A Night to Dismember (1983)

From http://images.yuku.com/image/jpg/
26f76e8ac4804dfab0e1093c42fe01c4_r.jpg

Director: Doris Wishman

Screenplay: Judith J. Kushner

Cast: Samantha Fox as Vicki Kent; Diane Cummins as Mary Kent; Saul Meth as Adam Kent; Miriam Meth as Blanche Kent; William Szarka as Billy Kent; Chris Smith as Sam Kent; Dee Cummins as Vicki Todd

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #137

Synopsis: Locked away from killing two neighbourhood boys, Vicki Kent (porn actress Samantha Fox, not the British Page 3 pin-up) is released in 1986 from a mental institution back to her family. Her sister Mary (Diane Cummins) is not too pleased with this development, devising with their brother to put Vicki back in the institution. Things are never simple though. People are dying in horrifying ways. The family's already cursed by a series of strange, alarmingly prolific deaths. There's a detective, presiding over the film as the narrator, sniffing around their home. And there's voices coming from the hat box.

How does a film as illogical as A Night to Dismember exist, a genre film author Stephen Thrower in Nightmare U.S.A describe as being made in Purgatory rather than the New York state it was in? Well, when a disgruntled film lab technician burns the building down, destroying a large chunk of your newest project, you either give up or do what Doris Wishman did and try to scramble together a new version. Having marketed a trailer beforehand, which involves an entirely different story involving demonic/psychic possession, the Queen of Sexploitation felt she had to still provide a finished product. One built from surviving fragments, clips from the trailers, outtakes and even clips from her previous films to put together what is a remix film of a work that never actually existed. For the most part A Night of Dismember is a pretty gruesome horror film inspired by slasher films. Even if the effects are obvious Wiseman, no stranger to extremity having made roughies (a sexploitation subgenre with an emphasis on violence) and porn, does make a film of the era. (Fake) head placed in a fireplace. Head squashed under a car wheel. Decapitation. A heart being punched out of someone's chest. Axes. Material which is blood soaked. However the look of the film, due to its materials, evokes how Herschell Gordon Lewis' films in the sixties which were paradoxically nasty but have the same quaintness of middle America. As parts of the film use old footage, there's a piece of that kitsch here that permeates the entire work.

From https://thecultcorner.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/kent-newspaper.jpg

Montage theory suggest that when individual shots are placed together they create an emotional or intellectual reaction in a viewer. How the shots are put together can drastically change this. Then you factor in how avant-garde filmmakers like Bruce Conner used pre-existing footage to create films like A Movie (1958) which create reactions in viewers trying to put this material together, collages of material that should not connect together but provide an effect nonetheless even if it's an intellectual consideration. You may find it utterly absurd to bring this idea to an infamous film from the same director of the Chesty Morgan films, but A Night to Dismember is a really peculiar case of what happens when a director attempts to make a film from existing materials rather than create new footage. One with a plot put together in continuity editing, from meagre pieces as a result of a rare circumstance of failure.

From http://dailygrindhouse.com/wp-content/
uploads/2017/04/S04-night-to-dismember.jpg

Noticeably, this film is not meant to be like a Bruce Conner film, meant to be a horror film following a single plot continuity. A string of murders that may be the guilt of a psychologically damaged young woman named Vicki, being driven insane by her siblings out of spite or misdeeds by someone else. The circumstances are in truth a working director attempting to make a product from off-cuts, like Owen Land's Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1966) for a drive-in theatre audience. When this happens in b-movie or genre cinema, it can lead to some bizarre emotional effects on the viewer. None intended, but the result of trying to scramble together a full feature length film from barely a lot. Think Coffin Joe's Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (1978), an apt title for this type of film, a collage of deleted and previously censored scenes from other films strung together by a loose "plot". A Night to Dismember is already from a director notorious for low budget films like Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965), with post synch dialogue, shots of feet and decor to hide the dubbing in actors mouths, and having to work around quick schedules. A film which is build from fragments in an attempt to make a story in itself a literal hallucination of a deranged mind.

