very reasonably asks, “but why? Why would you want to do it?” By way of explanation, Harlow flashes back to a slightly extended sequence of that guy from the beginning who has the muppet pop out of him. Then he laughs and catches on fire and his face explodes. I’m on record as being generally against bringing demons through gates, but I gotta admit I like this guy’s style.

            Anyway, it seems like this is going to solve the problem, whatever it was. Whitman and Charlie seem to think so, because in the very next scene after they’ve left the site of a daemonical musical number / head burning, they have the following conversation over the phone:

            CHARLIE (picking up the phone): “Perkins’ general store.” [seems weird he would just go back to his day job the next morning after an experience like that, but Charlie is such a profoundly dull character that I must admit it’s plausible behavior for him]

            WHITMAN: “Charlie, this is Bill.”

            CHARLIE: “Hey what’s up? How’s business up at the lodge?”

            WHITMAN: “It’s a lot slower today with the weekend over. What are you doing?”

A rare frame with no visible plaid, though a guy wearing plaid just left. By the way, keep an eye out for that mounted deer head that always seems to be looking right at the audience; he'll turn up in multiple locations and is very possibly the evil mastermind behind all the horror.

            This seems a surprisingly mild reaction to what they’ve just seen.*** At first you figure hey, I guess they know what they’re doing. But they definitely don’t, because almost immediately they’re confronted by some kind of indescribable pissed-off four-armed skeleton/art piece that they describe as a “totem pole.” Stillman (largely absent from most of the film after making a strong impression early on) tries to chop it down, but it comes to life and he runs away, and nobody ever mentions it again. OK, that’s definitely less than ideal, but maybe it was an isolated incident. But then a gigantic lizard and a colossal chicken and so on show up to rampage around town, and we’re forced to admit that whatever it was with Sheldon melting didn’t turn out to be as definitive a solution as our heroes seemed to assume. You gotta take these things seriously, fellas.

In the end, after Stillman has his head bitten off by an iguana the size of a high-rise and half the town has been smashed, Whitman heads off into the woods to do... whatever is is he’s trying to do. He doesn’t offer a lot of explanation as to what he’s trying to accomplish. Whatever his plan was, though, it either goes perfectly or it doesn’t, because he’s attacked by a guy on stilts with a devil mask, who might well be the Winterbeast for all I know. Whitman is a guy who couldn’t even get a small-time hotel operator to close early after half a dozen people vanished, so it really doesn’t seem like he’s got much of a chance against this ancient Indian demon or whatever it is, but then just as things seem hopeless, that plaid-coated slab of pasty glucose Charlie shows up, and someone has the idea to shoot a flare gun at an ancient Indian mask that someone gave Charlie, apparently anticipating exactly this eventuality, and that causes the horn guy to have his face catch on fire and explode.

That didn’t work with Sheldon, but I guess it works here, because that’s the end of the movie. The two friends stagger to their feet, Whitman says, “next time, you hunt for bears!” which causes both of them to laugh uproariously, and off they go on their merry way, presumably forgetting that there’s still a giant four armed skeleton, a tree monster, a pissed-off ET, a colossal turkey, some kind of three-eyed chicken, a straight-up kaiju house-crushing lizard, a murderous zombie, and probably like five more weird stop motion things I have already forgotten still out there wreaking havoc on the town. But the movie has now reached the technical definition of feature length, and so sorting all that out will have to wait til the sequel.

            Objectively, WINTERBEAST is one of the most magnificently incompetent movies I have ever seen, and that’s really saying something. But I, for one, am not able to resist being won over by something this outlandish, especially when it sports such a menagerie of Ray Harryhausen delights, obviously lovingly crafted by… someone (the credits are awful short on details, listing no “Special Effects” credit). A typically unsourced bit of IMDB trivia claims “The totem pole monster and the skeleton head that rips out of a man's stomach are both props taken from the Dokken music video 'Burning like a Flame,'” which I can report, after suffering through nearly five minutes of Dokken, does appear to be plausible (see 3:05-3:17). But if that’s true they’ve been significantly redesigned for their big showcase here; It would be easy to just repurpose some old Dokken props as-is and call it a day, but WINTERBEAST is not gonna settle for that shit. Whatever WINTERBEAST's actual talents are, it never lacks in ambition. It knows, I think, that it’s not really going to be able to deliver on the drama, but that just inspires it to really go all-out on the whammy. To shoot for the absolute most possible weird monsters, and also quite possibly the highest volume of plaid by fabric yardage in film history. Just like mean old Mr. Sheldon, it is not good, or even sane, in the traditional sense, but dammit, I have to respect it.

