Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell (2014)

 

Director: Spencer Snygg and Zachary Snygg

Screenplay: Spencer Snygg and Zachary Snygg

Cast: Peter Sullivan as Doug, Marisol Custodio as Brenda, Jon Arthur as Hector; Tom Cikoski as Jake; John Paul Fedele as Mayor Farnsworth; Jon Lunger as Roger Falk

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Why don’t you buy a gun and hug a tree?

To most this would be a silly low budget film about a 50-foot killer Easter bunny, from the shot on digital streaming era of cinema. I am coming to a film like this as a film from its director John Bacchus, one of the various pseudonyms for Zachary Snygg, a figure who has been around in the ultra low budget genre industry since the late eighties, creating curiously named films like The Bloody Video Horror That Made Me Puke on My Aunt Gertrude (1989). Figures like this are fascinating for me to find out about, be it Snygg or a Joe Castro, figures who are prolific but have not had writing on them, figures who just worked and made films which changed per the times they were in. Snygg in particular is a curious one, as he went to softcore film parodies like The Erotic Witch Project (2000) that managed to get onto British DVD rental shop shelves, to a series of horror films with predominantly black casts like Zombiez (2005). Honestly, whilst these films tend to exist under the radar in the straight-to-video territory, I have found that someone like Zachary Snygg fascinates in terms of seeing how genre cinema at a certain level changes over time. Well known cult figures like producer Roger Corman adapted to the times, as a figure like Fred Olen Ray goes from Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988) to Christmas in Palm Springs (2014), so it is fascinating to look at the more obscure figures or ones in the micro-budget genres who continued and soldiered ahead.

Here as well, Zachary Snygg has his trademarks, teaming with his sibling Spencer Snygg, particularly in that he has a very wacky sense of humour, something where, expecting prurient softcore with a film like Mistress Frankenstein (2000), you find yourself with a scattershot sense of oddball humor and obsessions like a man in a fake gorilla suit in-between the first two Erotic Witch Project films as a continuing joke. You could argue it is ironic, playing to the low budgets involved for arch humour, but it comes off weirder, coming to the fore here again with this absurd tale of a monstrous Easter rabbit, whose origins is only asked about for the final punch line with no answer, and the disgruntled dog catcher and the female artist stuck in the job having to deal with it. Opening with the son of a newly married father, disgruntled and unloading on his married to a considerably younger woman, getting his hand sliced off as the wedding cake does, Beaster Day is a film you will not be able to gage with if it is too ridiculous, too low budget, too wacky or does things which are indulgent and immature. A prolonged topless shot of an actress running about from a special effect monster is a good example of that which may be too indulgent for example of this, alongside its openly broad tone. It is a film, meant to sell as a monster movie, which however ends up feeling like its creator indulging in whatever they thought was funny and could sell for themselves.

With everything having the naturalism if artificiality as you see with 2010s shot on digital cinema, it is played with humour, which is with enthusiasm if indulgent, the absurdity found in characters such as the older guy, the father of the female lead, who cannot have fried food but asks for it to be cooked to smell (and for his sexual kinks with his wife and cook). There are moments that are inspired especially when it would have taken for more effort to be able to depict it, such as a first person from a spade, not even for a gore scene but just a trick shot for a single shot. In contrast, you have such an odd gag like the central dog catching/animal control firm being “Dog Catcher in the Rye”, which is strange knowing the Snygg brothers, who wrote the script, choose a J.D. Salinger reference which has no other context.

It is contrasted by the bunny itself, which is obviously superimposed on screen, with the gore scenes usually not directly onscreen, but the special computer effect of hiding parts of the cast to show missing limbs or as a severed head. They are usually separate cast members including female members from Zachary Snygg' softcore films like A.J. Khan and Darian Caine, a few of which happy to have the quota of nudity for the production, something which becomes less in this modern era like a selling point but more a stylistic choice even if will cause some to roll their eyes for how blatant (and pointless) it is. Said rabbit, at least a practical effect, is likely an actual puppet, a marionette with the strings digitally hidden and flopping forwards to move, who looks like a cross between a Sumerian rat monkey and the titular creature of Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973). It looks ridiculous, but with an example like the titular Godmonster, lovably too shabby to be able to survive as a living creature, worse (i.e. blander) has graced cinema.