From http://horrornews.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/
08/A_Night_To_Dismember-1983-movie-film-1.jpg

The plot is effected by being so compromised that attempting to fully understand the plot is something you have to eventually jettison. A pretension person like me would argue it has real dream logic by pure accident but it's not that far from some of the bizarre dreams I've actually had in my life. Some dreams do follow a real continuity when you have them in your sleep, even if they are compacted with figures and time blurred. There are also dreams which are frantic, ones you (or at least I) have woken up from confused which remind me of A Night to Dismember, a blast of pure cut-ups of scenes and events that hurdle onwards. Sometimes, following a slither of cohesive logic, they can be understood, others no so much. With A Night to Dismember, a viewer is experiencing film that had to compensate with so much narration. A lot of this narration is actually unnecessary, forcing a viewer to also have to separate between that which isn't of use and that which is with little time before the next sequence takes place. You only have seconds to decipher and understand each piece of it as it goes, frantically going along until many will slip behind and experience the film by the end in a maddening blur. This is a film where the detective narrator was helped in his case by every family member having a diary, detailed diaries that can explicitly talk of voices coming from a hat box or dialogue like "Suddenly Vicki felt like someone was making love to her in bright flashing colors". That's the kind of absurdity brought here, non-sequiturs made more pronounced by plot threads which feel less like they should be there but to make up the feature length.

From https://thecultcorner.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/2.png

The plot then is revealed to be a mess. When a plot does not follow a cohesive narrative, and the audience member can perceive that they haven't stepped on a film that is deliberately manipulating this structure, confusion shall arise. Aspects of the plot itself which make sense don't follow conventions either. Vicki's mental stability is capable of devouring your own sanity as a viewer. When there are voices indeed coming from the hat box, not done as a joke or with the mysterious voices not coming from a conventional place of horror like the closet. Or the screen turns red and psychedelic with mysterious hands caressing her, a lot of the sounds of distress inexplicably sounding like orgasms due to a poor choice of sound design. Some of this material is actually successful, the weirdness original and hitting successes at points, a sequence where Vicki witnesses a corpse walk out of a lake, her brother in a disguise to drive her insane, the most successful. Then there are plot points which make no sense or are superfluous, emphasised by narration which explains actions that are taking place onscreen as they are happening. Spilling into each other with an abruptness not from  a pace, carefully laid out plot but using odds and sods in the surviving material. The whole Kent brothers prologue is pointless and ridiculous - people killing people with axes only to fall on their own weapon and die; wives wandering the gardens in a nightgown so small their chests are barely kept in; and all other sorts of madness. The viewers' mind will try to connect the dots. The pleasure and pain, depending on the viewer's reaction, is from this denial of the connections, the desire to rationalise the scenes together becomes overwhelmed and breaking down.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zb8hyku64gg/hqdefault.jpg

Then there's the music and sound which is as much a violent influence on a viewer's emotions. Like other Doris Wishman films it was post synched with likely only one male voice playing all the males and a female one for the women in this particularly example. The head beings squashed by a car is clearly being sound tracked by someone making a squishing sound with their mouth. Animal mimicry is even involved. The soundtrack is even more disorientating. A collage of swinging jazz, game show music and library compositions. More unpredictable than the switches in this music is that it gets layered on top of one another. Combined with the hectic cutting of some scenes, the narrative being a constant or the limited dialogue track, and the result's a hellish sound and visual landscape you less to try to process but get sucked into and spat out of at the end. Eventually when the resolution is found, when the killer's revealed but almost everyone still dies, or gets involved in running through the same stairway like a Möbius strip nightmare, you have no idea what's exactly happened unless you rewatch and try to take in the information in carefully.

Personal Opinion:

Not for the faint of heart. You have to be prepared for this type of film, which defines every "bad" technique possible. Wonky dubbing, random music blurts, unpredictable scene changes, nonsensical plotting. For those who can appreciate this type of cinema as unintentionally surreal, imaging an alternative world where this was deliberately made this way is the way forward. One of those irrational one-offs you don't forget, swirling in my mind as a gaudy haze dream. It's certainly the most extreme of all of Doris Wishman's films by all accounts, very bad circumstances leading her to improvise a film that's arguably more rewarding in this state than was planned.

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

From https://thecultcorner.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/murica.png