Redneck County Fever (1992)

 

Director: Gary Kennamer

Screenplay: Gary Kennamer

Ephemeral Waves*

 

Humans make the finest bacon!

[Spoilers Throughout]

Welcome to no-budget filmmaking at its obscurest, a shot on video work which (depending on the version seen) starts with no opening credits and looks like a home movie.

It is also, unexpectedly, a weird tangent for this form of cinema as, rather than horror or even a low budget riff on exploitation films which deal with the American South, this is a comedy. Two men, one African American and the other Caucasian, are in a car. Their accents are notable, because after the success of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), the accent of the latter is clearly the same surfer/stoner one that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter had. Fuzzier than an unshaved bear, the film for a while had no IMDB page, not even guessed date of release, although it is clear from said fashions (including awful zebra print sweat trousers matched to a mauve top, and the Zubaz pants on display) that this was made in the early nineties.

The set-up is that, after their car breaks down, the pair find themselves stuck in "redneck" country in the American South, unable to pay for the repairs and having to find money to get to their destination in Dallas for Thanksgiving. What is supposed to happen over the hour length of the film is an aforementioned comedy, leading them to be more open minded about the region when they are finally able to leave, but this is as vague a comedy then you could imagine. Most of the film consists of our leads - one of them the most extreme in ending his dialogue with "Dude!" and "Hey!!" all the time - mucking about in the local Texas woodlands until they bump into a new character. It is very difficult to try to review Redneck County Fever when, even though events do happen, there is no momentum. Avant-garde films about characters just walking in the woods have more momentum and extravagance to this in comparison.

Were it not for my tastes and tolerance to this type of cinema, this would be a difficult film for many to sit through, even for myself thinking about how slow this is with little happening. Yet that is perversely the incentive for me to look at this with surprise, that this is a film that has this sluggish tone yet juggles between, in having to find the money to leave, the lead duo inexplicably getting involved with transporting cocaine in a possible stolen vehicle, throwing cocaine into a cop's face, and many peculiar references, between the singing Band on the Run by Wings aimlessly in the woods, enough for it to not be libel, to referencing The Most Dangerous Game.

The result is fascinating as amazing anti-excitement, which I had to admire for being so unintentional. Set in the South, banjo twang in the soundtrack, it is meant to be a comedy contrasting the city slickers mocking the Southerners, barely registering baring the accents however in terms of this culture clash. It does not help on such a low budget that most of the film is shot in generic woodland, on roads or by nondescript buildings. Static scenes of people talking is entirely the film's structure - if they were not there Redneck County Fever would fall to pieces or be entirely about walking - and the notion of this being a comedy is nonexistent unless this was a unique take on non-humour.

Even anti-humour have gags compared to this, whilst this languishes in their lack of. In what transpires, they meet a hitchhiker who turns out to be a policeman. A preacher whose gift to bless cars so they start working again is actually a con only really stupid people would fall for. And, closer to a traditional no-budget genre film, an encounter with a mad hunter in the woodlands who uses traps and is a cannibal, one who remarks on the virtues of human bacon. Moments do show the strange energy this film can touch at, such as the Most Dangerous Game reference, to the short story rather than an adaptation, being from the dynamic duo managing the cannibal to let them free to hunt them down, but it is subdued.  

You are stuck with a film that felt heavily improvised the most minimalist of filmmaking. You can even hear the director at one point, off-camera, giving directions when the actors get into a car. You expect, later on, the characters to relate the entire plot to the film's equivalent of a Southern Belle, as she artificially guffaws over each part, only for the film to thankfully cut to a caption suggesting time passed. An attempt at a shoot out at the end is played with a couple of actors, waving fake guns and hiding behind trees, Chekov's baseball being used for a second time in the film as an effective projectile weapon. Altogether...this is absolutely un-recommendable barring those who willingly trawl through the outer regions of cinema. It does not sustain itself even in sixty minutes. If it deserves to be preserved, to be watched a thousand years from now in the fuzziness of its VHS version, it is because of what an oddity it is even in no-budget cinema, all these films the more I encounter them, even the really undefendable ones like this, having a weird moment and/or energy to them.

Especially in that, for this type of cinema, you usually do not have a "comedy" like this when horror is usually common in the micro-budget field. If the Letterboxd credits, the end credits on the end of the version I saw the same, are accurate this was the only film director Gary Kennamer ever made. Its producer, David DeCoteau however is a name you might recognise. Someone who openly admits he churns out films, he has fans and enough different periods in his career to map a time line of: in the eighties, his most popular era, he directed cult films like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988), and by the 2000s into the 2010s, as an openly gay man, he made many films (many likely shot at his own home) where the main attraction was nubile young men with their shirts off¹. He did produce no-budget films like Todd Sheet's Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death (1991) in the early nineties, so he may have likely produced Redneck County Fever, adding to his curious career as a director and producer.

That background, and the film's weird anti-charisma, is as much part of the charm to an undefendable film, including the likelihood that this is tied to Reanimator Academy (1992), a film clearly made by the same people as one of the leads, the one most overtly influenced by Bill & Ted in his character's accent, makes a cameo in the other work. That film, a messy attempt to cash-in on the 1985 film Re-Animator, is more overtly entertaining with its bizarre mix of cartoonish gangsters, punching heads off and comedy, including the reanimated head of a bad stand-up, and unfortunately a bit of sexism, and again it is a strange history to know the duo bleed into each other. Just be aware however that for many, Redneck County Fever will be death to sit through for most sane film viewers, even if examples like this shown how odd cinema can be as a product.

 

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* This is a re-published version of a 2018 review of mine, with new context from the film being re-watched and tidied up to my current preferences in presentation.

1) Then he made a reputation, with films definitely shot at his own home, with the likes of A Talking Cat!?! (2013), in which Eric Roberts recorded his lines over the phone, but that is for another review.