Satan Place: A Soap Opera from Hell (1988)

Directors: Scott Aschbrenner and Alfred Ramirez

Screenplay: Scott Aschbrenner, Melanie Johnson, Jeff Stogner and Alfred Ramirez

Cast: Warren Andrews as Edward Dayton / Human Hormoan (segment "Disposable Love"); Nora Miller as Doris Dayton (segment "Disposable Love"), Mark Rackstraw as Gordon Lighthand (segment "Disposable Love") / Dick Slasher / Thug #2 (segment "Too Much TV"), Sonja Etzel as Mother (segment "Too Much TV"), Hollis Wood as Johnnie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie"), Marsha Malone as Suzie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie"), Lisa Hatter as Sophie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie") / Daughter (segment "Too Much TV"), Jme Mestel as Jonathan (segment "Sally Satan")

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Missouri Mop Massacre. He can't stop them, and he doesn't do windows.

A woman with Bonnie Tylor hair, blasting shot-on-video budget rock riffs from her car stereo, asks for directions from a male chauvinist, she the interlinking figure herself between all the segments from this anthology horror film.

The first half focuses on the theme of chauvinist men stuck trying to dispose of corpses, the first story following said guy in the introduction, Eddie, in a grumpy mood and not interested in his wife Doris' lamp chops. She fantasies about shooting him in the head in a cowboy pastiche, and he only cares for watching TV and forcing his wife to get him beers, accidentally killing her with one punch over a warm can of brew. Whilst that may dangerous sound like trivialising domestic abuse, in context the film has him both as a terrible person, and within a film where (even if moments have not aged well) the tone is played with a sick comedic humour, with the moment playing as an abrupt moment of fake blood splatter and he stuck in a predicament which will doom him. Like a few SOV anthologies I have seen, they have minimal stories, here Eddie having to dispose of Doris' body, a farce as he considers placing her piece by piece in the trash, but going the weird direction of cooking her in the stove first beforehand. It is obvious where this goes, as he is able to live comfortably, watching porn in the lounge, only to be haunted by her ghost. Not even taking a bath is safe, for the bathwater turns into blood, nor going to the fridge as she tries to force feed him her own intestines' when he is there. It is also a reminder for me too how the trash disposal unit in kitchen sinks, a concept we never really had in my home country of Britain, was a trope for horror films and made me wonder as a result how they were considered safe.

It is pretty obvious, and we are not even dealing with the more elaborate tales you might get from Amicus in the golden age of horror anthologies of the sixties and seventies. The Bonnie Tylor woman has to deal with another sexist pig, kneeing him, who becomes another folly of these kind of men we follow, driving drunk listening to country music, calling his ex a bitch, and running over an old man whilst desperately calling a Mary-Lou at the steering wheel who is about to leave his life. He gets the old man to hospital, but claims the guy jumped out at his car as the old man dies in the hospital. It is obvious too where this is going, thought it has to be established Satan's Place, alongside really liking abrupt twist endings even if they do not make sense as for this story, is more interesting as an SOV production with the tropes they have. Openly a lot of my enjoyment of this one, as many others, is more the template, the atmosphere, of a homemade horror film even when the plots are abrupt and/or slight.

For a lower budget film, the production tries its best more than others in this field, including extensive use of various locations, and is scored to moody late eighties synth. As the film goes, a lot of its personality, including its humour, comes from the surprising amount of pastiche moments, additional original music, and TV/film parodies shot and shown in televisions in scenes that would have taken a lot of time to accomplish. For the second story, they even when out of their way, for a production with multiple collaborators in multiple roles, to use off-screen sprinkles for a rain effect, as our morally dubious Southern stereotype lead thinks he has ran over the old man again when he has just gotten over it, despite the old man being already dead.

Our Bonnie Tylor lead returns in a segment called Too Much TV, about the titular channel hosted by Dick Slasher, and changing the pace as it is about the landlady who Bonnie Tylor crosses who becomes the lead, angry her adult daughter spends all her time watching too much TV and not dating men to her ideal of Elvis Presley. This is the segment more explicitly about the pastiches and side jokes even if aspects of Satan's Palace's tone and humour have not aged well. It is not just that even between women the frequent use of the term "bitch" is used, but some of the explicit pastiches themselves, such as the questionable gay prison movie pastiche Bathroom Bullies with its dropping the soap moment, even if its depiction in feet shuffling back and forth and mouth popping noises in slapstick is absurd, to the first episode having Eddie watch a wrestling match between a transgender dwarf (not the language used) versus a wrestling with his hand puppet friends on both fists. The latter wrestler though is a funny joke which does show the better side of this film, the more overt sillier side which this does provide in spades. Too Much TV is the most scattershot of the anthology segments, as the daughter is watching horror movies like Don't Go into the Kitchen, or good jokes like the Hard Boy, the advertisement for disposable dildos for women. It is definitely the kind of anthology segment you only get from shot-on-video films which drift off in logic, even when it tries to pull a course ahead as Dick the TV host starts to talk deliberately to the daughter about offing her mother. With clearly a higher production, such as all the TV segments shown on television with the horror parodies, you manage to go from a Psycho parody in a bathtub or the mother being gunned down by random 1920s gangsters with typewriter machine guns in a fantasy, all of which including the segment's own abrupt ending, feeling like something you normally do not get outside this world of cinema.

Sally Satan ends the anthology, Bonnie Tylor finally getting her own story, with a suitor named Jonathan visiting and perturbed by the cobwebs around the wine bottles, what looks like a bloody head being cooked in the microwave for dinner, and newspaper clippings about a murder found in the coffee table book for guests to page through whilst waiting. Clearly, the title Sally Satan is an indicator of something Satanic involved, as he lays on her bed in briefs, shirt and socks, all black, reading poetry at one point oblivious to this whilst the score of a NES fantasy RPG is repeating sweetly in the background. He will make the ill advised decision to be willingly tied up, and not even ask for a condom before Satan is announced to be coming.

