The Nostril Picker (1993/1988)

 

Director: Mark Nowicki

Screenplay: Steven Hodge

Cast: Carl Zschering as Joe Bukowski; Edward Tanner as Vince Armstrong; Laura Cummings as Armstrong; Gail Didia as Crisi Stroud; Heidi M. Gregg as Tracy Harper; Aimee Molinaro as Brenda Kearn; Ann Flood as Jo Bukowski; Clyde Surrell as Ed Simpson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I think the best way to introduce a film with that title, though this will be a more balanced and fair review, is an old review I made when I once viewed this as one of the worst films I had ever seen:

Once upon a time when I was just an adolescent, I was with my parents in a DVD rental shop when we saw this on the shelf, with a picture of a man with a finger up his nose and a knife in his other hand on the front cover. It fascinated all of us what it was about. Years later, at sixteen or seventeen, I rented this from an online DVD rental site, and turned it off in the first quarter of the running time. Forcing myself through the whole film later that night, I realized the only good thing about this was the title. There is not even gratuitous nostril picking in the film when all is said and done. Mike will tell you all there needs to be known about how terrible this is.

Barring the weird third person switch as if I have sudden turned into Gollum from the Lord of the Rings, the story is funny to reflect on. In Britain, we had Blockbuster Video, which was less the American store with a questionable nostalgia, with censored releases and exclusive Nintendo 64 rental games that now cost thousands second hand, but just a rental store that eventually disappeared from existence, argubly lasting longer than the American original did. It was the place, with a discount section of new DVDs, and second hand copies of them and videogames, where I was introduced to Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) (though on a DVD where the disc did not properly work) and Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend (1989), as extreme as you can get in juxtaposition. Blockbuster was not the local video rental store however to my family, as this was in the city and at the time of the DVD boom in the early 2000s, as our family used Global Video for new releases. Among their new blockbusters there was, if you looked at certain shelves, the trend of then-modern softcore films where the likes of Misty Mundae (a.k.a. Erin Brown) became a name for a generation of young men, alongside the lurid titles of VIPCO. Originating in the late seventies, and a distributor of titles which would get on the Video Nasties list like The Driller Killer (1979), VIPCO (Video Instant Picture Company) returned in the early 1990s¹, releasing Video Nasties even butchered in the VHS days alongside a slew of titles usually in the horror genre. Their black covers with just the titles in gold letters from the DVD era, part of the "Vipco's Vault of Horror", are still iconic even if the releases were cut or sometimes VHS rips. They will be missed, even if I am glad nowadays pristine releases of the likes of The Mutilator (1984) are available from the likes of Arrow Video. Least for my family, The Nostril Picker is the most notorious just from the cover, and that it was one of the exceptions you found in the rental store with more than the gold text, with that image of the lead Joe Bukowski (Carl Zschering) staring down the potential renter with a knife drawn and with the other hand a finger proudly up his nostril.

The Nostril Picker, without anyone of us watching the film until I decided to track it down, was a legitimate in-joke for the family from seeing it on the Global Video shelves. Back then, when watching it, I can attest to hating the film and even turning it off when I first tried to watch it, mustering up the early days of being a completionist to finish it. So much has changed over the years in my taste that, yes, this is a strange curiosity in terms of an independently made film shot in Michigan, one I see as gleefully ridiculous if a mess. The opening is how I remembered it, a creepy guy stalking a young woman but with the issue for Joe Bukowski, he sticks out like a sore thumb as a creepy guy on the street and thus will be pulled over by cops for being suspicious to the young women of Milford, Michigan. A bearded homeless man in a hat soon after approaches him and suggests a technique, picked up from his service in the Vietnam War, that allows one to change his body if he says an ancient chant, even into that of a young high school girl. Set to London Bridge is Falling Down, and Joe is now a dangerous man, especially as overdoing the change causes mental instability, worse when he is already sociopathic. Before then however this is set up as if a sex comedy about body swapping without sex in the first half of the film, including a montage set to a "schoolin'" song, revealing this had its tongue in its cheek.

That was something I never picked up when I was younger, and with his only film as a director, Mark Nowichi's movie was originally The Changer (1988), and was never released in the United States². Its infamous name comes from its British release with VIPCO in a perversely funny touch³, and likely helped it develop some notoriety for it alone and the tag line they gave the film ("He Chose His Weapons... He Selected His Victims... He Picked His Nose..."). With a now seventeen year old Jo(e) unable to buy dirty mags for a fictitious father, the sense of humour is clearly here from the get-go even without that inspired name change. Throughout the film tonally is a mess as it implies far more disturbing ideas about Joe the killer, trying to touch into the luridness of serial killers real and fictionalised, but humour is a constant here even when inappropriate to have been.

Before one asks, I highly double gender politics and Trans politics ever came to mind here, especially as one character, given a lot of screen time in a positive way, is still a comedy character only known as "Transvestite" meant to be funny in their person's existence. It neither really gets scuzzy in terms of the body transfer concept either, as even if Jo(e) wanders into the girls' shower, when she is just inducted into the nearest school without question, it is never with any real sexual content. Beyond Joe's later victims, when they are killed, haunting him in his apartment in lingerie covered head to toe in blood like an alt-girl photo spread from the past, it really has not a lot of onscreen shock value barring some gore, and the rest implied sleaze. There is only one scene of nostril picking prominently in the film as well, as we see the school days montage from Joe in his real form doing vulgar things in the perceived body as a young woman, so that will disappoint some too.

The film, after playing like a dated sex comedy with little sex at all, eventually starts to mould into its intended genre when Joe first goes kill crazy, the tone changing with some flying fingers and a little bit of gore, still nowhere near Herschell Gordon Lewis and its own tonal issues as it tries to be a lot more sleazier and even disturbing. It is blatant, if all off screen, how Joe's victims suffer implied rape and cannibalism, so bare this in mind. This is worth cautioning upon both as even referring to it may put people off the film, and because the film tonally despite its attempt at this bleaker tone, including Joe's troubled upbringing being brought in, is too goofy on purpose and accidental to make this work. The film as well shows its weaknesses, like some of the acting wavering in quality at times, which undercuts any attempt at seriousness, especially when a subplot involves a trans sex worker being the person who gets the police on Joe's tracks, all because he tried molesting her with a dildo that squirts fake semen and rightly got his lights knocked out.

Is it un-pc? More than likely, and truthfully, even when these films are a mess they fascinate me now, which is something my younger self could have never appreciated. The times where the film struggles are where some of the compelling eccentric touches come in, and when the film does succeed, it is interesting to, such as setting one murder through snap photos on a baseball field at night in stills, more nastier as a result despite little actual violence in the still images. The film, wavering between its clear designs for a greater depth, such as hallucinations of the victims commenting to Joe, to its humour does make it a weird experience, right down to the downbeat twist ending. Truthfully, I can see why many others and I would hate the film, a peculiar beast that never quite knows what it is meant to be. For its director Mark Nowichi however, he would go on to be a colourist including for directors' cuts like Cop Land (1997), to remasters for the likes of Evil Dead II (1987), so he thankfully would continue in filmmaking in an important way. Screenwriter and co-producer Steven Hodge never returned to cinema after this, and neither did lead Carl Zschering sadly. The story though of The Nostril Picker, thanks to VIPCO, has helped the film gain a cult for those who remember the name, even finally getting a release in the United States in 2014 from Massacre Video⁴. The film is, like a few regional genre films, a very acquired taste, but it is one which I return to with a lot more I can take from it. The story too, that for my family and many in Britain this title in the DVD era likely led to amused comments seeing it on rental and purchase shelves, even if never rented/bought, is one worth remembering as it added to its legacy from the humour in that title alone.

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1) Grindhouse Database's index section on VIPCO (Video Instant Picture Company).

2) The Nostril Picker - DVD Review, written by Dennis Capicik and published for Unpopped Cinema on October 18th 2014.

3) The Nostril Picker review from The Bloody Pit of Horror, published on October 18th 2020.

4) Massacre Video unleashes The Nostril Picker (aka The Changer) on US DVD 14th October 2014, taken from Cave of Cult and including the promo leaflet.