It is technically an ironic film, embracing how cheesy it is, but it never feels like it is bad for the sake of doing it on purpose, but throwing anything against the wall in terms of humour on its own whims, not because it wants to be sardonic about the presentation. Our lead male is a dog catcher too obsessed with his job, interesting as a funny character actor Peter Sullivan manages to make him less a detestable or annoying figure, but likable ridiculous, contrasted by a failing artist in Marisol Custodio's lead having to share a work place. Whilst other characters will be too broad for some – such as a former hippy major so bad he steals candy from children – even that character has moments which work, even when the jokes fail. The mayor's clear bias against the Amish is an example of where it feels less intentionally wacky by their creators' idiosyncratic sense of humour, at least Zachary Snygg's career from the couple I have seen, as it may seem a deliberately absurd touch to include and never show, "Amish" inherently viewed as funny despite being a minority group, but is stretched out into something which feels more peculiar than deliberately out-of-place. Even in the one off dogs that feels wacky in how out of place they are, there are at gets one or two good moments. The leads thankfully are game for the material, which can be broad but least hits with moments, such as Sullivan's Doug having police codes for dog catching and PSTD flashbacks about Shih Tzu dogs.

It is not a film for everyone due to this deliberately lacksidasical tone, but it is at least a film which tries even if in the school of throwing everything at the wall. Too many films do not sustain themselves in content, even if a lot of my appreciation of these types of movies comes from a love for even the no-to-micro budget films which are sluggish and have charm in their great faults. Using the Jaws template as so many, with the Easter Day celebration under threat, considering the films which have existed, the ridiculousness here has to be expected, and the issue becomes whether you expect something this low budget and proudly embracing how indulgent it is. Certainly, and this is a technically positive, this is one where you cannot dismiss it as trying, as Beaster Day least keeps bringing something new in each scene, a gag or a joke or man half dazed forced to wear a cheap carrot costume to attract the beast, whilst other horror films of any budget feel they are going through motions. Even the lurid moments, mostly all the female nudity, feels out-of-time in the current day, making it more the director-writer’s impulses for better and for worse. A film like this I would have hated back a long time ago, but now able to appreciate the freewheeling nature of these sorts of films, this one does feel unashamedly its own film for good, for bad, for cheesy moments and a few good one-liners.

Zombiez (2005)

 

Director: Zachary Snygg

Screenplay: Zachary Snygg

Cast: Jenicia Garcia as Josephine; Jackeem Sellers as The Dr.; Randy Clarke as Steve; Raymond Spencer as Terry

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I don’t want to hurt you…I just want to cut your fucking heart out!

Director “ZWS” begins Zombiez with the history of the undead explained over hip hop bears and white text on a black screen. The irony is that, with full spoilers ahead of time, these are not really zombies, eventually getting confused or suggesting that these members of the undead are the smartest in existence, when it reality they look like a horde of cannibals with a few with a severe case of decayed acne. I am not going to undermine Zachary Snygg for this – who has gone under multiple pseudonyms including John Bacchus, where he was a prolific director in the early DVD era of softcore that starred figures like Misty Mundane – though this will prove your tradition straight to DVD zombie movie that does not eventually stay a zombie movie.

Twenty miles away from the opening zombie attack, working for Purgatory Demolition Crew, is our lead Josephine (Jenicia Garcia), who already had to put up with being the one woman around male arseholes, but will eventually have to worry about cannibalistic figures chasing anyone in sight and playing with their severed organs, especially as these ones can run and use tools, somehow even in the middle of an industrial era finding sickles of all things, less likely to be found in brown land industrial environments unless an antique store was broken into than the woodland environment Josephine will eventually enter to find her beau, kidnapped by these evil hordes.

The one thing to note with Zombiez, and this could sound so patronizing to bring up, especially as the writer of this is a white male and realizes just how so it could be, is that this is a film with a predominantly black cast, including a rare case of a black female lead. This was still something that had to be brought up decades later as, even with voices like Jordan Peele directing films as a black genre filmmaker in the 2010s, representation in horror and genre cinema in English language films, from non-white directors/writers or just with non-white leads and largely non-white casts, was still not as common even if improving at the time. It really raises a perturbing thought of how this subject is still with a sense of a minority voice that I even have to bring this up, but credit to Zombiez, it is a film about a largely black cast, with a black female lead in Jenicia Garcia, regardless of how most people view it critically as a zombie film. Garcia, who stars in a trilogy of these films from Snygg – this, Vampiyaz (2004) and Bloodz vs. Wolvez (2006), alongside a crime film called Hood Copz (2004) – was an associate producer on this and Bloodz vs. Wolvez (2006), so there was an investment for her in general to bring these films to be. A director like Zachary Snygg is not brought up in talk in cult cinema, but his is a fascinating career with its pockets, from his late eighties no-budget oddities to his softcore career, with this period of low budget films with prominent black casts. With an obsession with ending titles in “Z”, these are interesting to point to, as much for the cast themselves here, and that this is a film with a predominantly large cast, with all the major roles, but no one has to raise this, entirely for the better that the tone is that of a zombie film where this is not a topic that even has to be raised.