Like the others, another abrupt twist ending out of nowhere happens, and as mentioned, Satan's Place: A Soap Opera from Hell is not really scary, more eccentric than humorous, and was yet my jam for this pure dose of homemade filmmaking with its own tangents. It also only goes over sixty seven minutes long, which is a huge help to prevent anything from being a miserable slog. Those few jokes which did not age well neither feel like they are truly cruel either, just reminders of this being an older film from the eighties, a long time ago. It becomes clearly, with its end credits, notwithstanding Hubert the Cat in a cameo of the mog licking a corpse kept in the bathroom, too an absolute collaborate effort which I have to admire, with a female co-writer Melanie Johnson as a producer, and one of the director/co-writers Scott Aschbrenner composing the music with another person named Jon Kay, which means even the brief Elvis Presley pastiche you get just for a single scene mention of him, and would have taken time to record, was a work of love from a figure who also helped direct and write the film around the scene. That again really emphasises the amount of hard work put into this film, the only one for the directors. It is an obscure Shot-on-Video title, and sadly might be a difficult one still to locate a proper release of, but for fans of the genre like myself,  you watch them even if imperfect for that sense of hard work.

Moonchild (1994)

 

Director: Todd Sheets

Screenplay: Todd Sheets

Cast: Auggi Alvarez as Jacob Stryker; Kathleen McSweeney as Athena; Julie King as Rocky; Dave Miller as Talon; Kyrie King as Weasel; Stefan Hilt as Cabal; Cathy Metz as Dr. Andronymous; Carol Barta as Medusa; Jody Rovick as Captain Simpson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

There's no debate about your fate. You're tomorrow's lunch!

An aerial shot from a helicopter over a cityscape, followed by a man climbing a barbwire fence to a Slayer-like thrash metal song in the score, sets up the ambition to be found here, especially if you have seen older Todd Sheets films before this, where he has jumped in scale from the films he made from before, drastically, in his shot-on-miniscule budget works even within the pre-opening credits here. There is a moving pick-up van stunt, jumping in to the back of one and someone then being thrown out, and a car chase with pyrotechnics and three vehicles involved. It is not as elaborate as a Hollywood production, but in context as a micro-budget film from the early nineties, this is a bold and challenging set piece to have pulled off, and only a clear superimposition of a car in front of a moving train shows the strain of a micro budget, something you would need a significant production to pull off and now may be done in blockbusters by green screen.

Aesthetically Moonchild feels like a digitized Mortal Kombat rip-off like Way of the Warrior (1994) for the 3DO Multiplayer System, which is an apt comparison as Naughty Dog's video game, long before they made The Last of Us franchise and released the same year as this film, was homemade without a true green screen and costumes including part of a Burger King packaging; here though with Moonchild, with its mix of ninja and samurai costumes out of context, and a post-apocalypse premise where the lead Jacob Stryker (Auggi Alvarez) had his DNA spliced with lycanthropy abilities, you do not have to just appreciate it as a historical piece of ambition, as whilst Way of the Warrior is as stiff as a board to actually attempt to play in modern eyes. Moonchild is from a director who once made Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death (1991), a film to enjoy if you accept it is a film where nothing happens, and over the three years afterwards gained so much from making films over the short time which passed in terms of pacing and keeping the audience entertained. The premise feels like one you would have gotten in a Sega Mega Drive/Genesis game, and Bleeding Skull tantalised with their review describing Moonchild as "an adaptation of an unreleased Sega Saturn game combined with backyard wrestling"¹, so there was a lot coming into this even without my interest in Todd Sheets as a filmmaker.

Truthfully, Moonchild is too ambitious, a plot that would require the budget of at least an Italian post apocalypse film to try to pull off, with way too many characters and plot points to juggle, but I cannot help but admire Moonchild as a gold standard for a micro-budget film to gun for this level of ambitiousness. It is a film which was made with fun from the crew but making sure to keep the viewer intrigued, where there are the little details like when a minor henchman produces a saw from their mutant stomach and Sheets has an actual motorized saw blade as a prop. Following a plot of Stryker, who was part of the evil dictatorship's project of creating a werewolf army, rescuing his son with a band of helpers including a female underground leader named Athena (Kathleen McSweeney) and her kid sister, this tries its hardest at every single moment, trying to keep at a pace even when the dialogue can linger on exposition, as Stryker learning he has a bomb implanted in his small intestine has only a 72 hour time limit after escape to get this goal finished. They have martial arts scenes even if there are few of the cast trained, and the werewolf effects, bladder transformation effects indebted to Rick Baker, are applaudable in how they were pulled off. It is certainly distinct for a micro-budget film, where it is one of the few post-apocalypse tales where the underground rebels have a nice cafe to plan within, and the Medusa figure among the villains' gallery is an older woman who, far from out-of-place and stealing the film, such as when she is threatening actual children in the cast with a finger spike in the brain for information.

Probably the only real surprise is that, barring one scene where a hand comes out of someone's mouth and rips a man's eye out, this has none of Todd Sheet's trademark gore from the time and later career, the one oddity in the film in production. This was homemade in the best way aside from this, with pyrotechnics when androids are defeated, alarmingly close to cast at times, and it only stands out because it has been something Sheets embraced as a trademark, especially as there is content here where that would have made sense to include, such as how Chicago is full of mutants and other androids who practice cannibalism, and the abrupt lead villain with "666" branded on his belly. What cannot be denied is the jump in craft however, as you see Todd Sheets leap, ocean sized in distance, in technical improvements and the beats in making entertaining genre films he would watch himself, full vim and vigor shown. So much so, you will not be disappointed you only once see a full werewolf transformation including a wolf man suit on furry steroids.

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1) Bleeding Skull 50: The Best Shot-On-Video Films, written by Joseph A. Ziemba and Annie Choi, and published on January 2nd 2022.

Death Nurse 1 & 2 (1987-88)

 

Director: Nick Millard

Screenplay: Nick Millard

Cast: Priscilla Alden as Nurse Edith Mortley; Albert Eskinazi as Doctor Gordon Mortley; Royal Farros as Mr. Powell/Charles Bedowski; Frances Millard as Charity Chandler/Faith Chandler; Irmgard Millard as Louise Kagel/Brownie; Nick Millard as John Davis/Sergeant David Gallagher; Fred Sarra as Lieutenant Cal Bedowski

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You son of a bitch, you got my bag!

Death Nurse is made by Nick Millard, who was one of many independent genre directors in the sixties and seventies, making films like Criminally Insane (1975) until the two Death Nurse films in the late eighties, where he joined many who saw the advantages of the shot-on-video boom in video recording cameras and making ultra-low budget films as this pair. About a homicidal nurse and her doctor brother, the film does not have to worry about a real hospital set, just the appropriate costumes and set around a rest home named Shady Palms which is clearly shot in someone's own home.

