Death By Dialogue

"horror"

Death By Dialogue (1988)

Dir. and written by Tom DeWier.*

Starring Ken Sagoes, Laura Albert, Lenny Delducca (spelled “Delduca” in the credits), Jude Gerard, Kelly Sullivan, Judy Gordon, Ted Lehmann (spelled “Lehman”). Jeez, were these credit-writers paying for extra consonants out of pocket or something?

After giving up on 1997’s promising-on-paper BLOODLETTING approximately 5 minutes in, when it became clear it was filmed on someone’s camcorder and all the director’s friends would be speaking in fake accents, I approached this last-minute substitute pretty skeptically. And that skepticism only grew with the unexpected Troma logo at the beginning. A movie that’s crappy and incompetent is one thing, a movie that’s crappy and incompetent on purpose is quite another. But thankfully, DEATH BY DIALOGUE is clearly more the former than the latter (and those were absolutely the only two possibilities). It’s unrelentingly crappy and incompetent, and may, in fact, be shot on video, but my anxieties were quickly relieved when it had a fog machine and a guy getting lit on fire in the first five minutes. So I figured we’d be OK. This would be endurable.

And endurable it is, give or take your pain threshold for low-rent, badly mic’d, indecipherably plotted, inadequately framed, inanely acted 80’s pablum where the biggest star is fifth-billed in a NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequel (Ken Sagoes, Kincaid from DREAM WARRIORS and DREAM MASTER, not even trying hard enough to stand out in a cast of largely first-time actors, thought I’m looking at his filmography right now and hey, he’s actually had a respectable career post-NIGHTMARE, appearing in ROSEWOOD and even a Coen Bros film).** A good test of whether or not you’ll survive the runtime is to gauge your reaction to the opening credits, wherein we will endure the entirety of the magnificently shitty wuss metal anthem “Night of Our Lives” by a band called “Azha.”

I’ve looked extensively for the lyrics or anything else about this band, and, finding nothing, I feel it’s my duty as a journalist to record here, for the first time online, the lyrics to what appears to be one of only two extant recordings by Azha, comprising between them the only available evidence I can hunt down that such a group ever existed (the other is the title track from the 1990 gangster cheapie EMPEROR OF THE BRONX).

Night Of Our Lives (1988[?])

Written and Performed by Azha

Lyrics by Azha and John Gonzalez (who is also the film’s composer)

Produced by John Gonzalez

Gonna have a good time/ looking for some fun /

I’m riding with my baby / We’re the lucky ones

Rockin and a’ rollin in a club downtown / cruising the street with the pop top down/

Just got paid it’s a Friday night / got a feelin that the evening’s gonna turn out right

On the..  

Night of our lives! (x4)

Lose your soul to rock and roll / party down and lose control /

getting up and getting out / getting crazy scream and shout

(rockin’ guitar solo interlude)

Rocking and rolling feelin the heat / Ground is shakin right on to your feet [?] /

gonna raise hell like never before / Gonna party til we just can’t party no more.

On the..  

Night of our lives! (x4)

[reprise] Lose your soul to rock and roll / party down and lose control /

getting up and getting out / getting crazy scream and shout

On the..  

Night of our lives! (x4)

If you can get to the end of the opening credits, you have either settled in for a campy, airheaded lark, or you’ve degenerated into a raging, drooling homicidal maniac, in which case it’s unlikely that you’re still reading this, so I’ll address the remainder of this review to the former category.

            This is the tale of a group of long-haired wussy 80s types --it's impossible to know how many for sure, it might be as few as four or as many as 60-- and their girlfriends and their one black friend (Ken Sagoes) who show up and make themselves at home at someone’s uncle’s house unannounced, which is either something people used to do back in the 80s, or, more likely, something that nobody ever did, which would put it closer in line with the rest of the ostensible human behavior we will observe during the course of the movie. Uncle Ive (Ted Lehmann, various TV shows going back to the 50’s including V, Matlock, Dynasty, and the 80’s Twilight Zone revival) and his vaguely defined live-in companion “Ms. Camden” (Judy Gordon, “waitress” on one of the 600 episodes of the long-running BBC series Grange Hill) are openly hostile to their presence there, and seem to be implying there is some great danger without saying it directly. And also, our heroes find a charred corpse on the property within minutes of arriving, before they’ve even unloaded their stuff from the car. But none of this seems to dampen their enthusiasm for their country vacation, as evidenced by an extensive volleyball montage (recycling footage we saw literally seconds before) which then segues into another montage where they play with the volleyball while running around off-court.

            A long day of volleyball montages deserves a night of existential rumination on the subject of death, and so our gang quickly gets down to it, waxing philosophical while watching “One of those old classic horror films.”

"Isn’t this the one where the woman gets her head chopped off with an axe?”

“Ugh yeah”

“Oh Gene, you gotta see this one. This woman gets her head chopped off with an axe!”