The bigger concern instead is that this is still a low budget zombie film, which you will ever run away from like the plague or appreciate. Realizing Bacchus/Snygg made this, and it comes to mind that a zombie film and a softcore erotic film are not that different in that they have their tropes and narrative beats. There is no malice to these words but a growing appreciation for figures like him from the straight to DVD era of cinema, or his casts, who make their careers working over the decades in these low budget genre films, but there is an irony to how many films in both genres were being made at the time that zombie films, despite being less likely to be placed on the adult shelf in a second hand DVD store, are probably with a greater disadvantage for me now decades later. Softcore, and why it and hardcore is still being made on mass, least has the advantage that there will always be an audience for titillation, but zombie films, even with mind to zombie film obsessives collecting titles like this alongside big titles, have the issue that, from this period on, there was a boom period in zombies in pop culture even in Hollywood, and that also means there is a greater issue of how many tropes, clichés and conventions have been repeated in just a short period for one horror subgenre.

As a result, not a lot even in terms of micro budget zombie cinema is “original” here, more so considering how even more zombie films came long after this one, which was made at a time when it was Land of the Dead (2005), Danny Boyle’s “infected” running hordes in 28 Days Later (2002) and the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, not including straight to video or non-English films. By 2005 onwards when Zombiez would be released, the undead would slowly become a pop cultural phenomenon, one which refused to die over the decades on but with the added danger of malaise. Zombiez feels the weight of this now, even if you could appreciate its low budget schlock, entirely because so much of this films’ stock scenes of fleeing and zombie attacks would be found even in large Hollywood films, which is not something you would have to worry about with an Erotic Witch Project, just to given an example of another film from the director, which could be sold on its softcore scenes even if making a parody of the Blair Witch will leave a lot of confused audiences who are not old enough to have seen that 1999 film nowadays.

Unlike some films, and with credit to this one, this low budget film keeps shots longer than a minute, even with the camera in motion, which is distinct among the requisite dialogue scenes and would have been a potential obstacle to include on a shooting schedule. In fact the sense of hard work here, for a type of film which would have been casually dismissed over the years, can be found in how even the camera operator, let along the cast, have extended scenes of running. There is unintentional humour – accidentally causing a car to crash so bad someone’s already cut stomach slops out a few organs – and there is the curious decision ZWS had in having dictionary level explanations for terms. There is something weird about having a term like “fear” – “A passive emotion or passion excited by the expectation of evil and impending danger.” – which, with the white text over black screen, is could be seen as a weird creative decision from him, but also causes one to realize how many of us viewing the film, maybe even  Zachary Snygg himself, knew what this word we all instinctively “get” meant without opening a dictionary like someone did for these text sequences.

There are also a lot of scenes of actress Jenicia Garcia moving or fleeing onscreen which is likely to put people off this. This is not a hyper lurid film in terms of gore or anything else, even keeping in mind to the director’s background with very explicit nudity, as beyond imagining the one actress here happy to do full nudity but laid on a cold table with fake blood sloshed onto them, this is mostly a tame film. The violence is working around its limitations and barely exists, more fritters of meat and fake blood with the zombie extras having to pretend to chew a person’s stomach out. The fact, for the most part, these come off as ghouls in their nature, with few zombie makeup effects and more extras in regular street clothes, is going to disappoint someone who wished to have zombies. This is more so as, even before the boom that came to be in the 2000s onwards, you could have no-budget films in the period beforehand post-George Romero just thanks to figures like Todd Sheets in his hyper low budget films, made in the late eighties and nineties when zombies were less popular, where they had zombie makeup and more gore even if homemade and usually real butcher store animal guts.  I come to this film having viewed it an obscurity which is not seen as “good”, with thankfully the right frame of mind to appreciate this and enjoy it; just bear in mind that, for any film to actually get made, that is an achievement, but expect a lot of lengthy scenes of fleeing, and not a lot of luridness like an Italian zombie film, or, in mind to the weight now forced onto this film after all the zombie films and television shows made after, all the content even found in big mainstream productions which are surprisingly violent.