Shady is apt as they openly mistreat the patients, performing operations without anaesthesia to learn how to, smothering tuberculosis patients, which consists of coughing into a cloth, with a pillow, and burying the bodies in the back garden or leaving them in the garage for the rats to feed on. Death Nurse is not going to be for everyone, the understatement of the year even as someone who liked the film, absolutely not a film you would recommend to anyone but those open to the film's limitations or with a taste already there for films like this where you get a prolonged scene of a man getting a snack out the kitchen, where you can hear air conditioners in certain scenes and they use bread knives in place of scalpels. Baring the budget and silly tone, this does get into something uncomfortably real of medical malpractice of medical staff deliberately killing patients, sadly something even a silly movie like this is not making up the existence of, even if this is thankfully a work whose mistakes and quirks soften the reality. Here these siblings, alongside the brother wanting to practice his surgery skills, get money from having patients sent to their home they can quickly dispose of. The only patient seemingly safe is Louise (one of two roles over the two films by the director's wife Irmgard Millard), the patient meant to kick her alcoholism only to get at Edith's bottle of sherry for sexual favours with the brother she is glad to provide.

It is an absurd experience, like a John Waters premise just needing a shove in the right direction and instead just charmingly eccentric, becoming more of a rough job being a doctor who kills, especially when you need to dig out a victim from the back garden as the social worker wants to visit him. The stilted nature of the film, including an almost complete lack of music score, is potentially off-putting, but it is perversely charming, following the banality of being a killer and how boring it really would be even in mind to Death Nurse's obvious limitations, with the closest thing to a score being a brief electronic drone in dream sequences, like it is going to turn into a random number radio broadcast. These dream scenes re-use footage from Criminally Insane, with Priscilla Alden the same lead between them both, always a sign of a no-budget film with a foot into the peculiar. Considering Criminally Insane follows Alden as a woman released from a mental asylum who kills to not be prevented from eating food she wants, it presents an idiosyncratic attempt to build a new film from new footage only James Bryan and Renee Harmon topped by doing it over and over again in the eighties.

Death Nurse 2 continues as before with the issue ending the last film being swiftly resolved with a murder weapon, and keeps the tone up with a prolonged scene of making a cup of tea after murdering someone. It feels like the second half, actually, of one whole film, more so as this does extend the reuse of Millard's Criminally Insane again for an absurd repetition, as alongside new footage from that film you get the same meat cleaver scene in full from that film as used already in the first Death Nurse. It feels fully a piece from a larger work when the pair are combined, as one hour films made into a two horror one, where this escalates the problems of the leads' murder spree by introducing Brownie (also Irmgard Millard), the homeless woman armed with a giant knife in her shopping trolley, and Misha, the self styled philosopher taken off the street for ranting under the mayor's window about abolishing income taxes and the evils of socialism. It feels the same as the previous film, continues the absurdity of the previous film, such as someone being chased in circles around the couch by a homeless woman with a knife, and trying to introduce twin sisters in the plot line to bring back an actress, related to Millard. Throughout both films, the word "bitch" is the most prominent aspect of the film, used in a variety of ways alongside close-ups of as Priscilla Alden scowling. You can even hear the edits of scenes, interconnecting two different actors in conversation in the same scene, due to the traffic outside cutting in and out in time, which adds to the humour of both films.

It ends naturally on the downfall being as banal and gross as human matter being brought out onto the lawn by damn rats, and whether these films are actually watchable, as already stated, is only if you have a taste for such films. It is deeply silly, at times a slog between them, but I have nothing but admiration for the attempt.

Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death (1991)

 

Director: Todd Sheets

Screenplay: Todd Sheets and Misty Wolfe

Cast: Kelly Hodges as Tiffany; Lisa Krueger as Beverly; Holly Starr as Liz; Laura Fuhrman as Kelly; Craig Wilcox as Jimmy; Jenny Admine as Muffy; Veronica Orr as Sherry; J.T. Taube as Chuck; Matthew Lewis as Tommy; Liz Marchicello as Sandra; Carles Monroe as Mr. Ray; Emmet Brennen as Hank; Carol Barta as Bertha

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Fuzzy VHS print, teased out eighties hair for a female demon exorcist who looks like a member of a female glam metal band, and micro budget gore can only open up an early Todd Sheets film. Sadly however, alongside the fact that character never returns, and is apparently from the early 20th century despite being dressed like an extra in a Mötley Crüe video, this is the one film as a fan of Todd Sheets even I have to admit needs to be approached with caution, even as someone who appreciated films like Goblin (1993) to Nightmare Asylum (1992) in spite of their flaws.

And yes, this is meant as a tie-in to David DeCoteau's Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988) in name, which is apt as he is an executive producer here, having produced a few of Todd Sheets films from this time. Unlike DeCoteau's film, where a sorority initiation ceremony at a bowling alley conjures up a genie, here a sorority initiation is going to happen, to stay at an abandoned collage all night, and someone made the bad idea to buy an old crystal ball for the pyjama party and hold a séance. The crystal ball smokes before they even get there, knocks the sorority members out and, confused waking up, now have problems other than what to do that night at the party. Two guys trying to get in will be dragged into this scenario, and an elderly heterosexual couple, regretting the crystal ball being sold from their antique store, look at get it safely back.

I think even diehard fans of Todd Sheets would admit this is a difficult film to appreciate if they have watched this, Sheets' career a prolific one from 1984 where, barring from 2005 to 2013, he has been making films for multiple decades with his earliest work the most micro-budget of homemade regional horror films in the VHS medium. Those early films are acquired tastes, but even next to Nightmare Asylum, one of the more difficult films from this era, this is a dry and improvised film at even only an hour long. Charm is found appreciating the director's personality onscreen, including Enochian Key providing the music (barring the public domain classical pieces), but this is a languid film of plot and a lot of dialogue. There is some moments here for me as someone able to appreciate these films, such as the humour in an ordinary older man, who inherited the crystal ball, talking in a banal shooting location about his grandmother accidentally summoning a kandarian demon as if it is a normal conversation piece, or a non-copyright infringing version of the game Twister called "Bimbo Twister", with person shaped pads like Warrior Green or Bimbo Brown.

There is however a lot even I struggled with, not even the randomness (and production and sound issues) of Nightmare Asylum in hindsight as difficult as this could be. There is a lot of talking, even Wayne's World references, heavily improvised and with the sense this film seems not fully formed.  There is even the sense of this with Todd Sheets being compromised, as the premise of a possessed sorority member stalking people in an abandoned collage is far less elaborate than Zombie Rampage (1989), an earlier film from him. I come to this wanting to see this film for years but it is really an odd duck where the one consistent aspect to any of this is being a self mocking micro budget film that teases jokes about micro budget horror films. It is amusing at times, such as the sorority member obsessed with movies about homicidal ice cream men who turns the lights off for a joke at the worst time, but it also has an ominous hindsight to it as if the film is admitting self defeat at its lack of success and is mocking itself.

