Debbie Does Damnation (1999)

Director: Slain Wayne

Screenplay: Slain Wayne

Cast: Ernest Brummer, Jeanin Lake, Tony Nittoli, Lisa Pete, Charles Pinion, William Smith, Michael Sonye and Slain Wayne

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Now I’ve got your horn motherfucker.

We are in for something out of the ordinary, and not for the widest of audiences, when in stark black and white a cannibalistic demon is munching through corpses in a room with a nude woman tied up on her stomach on a nearby table, ready to be his next meal. A stop motion skull spider with a British accent named Tregor comes to the rescue, on condition to kill the cannibal and go on a quest on his behalf for the Devil’s horns. Unfortunately she gets eaten by a stop motion Hell Dragon and Tregor is forced to find another woman for the quest, one named Debbie who has fallen into Hell recently, despite her guardian angel attempting to save her, and will be centre to multiple sides taking note of her.

A labor of love that looks like it took years to even complete, there will be many stop motion monstrosities onscreen, as there will be a lot of full frontal nudity, as initially Debbie finds herself is Hell without clothes, and a lot of content which will be off-putting for many. There will be content which has not aged well, content that will be random and abrupt, or just perverse, and there will be moments I still have to admire the fact the forty plus minute production even got made. Debbie finds herself in a war over the Devil’s horns, Satan himself reduced to a hornless head who wishes her to get them back, betrayed by two men who have the horns and are now about to start warning with each other in the film to get both for themselves. One of these two men, introduced briefly with two mouse traps on his cheeks, is the MVP for all the profane dialogue with eloquent choices of wording he has as a torture loving figure in the midst of a lo-fi medieval fantasy war with the other betrayer with soldiers and stop motion figures.

Debbie Does Damnation is only corpse paint away from a black metal video at times, scored to ambient music with guitar noodling, full of evil deviants from the Morph plasticine family tree and built from sets varying from Forbidden Zone (1980) to a bizarre avant-garde theatre production primarily using cardboard. Within such sets is stuff that is definitely not-PC nowadays, moments where this is a very unconventional fetish video, and stuff that is unintentionally ridiculous as other moments are pure bravado in getting them onto the screen with clear hard work and visible duck tape. It is unconventional to say the least, all which has to be ingested as really rough material, yet made with love by a porn director with a taste for kink. It was made before he fully went into the video porn director’s chair with titles which do not hide their content, some sounding a tad extreme for comfort, and others involving Kung Fu Girls 3 (2003) which do however ask interesting questions of what they are about even as porn films from the straight-to-DVD era. More so as I learnt of this film from Annie Choi of Bleeding Skull, this is a bizarre experience to get to, strange but undoubtedly a labor of love, hard earned in getting finished and crafted in a way I have to admire even if its own stream-of-consciousness will throw a lot of people off.

As Debbie finds herself with clothes, a sword and a quest between a civil war, as female warriors fight male ones, we see a film shot on Super 8, the director’s last bang (according to the making of including with this) before his full porn career began. In context, it makes sense how its attitude is with zero fucks given in wanting to do whatever it wants. Said to exist with the “R Rated version” I saw and an x-rated version, director Slain Wayne literally built the sets to what feels like being in someone’s skull for a near hour. Made from the gut of what was cool or sexy or deliberately edgy, I openly think aspects of this production are juvenile, some of it is tasteless and an issue, like a monster dubbed “a fucking spud monkey” said to be possibly on crack, but also has moments I have to admire. Even if you have to get into the gruel, weird improvised dialogue in the post-synched dialogue, or the fetishistic moments, like the random scene of Debbie being spanked by a warrior, or a scene of women being threatened with torture that show its hand for wanting to be kinky too, there are others where you did not need to take the time to have all the extensive homemade stop motion monsters which would have been painstaking to animate on any budget, but this nonetheless decided to have. Its extensive use of Barbie dolls in cutaway scenes or mannequin body parts to depict decapitations, sword stabbings and being eaten by plasticine hell hounds makes this considerably a higher bar in terms of a film trying to make a memorable micro budget film, even if it is a very nihilistic take on Hell where no one survives or is safe, even a flying skull finding itself forced into being a flesh light against its will. Its aspects of kink and very rough dialogue will put people off, and I will not defend it whatsoever; the virtues of the film come from the moments away from these which are ridiculous in tone and in actually being realized.

Even its sense of perversity at times has to be admired for its complete disregard for the expected, as you have a sex scene with a Mistress of Darkness involving a man bobbing for tentacles between her thighs, and if that is off-putting to hear, obviously Debbie Does Damnation is not recommended. But with that scene actually a highlight for intentional bad taste and funny lines, there is someone to admire of a film which is completely gunning to be memorable, and never is a lazy ironic way either. It is one which truly lives up to the notion of putting your heart and soul into a project, even if said project is as profane as this. 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque

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