That it becomes more of a cannibalistic group who sell human meat as Smiling Daves meat pies will further a disappointment for quite a few people, but thankfully, just right at the end when the film has felt its length, suddenly Zombiez does develop a strange sense of humor, something again to bear in mind with its director. It comes out of nowhere mostly, which will baffle some, but from he who made an erotic Blair Witch Project and over two of the films had a man in a cheap gorilla suit as a reoccurring joke character, it makes sense for me myself. There is a sense of this once beforehand – zombies who throw rocks are unique and funny, as barring concussions and potential lost eyes, something so childish is not what you expect from flesh eaters – but it is as if the film openly shifts to the ridiculous. A person in a chicken suit as target practice, casually walking to and fro flapping their arms as real bullets are fired at them, an emphasis this, whilst this is not auteur theory, Zachary Snygg clearly finds people in cheese costumes funny, as he does bickering, in this case the lackey who demands an operation name and thinks “Operation Gumbo II” is cheesy much to the rage of the main villain. The fact that one musical track is xylophone and brass, as if suddenly turning into a Tom Waits song, makes up for a lot of padding to a film, which is mostly a straight-to-video low budget zombie film, struggling with limitations, who thankfully rewarded someone like me coming in with an open mind with this gleefully shift to quirk.  

Mistress Frankenstein (2000)

 

Director: John Bacchus

Screenplay: John Bacchus, Joe Ned, John Paul Fedele and Michael Raso

Cast: Darian Caine as Helena Frankenstein; Heidi Christine as The Broadway Girl; Jessie Harcourt and Jade Duboir as the Housemaids; John Paul Fedele as Dr. Frankenstein; Bennigan Feeney as Igor; Michael R. Thomas as The Monster / Gypsy / The Burgomaster / Karl The Inspector; John Bacchus as Stable Boy / Hippie Couple / Father Karl; A.J. Khan as The Hooker; John Link as Karl The Jester; Kimbo as Himself

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #265 / Cinema of the Abstract Candidate

 

Frankenstein's Monster: Now the villagers with their torches, it's an incessant pain in the ass, I'm telling you.

Dr Frankenstein: What are you gonna do, it goes with the territory.

Frankensteins Monster: It goes with the territory...

Let us not kid ourselves with Mistress Frankenstein - from Seduction Cinema, creators of The Erotic Witch Project films, this is cinema meant to titillate a heterosexual male target audience, imaging women together in prolonged sex scenes padded out with a semblance of plot. It is crass, as a maid says to another if, "as a lesbian", whether she will be deflowered by the other, and it is not defendable. I am here, reviewing this, however to see what strange ways this New Jersey based company made these films in the late 1990s and early 2000s, structured around horror and genre structures, and by this point improvised to an extreme with an openly goofy tone.

And Mistress Frankenstein is weird. Set in an ill-defined time, clearly in the modern day but with a castle (behind CGI fog) that has the normal room decor of someone's house, the next heir of the Frankenstein lineage is a putz, whose wife Helena (Darian Caine) even before her death and resurrection was puritanical to anything remotely sensual. His tuxedo wearing servant Igor (a very flamboyant Bennigan Feeney) wishes he was more interested in twerking his nipples than the doomed attempt to get Helena's attention even when he brings her back to life, more so as, as a result of a new brain Igor acquired, she develops a greater interest in other women, whilst the locals, mostly all named Karl, will get wind of this and be the angry mob who acquire burning torches on-line on www.torch.com. This sounds far more complex than the film actually is, a film instead where a random fart and poo gag happens before the opening credits, in a very modern bathroom, for the sake of it. From director John Bacchus, who started with films like The Bloody Video Horror That Made Me Puke on My Aunt Gertrude (1989), this is openly silly, very cheaply made from Seduction Cinema, with all the silliest humour, even some Dad humour, you can get. I do not think this is even an insult, as there is something charming within this even as Mistress Frankenstein is not a film I can recommend to many. Those willing to experience it watch a film where everyone on camera helped pitch in on the production, as much as people behind the camera are likely on camera at some point, and this company managed to release a lot of these films at the 2000s and the early DVD market with the mentality of a merry band producing what they fancied.

Very improvised, if you watch the outtakes (included on the old DVD release) you see that this was made by a small group of people, likely the same people off-screen behind the cameras as is onscreen, improvising what makes them laugh as they made erotica scenes only involving women. As a result, here especially, you have a schism. Softcore with the curiosity, whilst I will not suggest feminist ideals with this film, that the women are openly sexual figures, whilst all the men, even when they watch and leer on the nudity and sex, are a bunch of goofballs, inept, get distracted taking a picture of their own erection, or getting their arms ripped off. The modern Dr. Frankenstein is an dorky figure, Igor, whilst a gay stereotype, at least sympathetic as he deserves more attention from a man whose relationship with his wife Helena was doomed even before her transformation, and the stable boy gets distracted by an attractive gypsy whilst her colleagues steal everything including a pair of bongos. Only the Frankenstein's Monster, already present, has some intelligence, liking milk and cookies, and throwing his lot with the gypsies when he catches one with the aforementioned bongos. All of this as I write this, creating sound sentences, does sound completely odd, more so as an ultra low budget production. I attempted to view The Erotic Witch Project as a fascinating, forgotten cultural item, which it is, but this from the future director of Bloodz vs. Wolvez (2006) feels now is part of a vast plain of cinema which, for many, is undefendable, yet is compelling for me as a border of how cinema can be different from what you expect.