This leads to a lengthy philosophical discussion on the experience of death, culminating with one of the guys standing up and gesticulating grandly,

“Think about it! I mean, think about it! Imagine getting your head cut off…. Come on, think about it! I mean, you’re sitting there with no head. You can’t see shit. There’s blood all over the place. Come on, think about it! I really wonder what that would be like! … Man, you think about it. Because I’m serious."

(Man, this guy really want us to think about it.)

“Well I wouldn’t want to die that way,” says his friend, defensively, maybe a little apologetically. “I mean, I’ve thought about this.” (How could you not, with this guy so insistent on the point?)

“I don’t know about you guys, but there is just no way I want to die,” chimes in another friend, controversially. “I mean, I’ve never thought about it and I’m not going to.” (oh man, she's gonna have problems with Mr. Philosopher). She shrugs, also a little apologetically. “There’s just no way I want to die.”

Now, all this talk of chopping heads off with axes (come on, think about it!) would, in any other movie, be allowable, if unusually on-the-nose, foreshadowing of a character’s death. But this is not any other movie. This is God Damned DEATH BY DIALOGUE. So yes, an axe-related death will come into play, but not the way you think.

Allow me to explain: at 31:02 minutes in (thanks, youtube comments, I got you), the movie figures you deserve a little reward for making it this far, and so two of the dozens or hundreds of indistinguishable white people wander off to an abandoned hayloft to fuck. While this young lady wearing her underwear but no shirt writhes provocatively on top of this dude who is also wearing his underwear and just sort of laying there, she suddenly gets flung out through a wall like a wrecking ball (I guess that’s what Miley was talking about?).

This unexpected turn of events prompts her partner to shout, while putting his clothes back on in frustration, “what the fuck is going on!?" (a question we, the audience, can very much relate to) and also serves as musical cue for a song called “When The Axe Comes Down.” (Ah, you see? Axes!). "What the fuck is going on!?" turns out to be something of an understatement, because as he stumbles through the woods searching for his lost paramour, he comes across a hair metal band (presumably the credited “Dirty Dogs”) actually playing “When the Axe Comes Down” out there in the goddamn woods (affording me a prime opportunity to casually demonstrate I know what “diegetic” means). The Dirty Dogs strut around while he stares at them in awe of their godlike musical prowess, finish the song, and then blow up his head with the power of their rock. So this movie is automatically pretty good. At 35 minutes we’ve had murderous hair metal wizards blow up a guy (I don’t think we ever find out what happened to his girl).

            By the way, I could find no more evidence to support the existence of the “Dirty Dogs” or “When The Axe Comes Down” writer/producer Michael McMahon than I could for the mysterious “Azha” (wikipedia lists no fewer than 13 “Michael McMahon”s, among them football players, Australian football players, politicians, Australian politicians, hockey players, Australian rugby players, and wheelchair racers. Seriously, like half of all Australians are named Michael McMahon, I think. But none of them appears to be this guy).*** But having already wasted nearly two hours trying in vain to find some tiny particle of interesting trivia on these two bands, I was finally rewarded for my efforts:  

            Notice anything unusual about those credits? Go on, have a look. I’ll wait.

            That’s right, this track was engineered by none other than Brett Gurewitz, founder of the seminal LA hardcore punk band Bad Religion, and president and founder of venerable punk label Epitaph records. When DEATH BY DIALOGUE premiered in November of 1988, Bad Religion would have been freshly galvanized by the release of their big comeback record Suffer after a five-year absence from the scene. So I’m not sure when he’d have had time to engineer this rinky-dink hair-metal track for a Z-grade horror movie, but hey, everyone’s gotta make that rent. And hey, 2nd engineer Donnell Cameron would go on to be a producer and engineer for Sublime, Blink-182, and Avenged Sevenfold, among others. The two were co-owners of Westbeach Recorders (which in 1988 had just moved to its final home on Hollywood Boulevard), so I guess that explains what they’re doing here. For the record, the engineering seems fine.

            Anyway, right around this time, we’re showing some warning signs that some kind of plot might be developing, because one of the blondes finds a script titled Victim 67 laying around, and starts to obsessively read it when she notices that her friends are all characters in it. (Oddly, she never explains what the script is actually about, just that everyone is in it. No mention of a plot of any kind, just a few isolated descriptions of incidents that occur, with no context whatsoever. Which actually might shed some light on the scripting process for this movie). Nobody else seems to find this very interesting, and in fact they all keep telling her how sick they are of her bringing it up. Even after three of their friends die in exactly the manner the script describes, and she notices that the title has changed to Victim 70. It is then that she realizes the horrible truth:

“This script is killing everybody! Gene and Linda, too.” 

Confronted with the evidence that this is some kind of cursed murder script, Uncle Ive confesses everything in one of the most rambling and bizarre origin stories I’ve ever heard. It's too longwinded for me to transcribe directly, but the general plots points are these: many years ago, an unnamed journalist was pestering a native Amazonian tribe about taking their photo, so much so, in fact, that they killed him. But then he haunted them, and so they put his ashes in a ceremonial urn, and that seemed to solve the problem. But then for some reason they gave the urn to Uncle Ive, who brought it back home as a “perfect addition to my pre-Columbian art collection” (note to Uncle Ive: might be worth looking up the definition of “Pre-Columbian”). Then, in the 1950s, his housekeeper opened up the urn while dusting and the “evil spirit was freed from its captivity, and the life force of that spirit harbored itself in the script of the film that was being done here at the time.” The IMDB plot synopsis claims the movie takes place “next to a movie set,” though I see no evidence of that in the actual film, so I guess that explains everything. Here’s the thing, though; Uncle Ive may well be the most interesting man in the world, but I can’t help but think that a backstory about an evil script should, you know, have something to do with writing a script or making films or something. What's up with the Amazonian tribe and the pesky journalist and all that? It seems like there’s gotta be more to that story, right? Let's try and stay on-theme here, guys.

Unfortunately just as it should start to pick up, the movies slows way down, with some endless chit-chat about what to do about the whole haunted script thing, and then some girl has a slow motion dream about a guy driving up in a race car, and then she takes her top off and they kiss and then she pulls his scarf away and his head falls off, which, I dunno dude, that would probably be more fun if it took thirty seconds instead of thirty years. These people just talk too slow and they pause between lines a little too long for this to have any momentum. People repeat specific lines of dialogue two or three times quite often, imparting a more than passing impression of a TV program aimed at toddlers. Part of the problem is that they must have spent their whole movie budget on those sweet ass metal songs, because the rest is uncomfortably silent, really highlighting how slow-moving all the dialogue is. Death by dialogue indeed.

 Fortunately in the final half-hour, things start to pick up a bit. Some sort of full-body gargoyle suit turns up, which is cool. Then it disappears, boo. A bit later, a big bald guy with a cape and a sword (Possibly stuntman Mark Ginther [best known as the wolf guy in TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES 2], but I can't say for sure, because the credits list four "Evil Spirit" actors) shows up and stabs somebody. Always a welcome turn of events, but after the bait-and-switch with the gargoyle, I was cautious to fall in love again. As it gradually becomes clear that this bald sword guy is in for the long haul, however, I was able to relax and emotionally invest in him. Pretty soon Baldy uses sword swinging to conjure a bunch of fire and explosions behind him which looks metal as fuck, and also he summons two cronies on motorcycles (shades of MANDY?). I have no idea who this dude is, but I’m 100% on board with his jam. If I could offer this mystery murder script that killed everybody including Gene and Linda some notes, though, I would suggest that this character “Bald Sword Guy” would have had more impact if he was established as the main villain any time before the final 20 minutes. He arrives way too late, but I admire his willingness to show up and get right down to business without any need for tedious introductions. He starts by offing Ms. Camden, who for the whole movie has seemed really sketchy and like she knows more than she’s saying, but I guess not because that’s the end of her. Later he gets his leg blown off with a shotgun in slow motion.

What any of this has to do with the ashes of a pushy National Geographic reporter or an evil script that controls destiny, I do not know. What I do know is that there’s a sweet-ass back-flip motorcycle jump that gets blown up by a shotgun in mid-air, but this movie is still somehow pretty boring. Which really makes the concept of a cursed script seem a lot more believable.

In the end... uh, it's kinda hard to describe, actually. Like, a grave explodes and the big Bald Guy jumps out, and then I think a motorcycle zips by, and then there’s a cut to the moon, and then to some tombstones, which seems to indicate that time has passed, but I guess not because the next shot shows everybody right where they were, except that Bald Guy is no longer visible. Then he sort of stumbles at them from off-screen, and then they say a prayer over the grave, and he disappears. I’m not sure exactly what this means or specifically what occurred because it’s edited into total incomprehensibility, but that seems to solve things, and everybody wanders off into the woods mumbling, roll credits. I kinda thought the problem was supposed to be some kind of cursed movie script, but nobody has mentioned it for awhile and whatever they did with the grave seemed to do the trick. Maybe the script was buried there?

I think it says something about this movie that it has an explosion and a motorcycle stunt, but then the whole sequence just ends with the anticlimax of a guy disappearing. DEATH BY DIALOGUE is full of real howlers and wild ridiculous nonsense, but by all logic should add up to more fun than it does. I appreciate any movie where a bald guy with a sword and his affiliated gang of zombie bikers can show up out of nowhere at any moment, but if you can’t build any momentum, it doesn’t matter. It still feels like kinda a slog. Albeit, a slog where sometimes people do sick bike tricks in front of fire, which is admittedly one of the more enjoyable species of slogs. Director/writer Tom DeWeir directed just one more movie, 1990’s Troma-released action flick CONTRA CONSPIRACY, but mostly thereafter stuck to his main job, as a stunt player with (as of this writing) 181 credited movies, including such diverse fare as CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, MORTAL KOMBAT, G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, THE RUINS, INLAND EMPIRE (!!!), JACK FROST 1 & 2, BIO-DOME, THE END OF VIOLENCE, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (where he probably met Ken Sagoe and convinced him this would be a good idea), BATMAN RETURNS, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, HELLRAISER:BLOODLINES, EDTV and, um, POISON IVY. And THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS. So if I’m gonna make fun of how crappy this movie is, I gotta take on a dude who worked with David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Tim Burton, John Carpenter, and Pauly Shore.

I’m obviously not going to be able to do that, so let’s just say DEATH BY DIALOGUE falls into the “vaguely watchable with an appropriate compliment of catty friends and strong drink” category of the Troma oeuvre, which is an elite enough company that it can probably hold its head up with pride and say a few words. Not that it would mic them well enough that you could make them out.

* IMDB also credits someone named Susan Trabue (only one other credit, as a producer on the sketchily-attested-to 1996 comedy SHOOT THE MOON, which has no images and only one review and no other evidence online that it ever existed) with “script and additional dialogue.” She’s not credited on-screen, but I have to imagine she really did contribute something here, because otherwise why on Earth would anyone take credit for being part of this turkey? The only other explanation I can think of is that she’s somebody’s ex and they attributed this movie to her out of spite.

** OK, It’s INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, but still. Since we’re talking about Sagoes here, I’d also like to point out that his IMDB biography claims he’s “written fourteen plays and over thirty-five screenplays” (IMDB credits him for seven, including two episodes of Laverne and Shirley[!]). It also claims he “studied under two entertainment legends, Edmund J. Cambridge and Marlon Brando.” If his performance in DEATH BY DIALOGUE is any indication, he must have missed a few of those classes with Brando, but hey, sounds like an interesting life, and I will always love the guy for being the most entertaining person in the already very entertaining NEVER SLEEP AGAIN documentary (yes, even better than Dokken). Also, I feel this is worth noting:

*** I thought for a while they might the the “Dirty Dogs” out of Colorado profiled in this New Vulgate article. The timing was over a decade off, though, and though they did have a “Mike” there was no “McMahon.” There’s also a German Metal band (see them in, um, action, here) of the same name from the late 70’s, but no such track, and no member named “McMahon.”

...But I did find a website devoted to a character named “Betsy Bitch” who is touted as the “First Lady Of American Metal” which claims Betsy at some point worked with a fellow named “Jay Dean.” Dean’s bio on this website claims he also played with a band called “The Dirty Dogs” who sound like a tantalizingly close match: “The Dirty Dogs were part of the late 80’s/early 90’s wave of Sunset Strip Scene metal bands that followed in Guns n’ Roses’ wake... In their brief period together (1988-1990), The Dirty Dogs became one of the top-drawing acts in the Hollywood club scene, packing out legendary venues like The Whiskey-a-Go-Go, The Coconut Teaser, and Club Lingerie. At different points the band included Jay Dean, Fred Gordon, Mickey MacMahan, Randy Scarbeary, Tim English, and Nate Winger (brother of Kip Winger). [Their 1988] three-song demo was produced by Beau Hill, producer for Ratt, Winger, and Alice Cooper amongst others. Apparently the band just missed being signed to A&M Records after the demo was recorded. The band recorded another demo after Jay left the band in 1989, and the tracks from that demo are featured on The Dirty Dogs’ official MySpace.” Note the presence of a Mickey “MacMahan” (not “Mickey McMahon,” as the credits list, but it’s gotta be the same guy, right?). The time and place is right, and the general description sounds so close that it’s gotta be more than a coincidence. Unfortunately their original Myspace page is gone, and no other information on this band appears to be available online.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	The current DVD box just says “Horror” and that’s it, which makes me think they wrote that in as a placeholder while they tried to think of a tagline, and then forgot and never replaced it. But the original posters says: Ken Sagoes, the kid who survived “Nightmare On Elm Street 3” is Back! Which places this squarely in the Sagoesploitation genre.
TITLE ACCURACY	They don’t show the script, but I imagine it’s stage directions, rather than dialogue, that does the killing. But never mind.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Troma movie
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Ken Sagoes? It’s a pretty thin record to qualify him as an icon, but apparently they believed in him as a horror draw enough to put his name in the tagline.
NUDITY?	Unbelievably, they actually got not one but two women topless for this movie.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Haunted...screenplay?
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	The story is too incoherent to really posit a moral, but I guess the lesson is, hey guys, let’s get Ken Sagoes in a few more movies here.