My youngest self would have despised this film, and in terms of exploitation too, there is not a lot here too. Despite the passing reference to "gazoongas", I would not expect nudity from a film like this from its female cast, trying their hardest, but more surprising is the lack of gore. It is not needed either but with Todd Sheets, who is a proud fan of horror cinema, one of the charms of these early films was the pure throw anything at the wall sense of fun they had, even if it was animal guts from the butchers as improvised human intestines. The closest here is a stake through the mouth shot with it behind the actor's head in the right place with no gore, or the possessed using the primary schoolyard trick of how to show you have taken your eyeballs out to let someone know you have turned. Again, it feels like Todd Sheets' hands were tied behind his back or something was off. People not used to these films would even hate Goblin, full of splatter, but now a production like that has an additional goofiness and charm to appreciate.

What you get here is ultra minimalistic, a lot of improvised talking, and you can even hear someone (likely Sheets himself) say "Cut!" at the end of a scene, which becomes something not to mock but actually a memorable moment by accident. What is on purpose when it occasionally happens can be amusing and why I like these types of films, such as the possessed with a cheese eating grin on her face pogoing herself in a door repeatedly, or accidentally confusing saline water for corns on feet for holy water. Even for those prepared for a film like this thought, I still have to warn them about the sluggishness of the film, as well as anyone with epilepsy as the final exorcism scene will be an issue for anyone with this. I was prepared for years that Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death was a challenge, but I still feel disappointed that this was the case. I hoped it would gain a perverse entertainment against its clear flaws. It is a film worth preserving in Todd Sheets' career in terms of how unpredictable it is as an independent micro-budget filmmaker at the time, as it belongs to the delirium of his earliest work, but I would approach it sadly with the patience of a saint.

Jungle Trap (1990/2016)

Director: James Bryan

Screenplay: James Bryan and Renee Harmon

Cast: Renee Harmon as Dr. Chris Carpenter; Frank Neuhaus as Dr. Josh Carpenter; Heidi Ahn as Betsy; Tim de Haas as Jobe Ortega; Valerie Smith as Janice; Rhonda Collier as Rita; Glen Sarabian as Mark; Linda DiNardo as Bena; Bill Luce as John; Jan Vanderberg as Obie DuBois; Bette Bena as Madame Trudea

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

We return to planet Renee Harmon, the figure that collaborated with filmmaker James Bryan numerous times since they encountered each other, Harmon her own personal voice in the independent films they made. This however has a fascinating back-story, and comes into the issue of how cinema in general like all art forms has a history of unfinished and partially destroyed fragments. Those films which never came to be, or finally did as we will get too, happen to anyone and with James Bryan, there were a few. One such project was Horror Con (1989), a slasher film set around an aforementioned horror convention, which never came to be and is merely a fragment. American Genre Film Archive preserved this fragment, and it has connection to the subject of this review: actors like Heidi Ahn and Obie DuBois returned for Jungle Trap, as did the conventional poster too. Jungle Trap itself however has a much bigger and even more elaborate tale, which was a whole film brought together and finished thanks to another group called Bleeding Skull.

Bleeding Skull was a website founded by Joseph A. Ziemba in 2004. It became the growing ode to independent and niche filmmaking, as the no-budget was admired, the homemade loved and as a site named after a type of novelty candle, it presented its reviews without irony, which accepted the silliness of these titles, their accidental joys, as much as sincerely appreciated how bloody hard making a film actually was. They would collaborate with American Genre Film Archive from 2018¹, and among the projects AGFA would pick up was a project Bleeding Skull had already released through a Mondo Video collaboration, taking a film they had discovered unfinished and finished off. They became fascinated with Renee Harmon, the German war bride who immigrated to the USA with her husband, trying her hand with cinema with self financed work where she was centre stage. Her frequent collaborated, as mentioned, was director James Bryan who would find admirers in Bleeding Skull, to the point they got to look at his archived materials. Alongside finding one production Run Coyote Run (1987), a bizarre re-mixing of footage from multiple films together found in a car boot², they found too a shot-on-video jungle horror adventure Bryan made with Harmon but never finished. Thus Jungle Trap, technically a 1990 film but officially completed and premiered in 2016, came for revenge. Even Joseph A. Ziemba and Annie Choi, novelist and a later member of Bleeding Skull, put their efforts in as, having a band named Taken by Savages together, they acquired time appropriate synthesizers and scored the film with the apt soundtrack for the mood. Jungle Trap was first a release Bleeding Skull distributed through their deal with Mondo Video, a brief collaboration of VHS releases of obscurities like Heavy Metal Massacre (1989), only for most of them to slowly be reacquired by AGFA in the time passed.

Jungle Trap is probably one of the more easy sells to anyone to the world of Renee Harmon too, as when you get to films re-using footage from Lady Street Fighter (1981) as she and Bryan did by the mid-eighties, things get weird even for my standards. It is still an acquired taste, but it has enough to entice someone with its curious home-grown nature, about a haunted hotel in the jungles and head hunters, all clearly shot in someone's backyard. This is its own world. Pre-existing footage, from action films or documentary footage of deforestation in the Amazon, is weaved into static new footage following Dr. Chris Carpenter (Harmon) and a group of archaeology institute members going into the forests after a rare artefact. It emphasises an admirable homemade quality where, to stage a train cart dialogue sequence, you redress a room as one and have the extras play appropriate locals as much as they can, alongside with when the jungle is staged onscreen with a lot of plants, "Jose Diaz for Greenery" the credited person to thank for the production design. A scene in a plane involves splicing pre-existing footage of one in the air against a cramped homemade box of a set, whilst staging a car crash means between existing footage and newer material, though they still have a fire stunt even if in the foreground of the car needed to be put out once cut was uttered.

I have to raise the obvious. I like old jungle adventure tale aesthetics, but be it film or video game, we have the issue of it coming from white expansion into third world countries and the problem, here with white actors playing head hunters who decapitate and preserve heads, that they are usually using symbology racially loaded to demonise non-white cultures. Jungle Trap is a goofy film, so I will not damn it, but just bare this in mind as this was clearly riffing on old jungle adventure movies which by themselves had these problems openly with them and this is merely a spin on. It is to the film's credit, whilst it plays to the sinister head hunters, one of its key points to the plot is how it is about white civilisation trying to force that tribe to leave their land, killing them off, and building a hotel on their remains, so credit to the film it is about the sins of colonisation in a shot-on-video cult work.