* The first minute and a half of runtime are just the credits over a black background.

** Majka shares a last name with the actor credited as David Majka, but who’s real name is David Mica, according to IMDB. Don’t know what to make of that. But I do know that this Majka is the only cast member with any other IMDB credits of any kind: apparently he appeared (uncredited) in 2017’s Jack Black vehicle THE POLKA KING, ending a 25-year absence from the big screen.

***  I also don’t understand why Whitman appears to be working at the lodge now, because A) I thought he was a Park Ranger and B) didn’t he want the lodge closed? But that’s pretty low on Maslow’s hierarchy of movie nonsense. If I was willing to accept that this movie takes place in a universe where you can buy a plaid suit jacket, I can buy that Whitman has a second job as a hotel clerk.

This thing's in there, and I didn't even mention it and it's not even the best giant chicken in the movie. Listen, I think you should watch this.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	THE EVIL DEAD meets NORTHERN EXPOSURE.
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a “Winterbeast” in the credits, but I sure couldn’t tell you which one it is, or why one beast is more important than the others.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None yet, but I still have hope.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Demons/ Stop-motion monsters
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Not even a C-lister in here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None.
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Many monsters attack, but no animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	A zombie shows up for one scene and is never seen again
POSSESSION?	???
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None, though the implication that Sheldon is doing some kind of demon summoning.
MADNESS?	No, unless you consider wearing a clown mask and singing children’s songs to a group of dessicated corpses somehow psychologically unhealthy.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	It kinda seems like the thing at the end is transforming into something, but who knows.
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Stillman: "This backwoods bric-a-brac is nowhere in my book."

The Dead Pit

The Dead Pit (1989)

Dir. Brett Leonard

Written by Brett Leonard, Gimel Everett

Starring Jeremy Slate, Cheryl Lawson, Stephen Gregory Foster

            In recent years I’ve become rather inured to the self-destructive futility of routinely (well, a few times a month, anyway) grinding out 5000+ words about some godforsaken 80’s video cheapie I watched on youtube and have already mostly forgotten by the time I post the final product. But it needn’t always be that way! THE DEAD PIT is a movie which could easily merit a word count comfortably in the range of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason if I had any inclination to walk you through the plot in detail, but to do so would almost certainly require a commitment of time and energy so spectacularly in excess of the time and energy which went into the original creation of the story that it would completely defeat the purpose of the thing. THE DEAD PIT was, according to a typically unsourced IMDB “trivia” section, written by director Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett (both of everlasting LAWNMOWER MAN infamy) in a mere three weeks, and I’m betting that even at that they weren’t exactly putting in 9-hour workdays. And in fact, “written” is probably a little strong in this case; “assembled” might be more fitting, as THE DEAD PIT seems to have been not so much written as a narrative story as grafted together from basically every hoary movie cliche available to an aspiring z-movie auteur in 1989.

            If that sounds like a condemnation, though, you may rest assured that it is anything but. Genre filmmaking is built on wholesale thievery, and that’s one of its charms. I consider it a feature, not a bug; after all, I think we would all agree that this world would be significantly poorer without the approximately 87,000 HALLOWEEN ripoffs which proliferated in the early 80s, or the uncountable millions of Italian MAD MAX ripoffs which, by volume, may well constitute the the greatest overall percentage of total films in existence (see the convenient pie chart, below):