And sometimes, this improvised cheaply made film managed something. Helena dies due to an unfortunate horse riding accident, and when I say "horse", the horse named Hilary was two people in a cheap two-person horse costume. The horse is shot by the stable boy upon Dr. Frankenstein's request, who blindfolds Helna and lets her ride on his back, only for her to strike her head barely in a tree, stuck there, and die instantly. That scene with the horse alone is why I have gotten interested in Seduction Cinema as, managing to get into Blockbusters and even British DVD rental stores like Global Video, you get bizarre moments like this. That shot specifically, of the stable boy shooting the horse, was legitimately funny regardless of context for how unexpected it is to witness. Among this reoccurring group of people who are in these films (director John Bacchus himself, who plays the stable boy among other roles, and actresses like Darian Caine to A.J. Khan), they let themselves indulge in their weird sense of humour, a world of its own where even Kimbo, the man in a gorilla suit who appeared in The Erotic Witch Project, is in this film in a cameo alongside a variety of other films by the company from this period with IMDB credit.

The sex scenes are long - trying to watch this not for titillation is ridiculous in itself. Scored to porn elevator vaporwave music with a lot of saxophone, the film has a lot of sex, with some scenes in-between, and where the interest lies for me is what ties them together in a format, before the internet became fully usable by many and porn clips could just be downloaded that excised this. There are very time dated references to being "2k complaint", prop nipple clamps are two wooden laundry pegs connected with tinfoil, and a brain is acquired from Clive's Body Shop, where you learn a politician's brain is cheap and difficult to sell off. Possibly indebted a little to Frankenhooker (1990), Frank Henenlotter's cult film from New York City, Darian Crane's Helena post resurrection shuffles along, in a mini skirt and tube top, to be with as many women as she can, the hotel room always used clearly informing the viewer most of this film is shot in one person's house.

In context, all of this is peculiar, where most will be frustrated with its randomness or the length of the sex scenes. It barely attempts a plot, one which never leads to anywhere as a jester, a random very hairy man is costume, appears at Dr. Frankenstein's window, in his very modern garden, spying at his resurrection of his wife and lets the Burgomaster be aware of this. I think it says a lot of this film where, as erotica meant to sell, the end credits sequence is Kimbo the gorilla playing at a keyboard in a hall as the Jester goes into a long monologue, involving his seed, as Frankenstein's Monster ballroom dances with a woman. This is bizarre, and this would have been on a rental stand in Global Video in my country, as it got a release in the British DVD market, all because there was a time where an audience wanting titillation existed for the new DVD format. A group such as Seduction Cinema could fill that market whilst doing whatever they thought would be funny.

This is more so the case as, not trying to parody the template of a film such as The Blair Witch Project (1999), this feels less inhibited, with a scene or two with a sitcom laugh track, to eco hippy parodies appearing for a scene, complaining of Dr. Frankenstein's environment harm let alone playing God, for a joke. Including the scene transitions, of peoples' heads spinning against a super imposed rainbow, this clearly knows it is eccentric and working with very little. Again, caution is advised against something like this being watched by anyone even if you do not factor in that erotic content, as that is a subjective thing dependent on the viewer. More an issue in this case is that Mistress Frankenstein would put people off for how cheap and how openly ridiculous it is, barely strung together and aware of this. It does not feel ironic either, but made as much in pleasing itself as it does to fit a market.

Even for that market, which exists into the modern day even with hardcore pornography available, this had the creative decision for one of its last scenes to have an epilepsy inducing threesome, set to black with the image flashing in and out, with moans repeated almost a cappella in rhythm to the music, which does raise questions of films like this even fitting the softcore market as suitable licenses. Especially as the early 2000s is a territory still open to consider, this, like any other outsider cinema, is going to be more interesting to view as a snapshot of the era. Less because they are good films but to imagine what they represent of the era, shot within weeks with the fashions and items at hand. That, and how, like an old Something Weird Video release for a decade before, I have found myself with Seduction Video films getting increasingly stranger the few I have seen, and this is bonkers to say the least when I did not expect this level of eccentricity.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Haphazard/Psychotronic/Weird

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