Thankfully, as well, Jungle Trap instead decided to riff on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) on a budget, and the power of video effects editing, so most of this is negated once you get into the jungle, actors playing staff of a hotel in the middle of a forest that was seemingly abandoned. With these hotel figures vanishing in an edit, or turning into head hunters, reality is distorted and it settles for this for the rest of the plot. Alongside a troupe of idiosyncratic cast members, from Renee Harmon's acting style to an occasionally seen drunk pilot, or Jan Vanderberg stealing scenes as the grinning older Hotel Bell Captain with his brightly ominous comments, you can also add soap opera to the proceedings. In-between a member secretly on the side of the tribe holding the skull artefact they are after to the backstabbing - Harmon's lead and the male leader are a divorcing couple, he dating a significantly younger woman (Heidi Ahn) - this provides a curious turn for a film with already a lot of curious touches. Genre is more interesting, as no budget shows here, when it ingests curious little plot contrasts like this.

Jungle Trap, as a result, does feel ambitious. In context, this is James Bryan having to work on lower resources, but it is more elaborate than a few shot-on-video productions from this era. Certainly next to Run Coyote Run, a mind bender but one by this point from Harmon and Bryan recontextualizing old Renee Harmon film footage, this is ambitious in trying to limit this and having to make a film almost entirely with new footage. It is one that is incredibly entertaining even to the point there is clearly two moments where the cast break character and find humour in the moment without breaking the fourth wall, which is sweet. This is before you take into account the rebuilding of the film by Bleeding Skull. Fans of this type of cinema, they edited together the footage with James Bryan for a film which, in context, is slick in comparison to some of the more padded, rambling and haphazard work that is loved too. The music is a huge virtue, with droning synth from the era that stands out in mood from Taken by Savages, with a little bit of nineties techno in there as well. This proves in itself the danger of losing this if the technology cannot be recreated over time, particularly as the love for scores like this or to John Carpenter having a second career as a musician proves that a specific sound to these synthesizers from older horror films was distinct to other electronic instruments from the decades after.

Jungle Trap is a curiosity, and it delights to see this managed to get a British premiere in 2022 from 101 Films. In the early days of DVD here, we got some surprising stuff from niche labels to the 2010s in the shot-on-video and shot-on-standard-digital formats, but retrospective releases were going to have an issue with a sustainable market in Britain especially as the cost of having these films going through the British Board of Film Classification, mandatory by our laws, is always going to prohibit a healthy access to niche cinema as in other genres and areas. It is, with this, amusing and great we did get titles like this arrive when they do, and on high definition of all things, alongside the greater ease in seeing these films online allowing a widening audience for this area of cinema that the likes of Bleeding Skull in the USA have helped with. It is telling what kind of film Jungle Trap is when at the end, despite there being death and betrayal, a lot of off-screen and prop severed heads involved, it ends on Renee Harmon and another cast member being happy and able to laugh on a bright day. That sense of entertainment and joy in these films is felt by this film's finale, with the story of even this film coming to life through Bryan and Bleeding Skull after two decades in itself a happy conclusion.

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1) Bleeding Skull's About Us page.

2) Bleeding Skull's page for the Mondo Video release of Run Coyote Run (BSV-003), written by Joseph A. Ziemba and published November 28th 2014.

Run Coyote Run (1987)

 

Director: James Bryan

Screenplay: Renee Harmon

Cast: Renee Harmon, Frank Neuhaus

An Abstract Candidate

 

The gods have indeed blessed her body bountifully.

Within the space of two months, I once unintentionally saw Lady Street Fighter (1981) three times, even if just in clip form in other films, as director James Bryan and star/writer/producer Renee Harmon milked that earlier film twice, unintentionally creating two sequels to the previous film with chronological time line differences and reused footage. Revenge of the Lady Street Fighter (1990) is just the entirely the first film again, all the footage with a tiny bit more new context, playing with Harmon's original lead character being followed by a new female character. Run Coyote Run is an unofficial sequel because it follows the premise of the prequel, even if shown onscreen reused footage, and turns it into a new story with the surrealism of pre-existing footage from earlier Harmon productions being incorporated into new scenes. With one little plot difference – the original film being about a tape containing the names of assassins, this about tape with drug smuggler leaders on a similar list – these technically do not co-exist as films in the same world, but it feels truthfully they should. With this film particularly, even if you include the three as a perverse little trilogy in the same world, this makes at times even Godfey Ho, the infamous Hong Kong director who created films from pre-existing and unfinished movies with new footage, look conventional at times.

Harmon is Anna, a female police officer with psychic abilities. Again, as mentioned, this is not intentionally a sequel to Lady Street Fighter, but it is tied to that film's plot, the McGuffin of a master tape of concern here again and Harmon’s original character Linda now re-contextualised with having a sister (who is unintentionally identical) searching for clues to what has happened to her deceased reporter twin. The film, unlike Revenge of Lady Street Fighter, has much more plot and new footage, and in Anna 's search for the truth, people are being silencing by those connected to a criminal cartel, including an evil biker priest who comes off as a joker among the bunch. This in itself, as shot-on-video genre cinema from the late eighties, is goofy, with stock footage of a hospital having to be used to introduce our heroine in her first scene, and a lot of silly dialogue such as the suggesting, despite being a reporter, Linda could not even spell “cat”. A torture scene from the original film is now casually turned into a new one with spliced in footage and voice, but this also leads to the most curious aspect of the film.

It is not just the original Lady Street Fighter which is re-used for footage but also, to compensate for a lack of budget, footage from previous films by Harmon and Bryan is used, specifically Frozen Scream (1975), The Executioner, Part II (1984), and Hell Riders (1984). This is where the Godfrey Ho comparison comes in, with his infamous cycle of ninja movies from the eighties like Ninja Terminator (1985) where new footage with the likes of actor Richard Harris in camouflage ninja outfits was spliced in with existing films he had acquired. In all my Godfrey Ho viewing though, unless deepest cuts may lead to some stranger surprises, he never reused footage from a prequel he made and replayed it with new inserts like what happens with these Harmon films, déjà-vu and the cyclical nature of violence taken here to an absurd depth. The most delirious thing, where Run Coyote Run gets weirder, is realising new actors are being dressed as actors from the old footage so they can connect, like a trick Chilean director Raul Ruiz might have deliberately done in his films with an intentionally alienating effect. Realising very obvious old man makeup on an actor was for a murder scene from Harmon’s Frozen Scream to be spliced in, a seventies film from a different era of cinema with its contrast in celluloid film to a video production, added a new level of weirdness here.  Adding to this is that you can tell the seams, such as with a fight scene on steel steps latter on, or how there is a strange woozy tone to the production even if replaying Lady Street Fighter again.