 And I mean, the standard format for a Hollywood movie pitch is usually framed as “[famous movie A] meets [famous movie B],” so it’s not like it's just hustling weirdos and Italians that think this way. As in, “It’s INDIANA JONES meets LADYBIRD” or “it’s STAND AND DELIVER meets HOLY MOUNTAIN!” It’s crazy, but it’s true: more often than you’d think, honest to god hard American currency has moved from the hands of some Caligulan plutocrat to the grubby mitts of an enterprising cinematic huckster, with merely the utterance of the words, “it’s STAR WARS meets THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.” Or, in THE DEAD PIT’s case, “It’s HALLOWEEN meets NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD meets ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST meets INFERNO meets DR. GIGGLES meets AMITYVILLE HORROR meets EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!” Nothing with that many competing impulses was ever going to “work” in the traditional sense, as a functional piece of art. But you know what, I’m betting Everett and Leonard weren’t exactly throwing the word “art” around a lot in the pitch meetings for this one. They want to entertain, not enlighten, and, in its own, goofy, daffy way, THE DEAD PIT is indeed pretty entertaining. Anyway, it’s definitely better than LAWNMOWER MAN.

            We begin our tale 20 years ago, at the imaginatively named “State Institution For The Mentally Ill” (state unspecified). The inmates are jabbering and shrieking and banging their heads into things, but honestly the whole facility looks surprisingly clean and progressive considering that the year must be 1969, an era not known for its overwhelming abundance of professionalism in the field of mental health treatment. Unfortunately, things are not going so great amongst the staff, as the smug-looking surgeon Dr. Ramzi (Danny Gochnaeur, THE DEAD PIT) skulks away down a secret flight of stairs hidden in a broom closet, with a patient slung over his shoulder. When his colleague Dr. Swan (Jeremy Slate, TRUE GRIT) protests that this is not the kind of by-the-book mental health care those stuffed shirts up in corporate will stand for, Dr. Ramzi just derisively brushes him aside and and goes straight about his evil business, which of course involves walking down a series of eerie corridors lit by a curiously unsourced green light.

Standard medical practice, so far. But when Dr. Spoilsport follows this brazen young rebel of medicine, he discovers that he’s been carving up corpses with bizarre occult symbols and wiring up their brains to do god knows what. And, uh, this may not be an isolated incident, from the look of the “dead pit” (that’s a medical term, I believe) next to the operating table, which must have at least a dozen bodies in it. “My god, you’re a doctor! You’re supposed to be saving lives,” Dr. No-Fun eloquently protests. “I’ve done life. Now I’m doing death,” says the blood-spattered killer, matter-of-factly. “You’re a fucking maniac!” his colleague rejoins, somewhat less eloquently, perhaps, but not without a certain blunt charm. As enlightening as this lively philosophical debate is, they obviously can’t keep it going forever, so our hero does the one reasonable thing he could do: blow the villain away with a handy revolver, smash cut to title, seal off the hidden door to the laboratory, paint over it, and forget the whole thing ever happened.* Problem solved, right?

            Well, twenty apparently uneventful years pass, so maybe this was a better strategy than I gave it credit for. But alas, as many a chagrined medical institution has discovered, sealing off rooms filled with murder victims for twenty years is not always the practical long-term solution one might assume it to be. There might be an earthquake which opens the long-sealed door and sets the evil doctor free in zombie form, for example. Which is exactly what happens here. In this particular instance, the earthquake coincides suspiciously with the arrival of Jane Doe (“introducing Cheryl Lawson,” “Palmer’s Wife” in J. EDGAR [!] but most notable as a stuntwoman with nearly 40 credited films!) a young amnesiac who protests in the most hysterical manner possible that she’s not crazy and that “I didn’t lose my memory IT-WAS-TAKEN-FROM-ME-I-TOLD-THEM-IT-WAS!!!”

"I know you think I'm crazy, doctor, but..."

            For some reason, this perfectly sensible line of argument does not convince her caretakers to release her, and so she’s stuck in a mental institution, and to add insult to injury they seem to be out of hospital gowns, or maybe they don’t have her size or something, because she’ll be spending essentially the rest of the movie hanging around the mental institution in her underwear, which is a totally normal and medically necessary arrangement I assume.

