Deatherman (2012)

 

Director: Bobby Keller

Screenplay: Bobby Keller

Cast: Dominique Capone as Holley Cooper; Gena Comandy as Tessa Carpenter; Mike Gavern as Dan Anders; Jenni Grasso as Buffy Winters; John Kasper as Dalton Law; Bobby Keller as Coyote; Jim Keller as Mumbo Chef; Allison LaRussa as Leech

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #184

 

 

Ah! Help me! Caesar salad!

This was originally an Archive review, due to the only writing I had being merely a fragment. Thankfully, for Halloween 2020, the dead aptly rose from the videotape grave and returned, allowing us a proper review this time. Whether this is the same opinion as last time, it will however come with better reflection.

Over a black screen with VHS-era early computer text showing the credits, I immediately think that "well the music is good". Deatherman, a throwback to eighties and nineties shot-on-video cinema and under sixty minutes, does feel the burden of a production just trying its hardest with very little. It is a film that is an acquired taste, and does have a bit of a conflict in terms of where the audience emotions should lay, but aside from that, I cannot look down on this at all.

Ostensibly, a male weatherman learns that a new female colleague Holley is joining their station, wishing to become a meteorologist too. We establish this homemade production with homemade news channel footage done with green screen, not hiding its origins, as it is shot in people's homes and public space, nor that, to compensate, there is a greater sense of absurdity, such an advert for "Melvin's Magic Shop", consisting of someone screaming about the magic shop or that he is even wearing gloves for no reason.

Our weatherman is not a nice protagonist, a sexist pig who is dismissive of Holley's ability to become a weather reporter and hitting on her, his comeuppance soon imminent. This is admittedly where the film does get confusing with what you are meant to feel, as it is going to be a splatter film but our soon-to-be-titular Deatherman is not a nice person, trying to seduce her whilst drunk which does not age well even by the end of the 2010s when this was made in 2012. She, having had a history of mental health problems, is just as conflicting as the supposedly sympathetic figure when she does decide to stab him to death. He had not even cross the point beyond just being a drunken and patronising pig to an actual threat, all involving a retractable knife prop and Holley smearing blood on her face.

She and two female friends, who all knew each other in psychotherapy, come together. Tessa who is a bar tender and seemingly has instant connections to body bag access for some inexplicable reason, and Buffy, who once wanted to marry a box of cereal, all three dealing with the body even if they forget to even have a shovel with them at first. In any other film, this would be the three female protagonists accidentally killing someone, but still being the heroes when that threat returns, though this film goes in an entirely different direction. In this case, as well, a nuclear plant incident leads to irradiated acid rain that resurrects him. How this actually works is one of the better jokes, as even characters question our now titular Deatherman about this to his annoyance.

After that, this is just a series of scenes of our titular figure killing off people we have encountered in the establishing sequence. The film does feel flimsy even in knowledge that you can have very little to work with, but does surprise what you can do if you try. You can still hire a bar when it is not open to do a scene at a bar, even if you only have only a couple of actors. The woodlands, where the body is initially buried, have always been the place many micro-budget films have used because there is no concern for permits. A lot of the film is scored to dead air and wind when the music is not there, which does strip away the artifice we find even in low budget horror films. The fact there are a lot of tattoos on the female cast, not deliberately for their characters but their real life beyond this film, is even something which reveals the artifice of a lot of horror films, as that is something you do not actually get in a lot of larger budgeted horror films, even in spite of the fact many men and women nowadays do actually have tattoos on their body and that would be considered to have more verisimilitude. This is the kind of detail which makes SOV and micro-budget cinema fascinating as historical signifiers.

The film is silly, as much for its title pun, a horror comedy whose conflicted notion of who you are supposed to be attached to is arguably even avoided as a concern due to how homemade and improvised it all is. Even following a completely unlikable character, the Deatherman, who cannot be stopped and (barring some gore) throttles most his victims, its atmosphere is entirely from the knowledge it is a production by horror fans, fans of SOV cinema, making their own very low budget shot-on-video production which cannot hide this fact. It has to work around these limitations even for its more outlandish moments, like impalement with an umbrella, or how a scene of someone being dragged into an arcade cabinet is pulled off, which has to be done by cutting away out of an actual arcade to the Deatherman actor in an empty cabinet shell, use of a fake Halloween rubber severed arm for a limb rip-off, and an empty basement room to shot someone going into that cabinet.

Instead of a plot being of concern, it is Marvin, that one scene one joke character for the fake news channel commercial, screeching about his magic shop over a fake news screen and telling his grandmother to go fuck herself, or Buffy as a literal cereal lover who are of interest. Or the moments which are absolutely random and never returned to, like Buffy's introduction of her talking to a plush dog toy, only for the toy to start moving and breathing when she is out of the room in a moment which is actually surreal. It is in wondering why so many films, high or low, are obsessed with shots looking through up the trees at the sky in woodland environments, or the TV show a character is briefly watching, consisting of a Santa plastic ornament falling down the stairs, a show that would be fascinating just to witness for wondering what the hell is meant to transpire after the commercial break.

Director-writer Bobby Keller actually becomes one of the people who steal the film as Coyote, a wannabe pimp-drug dealer, with his female sex worker named Leech, who he plays with a broad comedic voice and is decked out in a red shirt, green t-shirt underneath, a hat, and Christmas patterned red trousers that look like pyjamas. Deatherman, a film really only an acquired taste, grows into something fun because, contrary to the plot, there is a tiny cast of characters like him doing incredibly silly things or having some comic timing which are more interest, a sense of everyone just having fun. His (I presume blood relative) Jim Keller, in just a chef's hat and a black t-shirt with John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) emblazoned onto it, steals the entire film as "Mumbo Chef", not even attempting an actual character, but a figure muttering like a madman, bashing vegetables to death with a knife, and repeating phrases like "Caesar Salad" or "I'm a chef, chef, chef..." over and over again.

If anything, this is a great case study of how cinema, whilst is a great art form, is as much part of human beings just trying to create even something fun for each other on tiny resources. Long patches are sluggish or compare badly to the more ambitious and bizarre spectacles of shot-on-video cinema this was a tribute too, but it cannot be denied there is a spark of fun in knowledge of its origins, and having my own personal taste in this type of cinema where I do not concern myself with the limitations. Knowledge of how absurd the film is can be cemented in the end credits, with a titular theme for a film called Deatherman being performed by a death metal band named Esophagus, or that in the film's messy tone, it ends on two joke previews for future films, one of which is Deatherman in Space, consisting of the actor against a green screen shot shouting that he is now in space. Knowing sillier, like leprechauns, have been shot into space for horror cinema with more resources, this film is probably more self aware of itself in a healthy way than most.