It did feel like a dream as a result. As a film, Run Coyote Run is a curio only for those who can appreciate these films, which can be said of all the Renee Harmon /James Bryan collaborations I have seen. Coyote though has the advantage that it is a curious attempt at a lower budget genre film which is at the price of a VHS instructional film budget, using a remix technique you use for an artistic plunder phonics-like project but never expect for a production like this. That is not an insult either as, regardless of this being visible, the reused footage done to work around this creating a compelling strangeness within itself. As a result too, the genre burps between occultism, as yes, Harmon is psychic and has flashbacks to Linda’s experience, with horror incorporated by use of the Frozen Screams scenes, with their black hooded murderers evoking a slasher instead and with unexpected gore scenes within what is meant to be an action film.

It emphasises the fascinating with this ultra low budget cinema alongside something I admire, that of trying in spite of obvious handicaps to make a film. Common taste would dictate a lot of this film is (bluntly) "amateurish", from its acting to the contrast in footage types, but for a person like me or Bleeding Skull, a website devoted to this cinema, that is meaningless to the pleasure in them. Bleeding Skull have to be thanked for this film even being known, as they found the film in the trunk of a used car, first releasing the film themselves in a short lived VHS series in 2014¹, before the American Genre Film Archive included it as an extra to Jungle Trap (2016), a larger scale salvage by the website of a lost Harmon/Bryan film they worked with the director on to finally finish.  Standard technical bars presumed to be what makes a good film are alien to a film like Run Coyote Run, where even its rediscovery raises tantalising questions of how it ended up in that trunk in the first place. Instead, the joy of what, without safety barriers, a film can end up as are to be found here for the adventurous.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Minimalistic/Weird

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

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1) Bleeding Skull! Video VHS page for Run Coyote Run (BSV-003), written by Joseph A. Ziemba and published for Bleeding Skull on November 28th 2014.

Darkest Soul (1994)

 

Director: Doug Ulrich

Cast: Al Darago as Tommy; Jeff Witte as Mark; Heather Brown as Heather; Doug Ulrich as Rick; Kevin Rogers as George Schultz; Karen Coker as Sue

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Following up Scary Tales (1993), a shot on video horror anthology from Baltimore, Maryland, its director Doug Ulrich decided to follow up with a more focused production. You can see this in how, with absolute respect for Scary Tales’ charms, so much has changed. Whilst that film, readapting ideas from even Doug Ulrich’s teenage short films like the segment about Satan’s necklace, and a short prototype version around thirty minutes¹, still felt like a production for all its precursors that was put together with duck tape and hope, Darkest Soul focused on one plot, and feels more focused in general even in how it is made.

As a result, this is more a drama in truth than a horror movie, which makes this paradoxically more of a challenge to appreciate. Opening at a funeral, we follow two male friends, Mark (Jeff Witte) and Tommy (Al Darago). Mark is a regular Joe, Tommy is a motor biker, or merely likes leather jackets and shades, with the pair constantly being fired from jobs because Tommy is anti-authoritarian, like spitting into the freshly grounded mince at spite a female customer in a supermarket, whilst Mark tags along,. Tommy is the “Darkest Soul” of the title, someone who after an upbringing of a domineering father is becoming more immoral in his behavior as the film goes along. When a man from the local cemetery offers the pair jobs as gravediggers, the downward spiral begins as Tommy and Mark start to steal from corpses, their first jeweler taken to a store, with Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart vinyl in the back as an actual store, for $30 dollars and an unregistered handgun, to be followed by more corpse robbing and a decline for the pair to someone’s doom.

This set up nearly takes thirty minutes to reach, half the length of an hour long film, which presents the potential problem, the biggest, for viewers especially if they were expecting a Shot-on-Video horror film. It does begin to escalate as it goes along, sleazy in its own way as Tommy’s downward spiral includes (implied) necrophilia as he drags Mark down with him, a morality tale where any horror to this drama becomes a hallucinatory conclusion. Fed on fear and drugs, the ending, and that being all the horror of this film to justify the genre tag, will disappoint but for me befits this morality tale this is going for. It was interesting to see Darkest Soul, if a real curveball, especially as it still comes from the same people behind Scary Tales. Even if more straight-faced, this follows the previous film in the script being full of cursing and memorable insults, whilst this brings a sudden increase in explicit sexual content too, all meant as part of the storytelling but likely as much to sell the film. It stands out to as it is rarer in SOV cinema to see as not anyone may be comfortable doing actual nudity, especially not trained actresses and actors, something apparent in Scary Tales itself with the most modest and carefully shot scene for a main actress in a segment with her in a bathtub of water, contrasting this where there are figures who are more comfortable with this.

It is also, despite being a lot more cohesive than Scary Tales a lot more difficult to sell, the ultimate iron as, honestly shambolic in a charming way, its spiritual predecessor still had the advantage of sellability as a gory horror film, with no gory prosthetic effects to be seen in Darkest Soul, and being a psychotronic mass of horror you can sell as a cult film. Darkest Soul is to be appreciated for a slower experience, the creator Doug Ulrich proving they could make a film with a proper story, but this is definitely a work you would have benefitted more from, as most will, if you come to this after Scary Tales or a similar tale, and are prepared for something significantly more subdued.

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1) Made available thankfully through the American Genre Film Archive Blu-Ray release of Scary Tales, which included Darkest Soul and the early work.

Scary Tales (1993)

 

Director: Doug Ulrich and Al Darago

Screenplay: Doug Ulrich and Al Darago

Cast: Al Darago as the Storyteller (segment "Storyteller") / Chuck (segment "Satan's Necklace") / John / Rapist (segment "Sliced in Coldblood") / Ron (segment "Level 21") (as Al Darago Jr.); Brad Storck as Dan (segment "Satan's Necklace") / the Gardner (segment "Sliced in Coldblood") / Mr. Dobson / Ballplayer 2 (segment "Level 21"); Ilene Zelechowski as Julie (segment "Satan's Necklace") / Beth (segment "Sliced in Coldblood"); Mark Shapiro as Tom (segment "Satan's Necklace"); Bill Emge as Big Rick (segment "Satan's Necklace"); Doug Ulrich as Fred (segment "Satan's Necklace"); Cindy Darago as Bar Patron (segment "Satan's Necklace") / Bernise (segment "Sliced in Coldblood")

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

 I deal with more assholes than a proctologist!