            The semi-heroic Dr. Swan, apparently still around after 20 years, believes he can cure Jane’s amnesia by using hypnosis to access her deep-seated memories, despite her repeated incoherent shrieking rants that she’s perfectly fine, she just had her memory stolen by mysterious vaguely-defined shadowy enemies who lurk around invisibly menacing her at all times. Swan’s theories about hypnosis and repressed memories sound scientifically dubious, and we already have reason to entertain serious doubts about his crisis-time decision making, but he seems like a pillar of sanity next to Jane, who does not help her case that she is fine by running around in her underwear hallucinating and screaming about an evil doctor with glowing eyes constantly watching her. Could it actually be, for once, that the highly trained medical professionals are right and the woman in underwear shrieking about how she needs to be released from a mad house to escape invisible enemies is wrong? Of course not, don’t be a dope. This is a horror movie from the creators of THE LAWNMOWER MAN, so obviously she’s right: not only has the long-dead Dr. Renzi returned from beyond the grave as red-eyed ghoul, but he’s skulking around the hospital picking off the staff one-by-one as they wander around vulnerably in the eerie, empty abandoned wing of the old madhouse. And you’ll be surprised to hear that he has a shocking secret which relates to her mysterious past.

             The movie comfortably idles in slasher mode for much of its runtime, as Dr. Renzi racks up his body count and only Jane seems to suspect anything is wrong. It’s nothing special, but the movie benefits immensely from director of photography Marty Collins (a modest career of mostly video shorts and tech credits) who takes the opportunity to indulge in plenty of gaudy visual styling, from noir-ish abstract hard light geometry to Argento-esque impressionistic colored lighting to more esoteric conceits like shooting through a stylized keyhole. It’s perfectly ridiculous, of course, but so’s the movie, and the histrionic visual style deliciously reflects the ludicrous hodge-podge of story and the over-the-top performances (particularly by Lawson) which drift across the line to camp early enough to qualify to vote there by the time the credits roll. In fact, from the gaudy visuals to the alien performances to the slasher structure to the basic dramatic premise about a young woman who is witness to a crime no one believes, it’s got most of the essential ingredients for a perfectly respectable giallo, albeit an unmistakably American one. It even has some laudable gore, though sprinkled perhaps a bit too stingily throughout to compete with its Italian brethren.

            And then the zombies show up. Now, nothing leading up to this point suggests zombies in any way, and by the time they show up nearly everyone in the supporting cast has already been killed by the slasher, so they don’t have much to do but shuffle around grabbing at without ever quite grasping our protagonists. But zombies there must be, so zombies there will be, dammit, and I fear I do not have it in me to criticize that logic. There isn’t quite the budget for gnarly grotesqueries (they’re saving it for not one, not two, but three pretty awesome head meltings -- literally the same amount as RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC, an alpha dog move if ever there was one) so the undead shufflers are pretty much just bald guys in hospital robes with gray facepaint and blood smeared on them, lurching around in a pack. They’re fine, but not independently cool or important enough to the plot to warrant much discussion... except for two small details.

First, though they seem to struggle with opening doors, they apparently manage to successfully disable an entire parking lots’ worth of automobiles in about two minutes flat (“Damn, the distributor's gone! For dead people, they sure are smart,” bemoans the British guy who I forgot to mention earlier [Stephen Gregory Foster, LAWNMOWER MAN]). I dunno if they were all resurrected car mechanics or what, but good job on that one, fellas, that’s some real hustle. Secondly, these may actually be the only cinematic zombies I have ever seen in a non-parody who actually do want to eat brains. Or at least take them out and hold them.** Can it really be that a mere four years after RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, this idea (absolutely not found in any of Romero’s zombie films) had already taken hold so firmly that something like THE DEAD PIT felt obliged to throw it in there with no explanation or narrative purpose?

Anyway, all this leads to some ridiculous business with an insane nun blessing a water tank full of holy water and the world’s most unexpected WHITE HEAT reference. It’s a bit too dreamy and dawdling to quite manage an adequate climax, but at least the Killer seems to be having a good time. One time he’s holding a severed head and then says “I’m the head of surgery.” Later, he hands Jane a bloody disembodied brain and says, “Dr. Swan wanted to give you a piece of his mind!” These dad jokes actually make perfect sense when we discover Jane’s horrible secret: the awful Dr. Ramzi is, in fact: her father! How exactly this works and what happened to her memory and what it has to do with an earthquake or a dead pit or experimental brain surgery, let alone zombies, is never a question the movie even briefly considers (in fact, that British guy even points out the obvious: “that earthquake was a natural phenomenon, this [zombie doctor situation] is supernatural!” to a room which falls awkwardly silent, and then changes the topic), but come on dude, just go with it, it’s way too late for anything to make sense at this point, so why not savor one last inane, inexplicable flourish?

