The Barn (2018)

The Barn (2019)

Dir. Matt Beurois

Writers: Auregan, Matt Beurois

Starring Ken Samuels, Guillaume Faure, Piper Lincoln, Auregan

The Amazon Prime summary of THE BARN reads, "A serial killer strikes Sugar Grove, Virginia. As the number of victims increases, a journalist is send [sic] to cover the story. Her investigation will shake the local comm..."  [it cuts off there, as though the writer was suddenly struck down in mid-sentence by the very serial killer he or she was summarizing]

Now, two things about that blurb caught my notice.

First, I want to draw your attention to the fucking balls it takes for one of the world's largest corporations to give so little of a shit about their streaming service that they would include a typo in the two-and-a-half sentence plot summary. It’s only 29 words, for fuck’s sake, can we just do one fucking readthrough before we click “publish”? Second, I noticed the prominence of Sugar Grove, VA in the synopsis, which made me laugh because I've lived in or around Virginia for something like 30 years now and had never heard of such a place, making one wonder why the blurb-writer thought it was such a huge selling point. I assumed that it was either a patronizing name some Hollywood dirtbag made up for a dimly imagined Real America, or, hopefully, it was a real place and this movie was one of those small-town regional horror movies made by some amateur first-time filmmaker who got the whole town to participate. "Let's look it up," said I, capriciously. "If it turn out it's a real place, we'll watch this piece of shit."

Well, turns out Sugar Grove is a census-designated place (CDP) in Smyth County, Virginia, United States. The population was 758 at the 2010 census. We watched the movie.

Unfortunately THE BARN does not turn out to be a passion project of the residents of Sugar Grove, Virginia. Instead, two very unexpected things become clear almost immediately. First, it’s actually a French production, meaning the residents of “Sugar Grove, Virginia” will be played entirely by French actors, each with their own unique idea of what they imagine an American accent (let alone a Sugar Grove, Virginia accent) might sound like. Definitely was not expecting that. Second, it’s actually a zombie movie at least as much (and probably more) than it is a serial killer movie (and in fact, it’s not really either, but first things first).

            We’ll actually get to the zombies long before we get to the serial killer. Although the trailers barely hint at zombies and the plot summary ignores them completely, the film opens in the traditional Zombie Movie style. By which I mean, an opening montage of fictional news reports to bring us up to speed, which starts with real footage of the World Trade Center exploding (!) and then tells us that “one year after 9/11” a zombie outbreak started affecting the world’s children. They have a quick clip of Obama saying the phrase “CDC” (so looks like he still got elected, even in the midst of a zombie nightmare!) and then they tell us that the infected kids have been isolated in camps somewhere in Texas, and that the contagion has been contained, although it darkly implies that many people may not have been happy to have their zombie children snatched and quarantined by the army. And just in case opening with footage from fucking 9/11 wasn’t on-the-nose enough, it then cuts directly to a full-screen shot of a large American flag, hung over the door of a sinister THE BARN. So yeah, I’m thinking this might be some kind of political metaphor.

            But wait, so this is, what, a serial killer movie set in a world where a zombie outbreak has happened, but is now over? Don’t worry, I’ll explain. You see, this particular THE BARN is owned by local Sugar Grove resident Gil Perry (Ken Samuels, who had a bit part in DOUBLE TEAM and appears to be attempting something approximating the Cajun accent Seagal used to do on Steven Seagal: Lawman), and despite its ramshackle appearance this building is important to the plot in that it is currently housing small flock of zombie youngsters, who Gil has been hiding from the authorities and training not to be so bitey (including co-writer and French singer-songwriter Auregan). Gil's mute brother Earl (Yannik Mazzilli, OPIUM, whose American accent must have been too untenable even for this movie), lives there too, but seems to hate the zombies for reasons which are never explained, and likes to throw stones at the barn when Gil’s not looking. He also has a penchant for standing around in the background of scenes menacingly holding a chainsaw. Did I mention there’s a serial killer on the loose?

        But wait, what about the serial killer? I was just getting to that. Turns out that somebody has been murdering the local women of Sugar Grove, VA, (I think they say there have been something like 15 murders!) which has been causing local sheriff Benjamin Clarkson (Guillaume Faure, “reluctant surgeon” in DR. STRANGE, sporting a Pepé Le Pew accent so outrageous that one of the characters is forced to comment on it, a fact made even more absurd when the dialogue makes it clear he grew up in Sugar Grove!) to crouch next to the bodies, staring thoughtfully into the middle distance. Which, if I have learned anything from movie cops, is like 60% of what detectives do during any given day.

The murders have also brought a nosey reporter from Richmond, VA (Piper Lincoln, daughter of Lar Park-Lincoln of FRIDAY THE 13th PART VII fame, but perhaps less an actress than “an American exchange student who happened to be staying near the French filming location”), who keeps trying for an interview with the sheriff or Gil or somebody, bless her little heart. Richmond is well in excess of 4 hours away from Sugar Grove (approximately the same amount of time it’d take to drive from Paris to Cologne, to put it in terms that the filmmakers could relate to), so you gotta give credit to this local news station for making the effort. Especially since poor Sheriff “Clarkson” seems to be the only law enforcement anywhere in sight, despite the fact that 15 murders is almost 2% of the total population of Sugar Grove!* But I guess the feds are busy with the zombie camps and all that.

            Anyway, all this happens by the 10 minute mark. Which raises the eternal question: “What the fuck is this movie actually about?”

This is a question which you could fairly put to a critic like me, because it is part and parcel to this noble profession that we should learn the answer by watching the movie, and then report it back to you, the loyal reader. But every now and again, a movie --say, a movie pretending to be an American movie about a serial killer which is actually a French movie about a zombie farmer-- comes along and really makes that process a far more onerous one than it has any right to be. By which I mean, I watched this thing, and I still couldn’t really tell you what it’s actually about. IMDB claims the tagline is “Some search for the serial killer. Some protect the zombies” ** which is… I guess kinda correct. Certainly, those are the only really noteworthy things that can be said to happen during the runtime, but the movie also seem weirdly disinterested in both its possible plotlines. What actually happens, mostly, is character get together in groups of no more than two and have quiet elliptical non-conversations in grammatically correct but awkwardly phrased English. And then Gil will walk around his surprisingly tastefully decorated --...farmhouse doesn’t sound quite right, French villa seems like a closer fit-- and have a glass of wine while staring apprehensively into the middle distance (there is a lot of wine drinking in this movie, which I choose to interpret as the French filmmakers’ hearty salute to the Virginia Wine Renaissance). Things happen, people die, but the film never seems to really be about any of it; it’s almost breathtakingly lacking in tension or momentum, with event after event stubbornly refusing to add up to any kind of plot. The music and camerawork seem to think it’s some kind of anxious, slow-burn thriller, but at no point does it suggest what it is, exactly, that is supposed to be thrilling us.

            There is a serial killer on the loose, but at no point does the movie treat this as a murder investigation with clues and whatnot (there are only three male characters anyway, so odds are it’s one of them). And there are a couple docile zombies in THE BARN, but they’re apparently domesticated and don’t really pose a threat to anyone. At some point, the young reporter from Richmond seems dangerously close to discovering Gil’s zombie herd and it briefly seems like the movie might be establishing some sort of stakes. “Can Gil keep a prying Big City middle-sized-city reporter away from his not-very-well-hidden secret tame zombie barn” would be a very weird focus of conflict in a movie which has both a serial killer and zombies, but at least it would be a conflict. But then she never finds them and nothing much comes of it, and her plotline abruptly ends. So whatever the movie is about, it’s definitely not about that. (SPOILERS) Near the end, Gil does figure out who the killer is, and it seems like maybe he’ll sic the zombies on him and that would at least explain why there are zombies in this movie. But then he doesn’t and nothing much happens, he just shoots the guy and that’s the end of it. (END SPOILERS)

There seems to be some implication that the original zombie outbreak started in this town, and the locals are touchy about the army because of it, but I’m sure I don’t know what to make of any of that, and the movie sure doesn’t seem eager to make any suggestions about it. Also it’s mentioned that Gil’s dad killed his mom 42 years ago, but as far as I can tell that never really ends up mattering either. It’s possible that the characters understand how these things are meaningfully related, but since they never mention it and just circuitously talk around the point, there’s really no way for the audience to know what the fuck any of this is supposed to mean. Virtually the entire cast manages to die, and yet the movie remains imperturbably low-key and absent of any clear point, or narrative, or hook, or even genre. How is that even possible?

            Heck, even the metaphor is completely obscure to me. I guess the zombies are terrorists locked up at Guantanamo? But what’s with the zombie whisperer who can make them harmless, and what does any of that have to do with an unrelated non-zombie serial killer? I can only assume that the entire population of France would immediately understand this, and that, despite the language barrier, this movie is targeted exclusively towards them.

            But maybe it’d play in Sugar Grove, too, I dunno. Never been. Doesn’t look like the Richmond Post-Dispatch has done a lot of reporting there, either, but they did visit for at least one story that I can find (warning: depressing). That’s probably not the episode Sugar Grove would prefer to to be known for in Richmond, so maybe the whole zombie farm angle isn’t such a bad thing have on the tourism brochure after all. I’d like to offer something better, but an excruciating lengthy online investigation revealed virtually no substantial information about the place.*** Still, I have to believe they deserve better than this.

* For comparison: if a serial killer got 2% of the population of Chicago, there would be roughly 54,000 dead.

** The poster, for the record, just has the generic “Fear What’s Inside” which still isn’t really accurate.

*** There’s an “Au-Some Mini Carnaval” at Oak Point Elementary school tomorrow, but that’s in neighboring Marion, VA. Also a “1st annual Kentucky Derby Party” at a bar called “27 Lions,” which seems like an oddly specific number of lions and I’d love to know the story there. Their website claims to have 27 taps and it’s a pretty good beer list, but come on guys, you’re burying the lede here, what’s up with the lions?

Blood Frenzy

Blood Frenzy (1987)

Dir. Hal Freeman

Written by Ted Newsom

Starring Wendy MacDonald, Tony Montero, Lisa Loring, Lisa Savage, Hank Garrett, Ash Monica Silveria, John Clark

            Back when my friend Tommy first started to work at a major American auto manufacturer, the old company man who was responsible for acquainting the new hires with the finer points of their incipient careers made a remark which has haunted him ever since. This poor trainer was trying to impart upon the his wards the benefits of teamwork, and, clearly trying to speak to the youth of today (this was in 2008 or so), he told them something to the effect of, ‘you know, you need to stick together. Like the Ramones. If the Ramones hadn’t been able to work together, they’d never have been successful.’

            Well, of course Tommy knew this was well intentioned, and he didn’t say anything. But deep in his heart, he knew this was a filthy lie. First of all, the Ramones were never successful. Influential, perhaps, but never successful. And secondly, he knew that they were most certainly not able to work together, because he also knew the original Ramones were the four absolute worst people on Earth. And moreover, they were each uniquely despicable and dysfunctional in conflicting ways almost precisely calculated to cause the maximum possible amount of friction: Joey Ramone was an obsessive-compulsive, sanctimonious prima donna control freak; Johnny Ramone was a ultra-right-wing Ayn-Rand-reading narcissistic sociopath; Dee Dee Ramone was a debased, drugged-up degenerate junkie, and Tommy Ramone was a drummer. The four cornerstones of human misery. If Sartre had known Hell would be these other people, he would have died a much more religious man.*

            I mention all this, because the wikipedia plot description of the 1987 slasher BLOOD FRENZY sounds almost zen-like in its simplicity: A psychiatrist takes a group of her patients out into the desert for a therapy session. They are stalked by a killer. That’s it, that’s the entire plot description as of this date in 2018, and frankly that’s such an entirely succinct and comprehensive plot description of this particular movie that I, for one, feel no obligation to expand upon it. But what that plot description doesn’t really get at is that this “group of patients” being carted off to the desert for a therapy session (???) makes the Ramones look like a barbershop quartet composed of Gandhi, Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross and Jesus. There are six of them, to start with, something so perverse even The Ramones wouldn’t have dared. And each is more powerfully repellent than the last. Fortunately it’s easy to tell them apart, because they are all defined by exactly one personality trait, and that trait will establish every single interaction they have throughout the entire course of the movie. They are, in descending order of tolerability,

• An ex-Vietnam soldier with extreme PTSD (Tony Montero, MURPHY’S LAW, TV’s Falcon Crest)
• A non-functional drunk (John Clark, JAGGED EDGE)
• A frigid basket case (Monica Silveria, no other credits)
• A very committed nymphomaniac (Lisa Savage, “woman at picnic” in FOREVER YOUNG)
• A bitchy lesbian (Lisa Loring, Wednesday Addams from the original Addam’s Family)
• And the world’s most intolerable asshole, who if he had survived, spoiler, would almost certainly be a high-ranking official in the Trump administration today (Hank Garrett, DEATH WISH, THE SENTINEL)

(Or, as the video box describes a few of them):

            They are led by arguably the greatest monster here, their psychiatrist Dr. Shelley (Wendy MacDonald, MAYHEM, LEGAL TENDER). Sure, on the surface she seems much less unendurably annoying than her patients, but come on Dr. Shelley, what the fuck were you thinking setting something like this up? Your plan is to drag the six most infuriating people on Earth to an isolated desert location and just, like, camp there while they argue and push each others’ buttons until someone snaps and starts murdering them?

            If so, good plan, because of course that’s exactly what happens. I question if this is standard evidence-based psychological practice, but considering the people involved here, that’s maybe a plan I could get behind, and possibly even something I would argue should be covered by Medicaid. There may be more efficient ways of slowly killing off the six most infuriating people on Earth, but this way gets the job done. Slower than one would prefer, but still effective.

In point of fact, we already had strong reason to believe that BLOOD FRENZY would not entirely limit itself to being an unsentimental exploration of the complex ways in which mental illness expresses itself within a group setting, because we watched a pre-credits sequence wherein a little kid murders his or her drunk dad with some sort of cruel-looking garden instrument over a disagreement involving a jack-in-the-box. Since we don’t see the kid’s face (it appears to be a female child, but they could always be SLEEPAWAY CAMPing us) we have to assume it’s one of the nuts embarking on this little psychological adventure, which sets up an agreeable And Then There Were None scenario which plays nicely off the fact that every one of these people is unpleasant enough to be a likely suspect.

            As for how that scenario plays out, there’s good news and bad news. The good news, and the film’s biggest shock, is that BLOOD FRENZY is actually a reasonably well-assembled production, as far as this kind of thing goes. It looks and feels like a real movie, albeit a cheap one, with perfectly adequate, baseline professional cinematography (by Rick Pepin, who went on to become a prolific producer of sub-SyFy level crap you’ve never seen), editing, (Ruben A, Mazzini, CYBORG), music (John Gonzales, no other credits), and visual effects (John Goodwin, THE THING[!]). I mean, it’s never more than adequate, but it feels like fucking LAWRENCE OF ARABIA compared to something like WINTERBEAST. This was by no means a sure thing, and may even be something of a minor miracle considering the stark fact that BLOOD FRENZY is the sole non-pornographic film in the oeuvre of prolific porn producer and director Hal Freeman (STIFF MAGNOLIAS [seriously], and most, but not all of the venerable CAUGHT FROM BEHIND series, specifically everything but parts 5 and 21-23. I don’t know if he was sick those days or what).

 Freeman, hoping to diversify, believed in this one so much he apparently financed the whole thing himself,** which maybe explains why they put enough elbow grease into it that it looks like something you could show in theaters without overwhelming shame, which was certainly neither necessary nor expected (as far as I can tell, it never was). The acting all around is terrible, of course, but terrible in that particular broad, cartoonish 80’s way which makes these no-budget vehicles more entertaining and charming than they would have been in any other era. Everyone in the cast is game to play their one character trait to the absolute hilt, cheerfully hamming it up enough that the wait for the killings to begin isn’t a total dead zone (Loring, in particular, goes full-on Nic Cage to enjoyably campy effect).

            The bad news, though, is that the wait for the killings to start is way too long. You’ll notice I began this review by talking about the characters --always a bad sign in a slasher-- and that was an unfortunately appropriate place to begin, because although there is eventually some murder, the movie spends an ungodly amount of time sitting around with these bozos before the ax comes down. After the pre-credits stinger, it’s nearly 40 minutes before the next kill, which would be too long a wait even if these weren’t, again, the six most annoying people on Earth. I appreciate the actors’ general high levels of energy and enthusiasm, but we didn’t come here for the story, Mr. Freeman. You would think a porno producer would be even more keenly aware of that fact than your average genre hack, but an easy 15 of the movie’s almost 90 minutes could have have been comfortably excised without sacrificing a single frame of any real value.

The acting is bright enough and the editing is crisp enough that it’s never exactly draggy, but the script, supposedly based on a story by Ray Dennis Steckler (THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES)*** but written by Ted Newsom (who seems to have oscillated between porn [CAUGHT FROM BEHIND 2: THE SEQUEL] and horror [EVIL SPAWN] before gradually segueing into horror retrospective documentaries [FLESH AND BLOOD: THE HAMMER HERITAGE OF HORROR]) seems overly-committed to packing red herrings into its whodunnit structure, to the detriment of the film’s overall momentum. Whodunnits are a legitimate part of slasher standard operating procedure, but obviously in a movie like this, the real draw is the kills, which is unfortunately where BLOOD FRENZY comes up short. There are ultimately enough kills to qualify as a “frenzy” from a technical standpoint (that’s a few more kills than an “incident,” and a few less than a “massacre”), but the movie takes a real long time to get going, and most of the kills are pretty lackluster, simple stabbings or throat-cuttings which don’t make for any giddy highs to offset the plodding narrative (the best kill, a bravura flying pickax impalement, is reserved for the killer, which is an interesting move that probably speaks to Newson’s relative inexperience with the genre).

With too long a runtime and too few showstopper kills, BLOOD FRENZY doesn’t offer a lot of reason to seek it out over the approximately 900,000 other 1980s no-budget slashers you could choose from. But if, like me, you are doomed to watch every one of them after being cursed by an easily offended warlock, you could certainly do much, much worse. It has a cast of colorful --if obnoxious-- characters, a solid production, and enough goofy twists and turns and vicious killings to just barely meet your minimum standards for an acceptable 80’s slasher. And, all things considered, that’s a lot better than you’d have any right to expect from the movie’s pedigree. Considering what they were working with, these guys really came together to pull this one off. Maybe somebody gave Freeman a pep talk about the Ramones.

* How bout that, I bet you weren’t expecting a Sartre joke in this review of 1987’s BLOOD FRENZY.

** Or so says co-producer Claire Cassano in Francesco Borseti’s 2016 book It Came from the 80s!: Interviews with 124 Cult Filmmakers.

*** Again, so says Cassano; Steckler’s name appears nowhere in the film or on IMDB.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	Seven People Walked Into A Private Hell... No One Is Walking Out. Actually it’s eight if you count the audience.
TITLE ACCURACY	The judges have ruled that seven kills is technically a “frenzy.”
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None, though Freeman is something of a icon, as his appeal of his conviction for, essentially, pimping (hiring actresses for adult film) resulted in the landmark 1987 Supreme Court case People vs Freeman which effectively legalized pornography in California. Man, Freeman had a busy year in 1987, especially considering he directed 12 more movies that year after completing BLOOD FRENZY.
NUDITY?	Yup, but only a small bit, considering who we’re talking about here.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	A dispute over a jack-in-the-box seems to have started the problems here.
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Probably, but I’ll be damned if I can point to a specific example
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never attempt therapy by driving the six worst people on Earth to an isolated location from which there is no escape.

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.