Directly beamed from Baltimore, “No budget productions present” a VHS haze dream, one of the rare titles to ever get a release in the United Kingdom (on September 2022 from 101 Films/American Genre Film Archives), and on Blu Ray no less, which is ironic knowing this title, preserved from the original S-VHS master tapes, is the anti-thesis to pristine 4K restorations in how it has the grain and damage from a videotape master which has felt the presence of time past distort it. This is, aptly for a shot-on-video title, an acquired taste which completely skirts all notions of what a film traditionally should do to tell a story, but is rewarding as a time piece, a snapshot of the period, if you believe cinema is historical artifacts, and as a shot-on-video fan, gleefully silly and made with love if you love the see a Grand Guignol event as restaged with the moxie of recreating a horror movie with the Halloween decorations found in a Poundland¹, or in this case, in their back yard.

A hooded figure, clearly an animatronics, presides over (real) kids telling them three stories, in a VHS fuzz haze, beginning with a story about Satan’s necklace. Whether the figure should be telling them the stories or not is to debate as, alongside their gory content, this is ripe full of dialogue even when tasteless (“Nice shot Stevie Wonder”) which is gleefully full of swearing or figuring out ways to insult people. The first five minutes of this segment, in its amateur desire to make the dialogue sparkle rather than being dull exposition, makes it even if profane memorable, all before it ever gets to a single detective and a guy finding a necklace with a metal detector. None of the tales, which lasts over seventy minutes, are properly told as anthology narratives, but it is funny that, even here, you see a SOV segment here which can be tied back to M.R. James’ Whistle and I’ll Come to You and A Warning to the Curious, both his original short stories and their multiple adaptations for the BBC, in how you should always be wary about digging up the past, especially when as here you just put a necklace on you find in the ground without checking it. Here, even in the middle of the territory of John Waters films, where these guys can easily find Yoohoo bottle caps, they had the unfortunate chance of finding some of the Devil’s bling, and it has an immediate effect on one of them, when worn, like the ring did to Gollum in the Lord of the Rings tale.

Only Gollum (to my knowledge) never had a dream of having sex with his wife, nor had a wife, where she suddenly turns demonic and pukes blood onto him, least unless J. R. R. Tolkien had excised passages from the books about this. This is where you either find charm in Scary Tales as no budget or do not, as these actors are locals from Baltimore, and they will play multiple roles over the three tales, and into the unofficial sequel Darkest Soul (1994) from the same creators, a labor of love between them all to get the production off the ground. Everyone is playing multiple figures throughout all three segments, and working behind the scenes. Here to have someone, when they see their demonic side breath fire, they have to have the actor to the side in front of the jet of flame to make this seem the case, which is crude but the closest to what they could do without getting someone burnt. They did however manage to get a practical effects creator who, impressively with no budget, could depict good demon ear and finger nail growing effects, even a heart ripping, the gore and effects something the second tale, Sliced in Cold Blood, is going to run with.

Sliced in Cold Blood is meant to be about adultery, but instead it is a sub-genre of no budget cinema which only appeals to those of a certain type, or if you can find humour in it, which is the excuse for a series of gory effects, not the same if cousins to the splatter genre Herschell Gordon Lewis innovated in that. Specifically with the lowest budget works, they seem like the spectacle of having managed to pull off the effect let alone the gore itself is part of the spectacle, whilst Lewis would have found organ meat or a cow tongue if need be. In another context, with the little story here being a jilted husband killing his wife, her lover, and in his loss of sanity frankly another in a close radius, this would be mean and gross, sleazy least in how many times the word “fuck” is used as both a curse word and for sex throughout Scary Tales, but this here is so naïve and over-the-top, it instead becomes absurd. Finding bow and arrow for the lover, and knowing this is a terrible pun giving him the point, the husband after his wife buys a farm goes kill crazy and there is no plot after this, not even punishment for him or an actual finale, only a string of practical effects. A poor guy gardening first and anyone he fancies afterwards cop it, even crushing a man’s head until his eyes pop out, even a woman nearly attacked by a wannabe rapist and the rapist himself.

Obviously aspects of Scary Tales have not aged well, but one of the things about the fan base of these weirdo titles, even if tinted with a little irony, is how it has become about how exaggerated and absurd they are, the irony in the modern day now streaked with affection from the underdogs least getting these films off the ground rather than ridiculing them for having tried, which is an empathy I find is one of the best changes to this type of psychotropic appreciation. The second segment is an antithesis, more than the other two, to what cinema is perceived as in mainstream advertising and Hollywood horror, this a piece entirely there to see the severed head effects and gore, which some will find prurient and gross, some absolutely amateurish. In context however, those who can enjoy it see this coming off more as a spectacle of normal people outside the film industry throwing together a ghoulish visual, even managing to pull off a bisecting of a rapist’s head with a machete that would have been a pain to put together.

Level 21, finishing Scary Tales, is an evil videogame segment which is not a strange premise at the time to have. Even before creepypasta, a phenomenon of fictional tales of cursed video games told straight-faced as real urban legends for the entertainment of being on the modern internet, there were stories about video games. There were the likes of Polybius, the urban myth of the arcade cabinet which was actually a US military experiment in the sinister vibes of an MK Ultra mind control project, or how, confirmed as actually having if unfortunately gruesome moments of bad coincidence, the 1980 arcade game Berzerk, with its evil smiling face creature Otto the main figure to run away from, has the first two cases of players having died whilst playing the cabinet due to heart attacks, due as much to how long they were playing the game, and existing heart conditions, but linked to its infamy as a real legend even if the truth is for scrutiny per case². Level 21 is the level our lead has been trying to reach but never could, the game in a snippet looking like an MS-DOS/Amiga Western role playing game like Might & Magic. The guy, a father, is so addicted to the game, getting past level 20, he neglects his son and plays the game even at work.

Level 21, however, upon reaching it, emits smoke out of the computer monitor and knocks you unconscious, sending you into a world of fantasy. The use of Maryland countryside is one thing, but for a medieval fantasy, this is where the film’s quirks and charm do get weird. You end up dressed as a roman centurion, in the middle of the countryside, and before you ask if you are in a dream, get kicked in the shin by the fantasy dwarf explaining all this to you. Then there is the random ninja, inexplicably in a world of a troll, (an actor with a bald cap, fake teeth and extra large baggy underwear), and a evil magician disguising himself as a damsel in distress, all because clearly some of the crew were learning martial arts. Somehow the horror anthology gets into the type of “loose” martial arts fighting which is a sub-genre in no budget cinema in itself and of its own charm, just because someone wanted to film a martial arts fight scene even if in a fantasy video game setting with no context.

Scary Tales will be appreciated if you enjoy the revelry of shot-on-video and no budget cinema. There is possible joy to have if you have never seen a film like this before, how it cannot hide the “aw shucks” silliness. There is potential delight in seeing the production try at elaborate effects from a made-in-a-garage way – here literally throwing a burning orb of material as a fireball at someone, in a moment where one false move could have burnt someone onscreen, or summoning swords from the ground by having an actor (or their arm) buried under a freshly dug up patch of the grass before the shot – and that is as much where the joy in these films exist from. Again, this is a subjective taste, and this type of cinema is as subjective as you can get. It does have the charm to appreciate however, and least for this person writing this review, I enjoyed every minute of this for these reasons.

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1) Aware this is a reference that will not make sense to non-British readers, or any without having visited the British Isles, this is a discount variety store chain which, whilst not everything is this cost, sells goods usually for one British pound coin. Halloween decorations, let alone toys and food, are cheap and cheerful to use the term, even if they expanded out into even having a fashion section over the years.

2) How Many People Has the Berzerk Arcade Game Killed?, written by Josh Wirtanen for Retrovolve for January 6th 2016.

Dominion (1992)

 

Director: Todd Sheets

Screenplay: Todd Sheets and Misty Wolfe

Cast: Carol Barta as Elizabeth; Frank Dunlay as Roger Williams; Auggi Alvarez as Clarence Theopolis; Charles Monroe as Stan Lotus; Tonia Monahan as Jamalia; Jody Rovick as Gazelle; Ray C. Merrill as Asmodeus; Veronica Orr as Mistianna

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Some Todd Sheets for a quick shot-on-video fix is a pleasure for me. These "SOV" films from the USA are still a niche, least when you are English and they rarely get a release in the United Kingdom barring American Genre Film Archive titles or when they are available on line legally. These films are an acquired taste, but I admit there are within them, including the ultra low budget titles of the digital era into the 2000s, a compelling aesthetic them. With VHS shot titles themselves, with their video produced opening credits and a format, VHS haze, which I have no nostalgia for, and will not view as superior to Blu Ray or even DVD, there is yet for these productions something compelling to watch within them because of this sheen. Todd Sheets, his older films let alone new ones, are as much their own fascination in this territory.

Clearly Dominion is going to be a vampire film from the Salem's Lot (1979) reference in the first scene, of the scene from Tobe Hooper's TV adaptation of a person floating outside a window, though the police here at least consider the recent spree of blood draining killings involving at least a person who thinks they are a vampire, rather than waste time baffled by the bizarre murders, having drained thirteen people by the opening scenes. Alongside an older woman who is clearly a vampire expert, as she keeps a stake in her luggage, the police find themselves having contend with a vampire cult living underground led by her brother, a young boy where the child actor himself is gunning for scenery chewing in how he reads his lines.

As an early Todd Sheets film, those of a certain time period are separate to the others, their productions likely to be (with affection for them) ramshackle or at least silly, this not taking itself too seriously when these vampires have low targets - wishing both to dominate the world but also grocery shops, one female vampire wishes to rule the cosmetics world to fix her pale complexion. They plan to resurrect the boy's master through the Satanic power of rock, Todd Sheets' in-house band Enochian Key, not just having a score credit but onscreen as Enochian Key, playing demon worshippers who eat human flesh. It is fascinating, knowing he was ending even the goriest of films from this time with a thanks to Jesus Christ, that Todd Sheets does pastiche the Satanic Panic on rock and metal music from the eighties here, and that he has the religious zealot mother, formerly a hippy, for a brief scene as an antagonist even though her daughter's decision to go to the Enochian Key concert proved her mother right. These early films, truthfully, are lacksidasical, but they have a charm from this. An actual long form plot may be unlikely in this case to draw out, only scraping through its plot points over nearly seventy minutes, including the least expected romantic melodrama between two older supernatural experts which is barely scratched upon. But this is an aspect of all these early films, as it would not be a Sheets film from this time without a lingering scene or two with gore and animal organ meat as practical splatter effects.

It is a delight, considering they are tied to Todd Sheets into the modern day, I got to see Enochian Key performing onscreen (in character) rather than just in the score, as a homemade metal soundtrack. Soundtracks to Sheets' films, even in the rougher films from this era, are always interesting, and whilst moody at times, one or two pieces do sound like a Philips CD-I lounge track from composer Matthew Jason Walsh. That is neither a ultra obscure joke at a games console few can even emulate either as, alongside tracks which evoke Italian horror composer Fabio Frizzi, not just his pieces from Zombi 2 (1979) but the tropical cuts from that soundtrack, a banger in this case, but there are moments in Dominion which evoke Jim Andron's score for the Philips CD-I version of Tetris (1992). Made available in the modern day as a soundtrack in the streaming era in 2020, it is amusing, especially in a scene for a romance where the crew hired a horse and carriage, how similar they sound, coming from the same year, to the point I did wonder, with no accusations at either side, if any of these tracks from both accidentally blurred similar notes on their synthesizers unintentionally.

Sheets' films from this era do end up being messes as mentioned, which is a warning, as by a Clownado (2018), even with that ridiculous title premise, he fixed his cinematic style and pacing with considerable decades of work, having worked over the years baring a fallow creative period between 2005 to 2013. The early "primitives", to give them a name, have charm though. Some ambition is there - the close-up of keys being thrown to someone, with the camera behind them simulating their travel across in the air, is inventive. There is the gore and the horror fan here behind the camera too - with another least expected moment, that being the least expected chainsaw scene, with limb removal, transpiring because they wanted the scene. The sense this does not follow what is expected, by accident, of what even a low budget horror film should do is also here - it abruptly ends, not with the conclusion of the story, but randomly on two female vampires snacking on a john. This is to be expected with Todd Sheets' films from this era, and I love them now as much for this.