If THE DEAD PIT has any real flaw, it has to be… well, OK, basically everything, from the idiotic dialogue to the hilarious performances to the free-associative narrative to the chintzy tiny homemade model of a hospital that bravely stands in for the establishing shots. But if it has a flaw that actually hurts it, it’s unfortunately the antagonist, who can’t seem to summon the discipline to stick to a gimmicky MO or offer even the barest gesture towards what he’s actually trying to accomplish or what his deal is. I mean, is he back for revenge? If so, what does that have to do with his secret daughter’s amnesia, and for that matter how was he responsible for her memory loss when it happened before the earthquake which we’re explicitly told set him free? What was he trying to do with all that experimental brain surgery, and does it have anything to do with his supernatural return? And what’s up with all those zombies, was this somehow part of his plan, or is that just a happy accident? And do they work for him, or are they just unrelated zombies who don’t interfere with whatever he's got going because he’s a ghost or wizard or whatever and has no brain for them to remove and fondle? And what’s the deal with the bodysnatching final stinger? Is that what he’s been trying to finagle all along, or was the nun in on it the whole time, or what? Lots of things don’t matter at all in a movie like this; narrative logic, believable acting, realistic dialogue. But you gotta do a better job selling the basic conflict, and the only way to do that is to successfully define who your villain is, what he wants, and how he works. Without that, you’ll never make it to THE DEAD PIT 2: RAMZI’S RAMPAGE.

Still, it’s an easy flaw to overlook in light of the rest of the bounty THE DEAD PIT provides. It’s chock full of colorful weirdness, gratuitous violence, and misguided ambition, and all that combined with its gaudy visuals and dreamy plotting adds up to an agreeable cocktail indeed. In fact, this is exactly the sort of thing which is absolutely ripe for rediscovery by Arrow Video, or Grindhouse, or Scream Factory or somebody who wants to give it a handsome Blu-Ray release with a bunch of interviews with the actors (who, with the possible exception of Lawson, clearly know what kind of movie they’re in and look like they’re having a good time with it). And if all that ain’t enough to make you look more kindly on the creators of THE LAWNMOWER MAN, let me sweeten the detail: the original VHS box featured a zombie with goddam glowing eyes. Not all of these reviews need to be 5,000 word long, but sometimes, just sometimes, a movie really earns it.

This is weird, because it's actually a plot point that Dr. Ramzi's eyes glow red, but there's no green eye glowing or glowing zombie eyes of any kind in the film. They came so close to getting it right!

(Bonus: IMDB reviewer Molly Celaschi apparently believes there are such things as "Brett Leonard fans interested in his filmography" and manages to pick out the three most mundane logical gaps in a movie which features extraneous zombies) 

*“Hadn’t thought of it in 20 years,” says Swan 20 years later, apparently having taken his Yoga instructor’s advice to “live in the moment” perhaps a hair too literally.

** Alas, they do not moan braaainnns, BRAAAAINNNS, but there’s no denying that the removal of this organ appears to be their main goal. Besides taking distributors out of parked cars, anyway. Wait, do they think that’s the car’s brain?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	They’re Out, says the VHS box, noncomittally. But the theatrical poster is better: When the Dead Start To Walk, You’d Better Start Running… THE DEAD PIT… Drop In Anytime.
TITLE ACCURACY	There’s a dead pit, sure, why not.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	All
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	No
NUDITY?	Sadistic nurse chains our hero up in her underwear and sprays her boobs with a firehouse until her shirt comes off. But this is revealed to be a dream -- in fact, our hero’s dream -- so we can assume that it’s not just shameless T ‘n A, because who would dream about their own boobs for purely prurient reasons? She does spend nearly the entire movie walking around in her underwear, as is totally normal in a mental institution.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Definitely zombie, although I’m not quite sure how to categorize the undead Dr Ramzi, who seems to be some sort of ghost wizard but was apparently solid enough that a locked door kept him quiet for 20 years.
POSSESSION?	I think it’s the implication of the final shot?
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Well, it is a mental institution
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Melting!
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you’re ever involuntarily confined to a mental institution because invisible supernatural enemies are attacking your brain, stay strong and remember YOU’RE RIGHT AND EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG.