Posts tagged video

By Dan Kinem



Looking at this fantastic cover of a woman with her throat slit dripping blood, plastered in beautiful rental sticker warnings, you would expect this to be a classic crazy 80s slasher. You’d expect it to be anything other than what it actually is, a sixty-minute-long softcore drama from the 60s called The Kill. Luckily, or unluckily, for the audience the film was re-titled, re-edited and re-dubbed into a weird nudity-filled unintentional comedy.

Blood Hunger opens with a dead cat on the side of the road for needless shock value (can’t say 100% for sure if it’s real or not, but it looks it). Great start to what I can only assume will be a classic cinematic masterpiece. There’s an overly long car chase that culminates in three men in black (galaxy defenders) beating the shit out of a woman with their fists, then dragging her back to a room with only a mattress and a bunch of film canisters to be raped (likely the director’s actual room, which is sad on so many levels). The sound effects for the punches are hilarious, as they sound like frozen meat is being hit with a stick. The re-dubbing I mentioned above is done so poorly that it becomes comical. The girl’s screams go in and out, don’t match up, and sound like they are meant as score to the film rather than an actual sound effect. The sound of a guy unzipping the zipper on his pants in order to rape this poor woman is priceless (sounded like a bee buzzing in my ear). I cannot get over the effects they settled on. When the guy finished raping the girl there’s a literal lion’s roar and a car crash played. Then the sound of him zipping his fly back up is a creaky old door. I can only assume they had a library of effects to pick from and just tried to use every one of them randomly.


“I’m about to, I’m about to… Aaaaahhhhhhh!”

The rape victim goes to hire a private detective to help her catch these bad guys. As if his 40s/50s movie detective-schtick wasn’t obvious enough, they plastered a gigantic poster of Humphrey Bogart on the wall of his “office,” too. She talks to him, but all that comes out is a sped up Alvin and the Chipmunks-like effect over her voice so you can’t hear anything she says. Turns out this rape victim is a nympho who only cares about getting revenge on the guys who raped her and having sex with anything that moves. She bangs the detective and the detective says in his head, while they are both having sex, “I still didn’t trust her, she might be from the phone company.” Huh? Is this humor?



A hunchback/retarded janitor, who, because of his fake hunchback, can’t even button his shirt fully, gets raped by the girl who got raped. She throws him on the detective’s desk while he is gone, has sex with the guy’s hunchback, with the Lone Ranger music playing in the background (actually, it was an advertisement for the Lone Ranger playing), in front of the Humphrey Bogart poster. I could barely believe my eyes but it happened.



While the detective is investigating, he gets caught by the thugs and gets tied up. Turns out these are heroin dealers headed by a man named Adolf Krueger (lol). He manages to call the rape victim to come save him in a hilarious scene featuring him struggling to get the phone and falling all over the place. She comes over and she has sex with him in the gangs’ room where she was raped… Classic.


Adolf.

There’s another WC Fields-like car chase (ala The Bank Dick) between the gang and the detective/nympho. The whole time this chase is going on she is giving him road head, I think. The scene was so disjointed and crazy that I can’t be 100% sure of anything that happened.

A few random simulated sex scenes followed (including one random death) and then both of the main characters were killed. The end.



This movie plays more like Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? than an actual serious horror or rape-revenge film. It’s like a group of teenagers found the original footage without sound and were given the job of creating a comedy out of it. The footage comes across like one of those late 1960s, grab a camera and shoot some sex and violence-type of movies (i.e. a perfect candidate for a Something Weird release). I enjoyed the movie for how bad and funny it was, but overall, it’s a pretty terrible movie that’s saving grace is its short, sixty-minute run time.

The fact the director, Gary Graver, went on to work with Orson Welles is baffling. His skills as a cinematographer increased greatly after working on this as some of his later stuff, like Welles’ F for Fake is amazing! Graver also directed and worked on so many other semi-noteworthy horror and porn movies, such as Trick or Treats, Mortuary, and Young and Restless II (starring an underage Traci Lords!). The man is a legend so it’s definitely cool to see where he got his start, though, I assume this release was edited without his approval (I could be wrong, though).

I am absolutely in shock over the fact this film was also released on VHS under the name Reservoir Cats with the bold statement, “Quentin Tarantino fans will love this!!!” This is not even remotely like Reservoir Dogs, nor have I ever heard Tarantino mention this. Such a funny attempt at a cash-in that probably pissed more people off than even this Blood Hunger release did. This release was put out by Even Steven Productions, one of my absolute favorite companies (Midnight Intruders, Swinger’s Massacre, Satan’s Storybook, etc.). So far I have 7 of the 8 known-releases by them and their whole gimmick for the most part was re-editing adult stuff or random movies they had access to and making them look like horror movies. I highly recommend copping this tape if you can find it. I heard the movie was released on DVD, but as far as I can tell there is no official release of the movie so you have to go with the tape and you won’t regret it!


Meow.

(Source: vhshitfest.com)

By Dan Kinem

Nearly everyone under the age of forty has been affected in some way by something Kevin Smith has done. Whether you try to act cool and denounce him now, there’s no way you saw Clerks for the first time and weren’t at least marginally affected. There was nothing like it, and still, there isn’t much that comes close to the feeling, vibe, and characters that movie created. Fast forward five years later and Kevin Smith has two, nearly three, more films under his belt and has developed a legion of fans that worship him and will buy anything he puts his name on. He comes up with the brilliant idea to combine his love of comics with his love of making money off his fans and voilà, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash is born. With this store opening he decides it would be a great idea to do a bus tour of all the locations used in his movies around the New Jersey area. Originally wanting Jason “Jay” Mewes to host the tour, he settles for Brian O’Halloran (Dante). What follows is one of the most awkward and uncomfortable fan-shot (on a VHS camcorder) tour videos imaginable.



Before we even get to the tour itself, we are “treated” to a short film entitled, Jay & Silent Bob Meet Bill & Ted. Yep, you read that right. It’s a horrid stop motion animated short film that features Jay and Silent Bob action figures getting crushed by Bill and Ted’s falling telephone booth. It’s so poorly made and pointless that I couldn’t even tell what was going on until watching it a second time.







I was hoping when I popped this in for some production value, but this is exactly what I feared: a guy holding a handheld VHS camera, talking to himself behind the camera, going in and out of focus, and delivering a complete dad-shooting-home-videos annoying vibe.

Brian O’Halloran stands at the front of the bus telling bad jokes, starting with the ultimate in terrible: “We’re not going to Atlantic City, and if you’re thinking that you’re on the wrong bus. But, we do have something in common. Both this bus and that bus are a gamble. This tour could be a winner, could be a loser. But we’ll all make it a winning tour today.” The cringing begins on one of the most hilariously bad and awkward bus trips ever.


“Fffffffff.” My thoughts exactly, Brian.

He makes jokes about every single bus tour that exists, from Kramer’s New York bus tour, to the Hollywood Blvd tour, to the Krusty the Clown tour (he even imitates Krusty!). Besides delivering terrible jokes, he also complains and says, “I’m supposed to be acting in movies. How’d I get this job?” That’s so similar to his quote in Clerks (“I’m not even supposed to be here today.”) that it’s almost funny, but you know he’s being honest so it just becomes sad.

They go passed everything they can possibly talk about, from the hospital where Kevin was born, to where they shot stuff from Vulgar, to the diner from Chasing Amy, to the funeral home from Clerks (where an actual funeral is happening), to the finale, the Quick Stop. Bryan Johnson (of Comic Book Men fame) is also on the bus. I wish he did more talking as this would have made a much better tour. He is one of my favorite people alive and one of the funniest.

While going from one random New Jersey location to the next, Brian, attempting to come up with anything he can, tells a story about a dog, Haiku, who took a “huge steaming dump” in his house (which he brings up multiple times on the trip, even coming up with a Haiku about the situation). He does too much talking about the movie Vulgar, too, which I’m sure people who were on a View Askew tour wanted to know all about. During this boring stuff I started looking for other stuff to entertain me, which is when I noticed a cool Buffy hat!



The bus ride consists of more than half the seventy-minute run time, so Brian has to do a lot of talking to fill this space. He imitates a New England accent, stumbles over words, mumbles, rambles, talks about stuff that has nothing to do with anything, etc. He looks to the audience for help nearly the entire time, but they do nothing to save him from embarrassment. Most of the time they are silent and don’t even give him a courtesy laugh. He even asks how people think the tour is and someone screams (completely seriously), “Eh, it’s alright!” It was so awkward. I was cringing the whole time. He begins to talk about how great The Critic is even because no one will help him out and he doesn’t want to just sit silently for the rest of the tour. Nothing against him, he’s a great guy, but he was not cut out to do bus tours. I never thought this could be boring, since I love everything Kevin Smith-related, but I was zoning in and out the whole time. It only began to get interesting when they got to the Quick Stop where he stands on the ice cream cooler, tells some interesting anecdotes, and shows off some stuff from Clerks (like eggs, the porn magazines, etc.).





About 75% of the stories he tells Kevin Smith fans will already know, but there is some good stuff that people won’t know. RST Video was still open at this point but it was locked and didn’t open for a few more hours that day so they decided to break in. That’s the best part of the whole video since I’ll never get to see RST Video and seeing any video store footage from back in the day is cool. I couldn’t make out any titles, but it looked like they had a lot of good porno. Brian even mentions how a movie collector would have a field day because there’s a bunch of rare titles there you can’t get anywhere. They make it back to The Secret Stash and luckily for them and us, the tour is over. They took the gamble and lost it all. They didn’t listen to Brian, and therefore it was anything but a “winning tour.”




This is possibly the rarest tape we have reviewed. I can find no mention of this anywhere on the internet. Not even anyone saying it exists. It was obviously self-distributed and self-printed, but it’s all but lost now. For all I know, this might be the only copy out there. If anyone is interested in getting a copy, since it isn’t for sale anywhere or online, just hit me up. I can make you a copy of it if you shoot me $10 to cover the shipping, DVD-R, production, time, etc.

(Source: vhshitfest.com)