#vhshitfest

I recently was digging through a box of recorded tapes. Some insane shit (that will appear on the future VHShitfest: The Mixtape Vol. 1) and stumbled across an old home movie tape. After watching it I was flooded with nostalgia and reminiscing on my childhood (age 8 and 9 to be exact). I decided to edit the footage down into a more bite sized chunk for people to check out. This probably won’t interest most people, but I personally love watching and finding people’s old home movies. I especially love watching them when they feature Halloween or Christmas footage, which this has both. There’s some really fun stuff featured, including me flipping out over getting Jet Force Gemini, me as Darth Maul, my brother and I loving Pokemon, me loving some Titanic and Korn, and much more. If you’re into this type of stuff please go check out the video, comment, like, and share. Thanks!

A little over 20 years ago a friend and I were making a sprawling epic of an SOV horror film called RIVERHAUS RANSOM. On a night totally unrelated to the process I was driving down the interstate and smashed my 1988 Chevrolet Celebrity into a deer, sending it flying over the hood and onto the side of the road. I was fine, the deer was not. The Celebrity was somewhere in the middle, matted with a bit of hair, spattered with blood and left with a severed coolant line and some other miscellaneous issues that would make it sound like the yawning apocalypse every time its engine was running for the brief remainder of its life.

There are a few select scenes in RIVERHAUS RANSOM (pictured above) during which you can hear it bellowing out of hell down the street, its garbled engine noises taking over the VHS camera's meager audio capabilities and adding a new kind of ambience into the mix. When I really think about it, this is why I appreciate homemade movies in the first place. Not because they all need to have a beater screaming for dear life (and ending deer life), but because they capture a moment in time that even small indie films can't manage. A time when a group of like-minded—or not—folks got a wild hare up their ass to make something, even if that something can barely muster material worthy of a z-grade rating.

From one Kentucky filmmaker—hey, I can call myself whatever the hell I want—to another, it was my solemn duty to pop in Jack Shrum's BLOOD HUNTER at the wild-eyed witch's hour. Released in 1996, just a few years prior to the filming of RIVERHAUS RANSOM, BLOOD HUNTER tells the tale of Victor, a vampire who relocated to rural Kentucky due to the similarities he finds its environment has in relation to the vague Russian location from which he hails. It's here that he posts up in a cave and lives a relatively quiet life as a nighttime auto mechanic, at least when he's not killing some of the more unsavory denizens of Brownsville. 

Shrum wasn't originally supposed to play the blood-sucking lead, but that didn't stop him from delivering plenty of deliciously dry one-liners you can see coming from a mile away. They're all welcome, and it's clear everyone involved in the film was very welcome in town, too, as they brought a slice of Hollywood to add to the local flavor in a place that apparently didn't even have any stoplights at the time. Who could fault their enthusiasm? There are plenty of locations that give residents a chance to laugh it up in the background, or even step into the occasional role. Shrum loves tasking his actors with spewing out full scenes of dialogue exchanges without any cuts, which makes it extra delightful when an actor stumbles over a word in one of their final lines. You can practically feel the "fuck it, we're not doing that scene again" energy floating through the air. There are almost no actors here anyway outside of Chuck Ellis, who plays Sheriff Ben Taylor from deep down within his soul. 

When BLOOD HUNTER came out it made the local news in an incredible time capsule of a report that's included in VHShitfest's Blu-ray, which gives the film about as loving a home as humanly possible. BLOOD HUNTER was produced for around $18,000 depending on who you ask, most of which came from Shrum himself and little of which is visible on screen at any single moment. It may not be a masterpiece even by the standards of its contemporaries, but it was money well spent, clearly, and the only fallout was that poor fella who played the child molester. Apparently everyone thought this role reflected reality and his reputation quickly turned to dirt, forcing him to relocate. 

You call yourself a VHS fan, but yet you haven't picked the new issue of Lunchmeat VHS Magazine? What are you waiting for? Cruise on over to adjustyourtracking.com, and get your issue today!

By Dan Kinem

End my life, Lord. Please do it now. It normally takes me about a day of thinking to pick a movie to watch. In this case, it took me a week of deliberating. I finally went with an obscure movie called Enemy Unseen. All I wanted was some crazy crocodile killing. Is that too much to ask for, God? What in the world would make me think that a movie with a giant blood-thirsty croc on the cover would have that?

When the movie opened with a song I swear was featured during a Dylan and Brenda 90210 montage I was nervous. "Unique choice of music," I thought. "But maybe they are going with music you wouldn't expect to hear to throw the audience off ala Cannibal Holocaust," I hoped. Nope. A man and woman are wandering around the jungle for some reason when they notice a weird ritual being performed by some natives. During the ritual a woman sacrifices herself to a crocodile and dies. The death was highly underwhelming and entirely off-screen, but I still had hope. Instead of running, they stick around and are immediately noticed by the natives and chased down. The guy is then shot with arrows and falls into the water where a crocodile kind of eats him, but not really. And yes, you read that right. He is shot and killed first, then the crocodile gets to him (although leaves no visible marks of any kind when we see the man's body later on). The woman is captured and taken hostage.

By this point I was very skeptical of the film and began noticing that it was more focused on the natives than on the crocodiles, but I still kept watching. The owner of this foreign land (known as Crocodile Valley -- good choice when buying property) is the girl's father, who hires a hodgepodge team of mercenaries to go into the jungle to find her. How a team this bad was assembled is beyond me, but they immediately start dying off and fighting each other. The only two people in the group that matter are Steiger (played by Vernon Wells) and Josh (played by Stack Pierce). These two actually have fun chemistry and manage to make for some enjoyable moments. It basically plays out like any other 80s low-budget action movie. They end up getting caught by natives, breaking free, saving the girl, and then the girl falls in love with Vernon (just six days after her best friend/boyfriend died). Credits.

What could have set this movie apart would have been some crazy fucking crocodiles, but sadly that never occurs. We get a few scenes of crocodiles biting people a little bit, we get a couple scenes where the crocodiles lay around on the land and watch people, and then we get one or two implied crocodile deaths. Highly disappointing on that front. If you go into this movie expecting the horror elements to be extremely, extremely minimal and the action elements to be extremely, extremely stock then you won't be disappointed. It's just an easy to watch, cheesy action movie in the vein of most other AIP movies.

By Dan Kinem

Canada is a very weird place. For one, they put disgusting cheese curd on their already perfectly delicious fries. For two, their BBQ sauce tastes like taco sauce. For three, they aren't nearly as proud of Degrassi as they should be. And for four, Science Crazed.

That last one might not be as obvious as the other three but it's the most bizarre of them all. Science Crazed was the one and only film from Ron Switzer (though he may have done another that never got released called Buzzsaw Nightmares), a Toronto-based madman/experimental genius. It was made in 1989 as a "spoof," though somehow I am doubtful of this. It's so lost and absurd in its execution that it is impossible to tell the true intentions behind this film. I'd like to view it as an extended drug-induced noise pop music video rather than a horror/comedy spoof. "Spoof" in this instance is a marketing attempt to play off the film's flaws, but rather those flaws should be embraced because they are what makes this film so special.

The movie is basically a fucked-up Canadian retelling of Frankenstein. Dr. Frank is decades ahead of his time but only he knows it. He gets the boot from his job half-way through his most important experiment -- which I'll dub "The 21-Hour Birth" (or is it the 18 hour birth? The math gets a little jumbled, but that's not the point). Frank -- in the way only a genius could -- kidnaps a girl and makes her carry a fetus to birth in a extremely accelerated time-frame that kills the mother and her freak of a son... or does it?

The rest of the movie is 77 minutes of extreme close-ups, experimental lighting, and noise. Yes, noise. Not only does the soundtrack sound like a lion with a bone stuck in its throat, but the rest of the time is filled with sounds from the son, or The Fiend, as he is referred to. The sounds he makes while he slowly kills his victims can only be described as a helicopter trying to start that literally only has a drop of gas left yet won't stop trying. The whole effect is a cacophony of noise coupled with this bizarre art student cinematography that must be seen to be believed. The Fiend being the slowest motherfucker in film history and the whole cast being the dumbest motherfuckers in film history only adds to the effect. Close-up of The Fiend's boots dragging on the ground. Close-up of two girls faces while they work out. Repeat. I'm not lying when I say "repeat," either. It's on an endless loop. Yet, each shot is more entrancing than the last.

Where the film succeeds with flying colors is the dialogue. It is entirely dubbed and boy does it sound like it. Sometimes the actors mouths will move and Switzer makes the brilliant decision to just say nothing. Other times he does the opposite, having straight-faced characters continually repeat lines like, "Mommy, Momma, Mommie" over and over. Each character is more hilarious and ridiculous than the last, but the legend of the movie is the detective. With each line he spits out I was crying. He was masterful in his over-the-top seriousness. My favorite being... "And I'll tell you something else! It looks like our baby... is a grown killer."

I will not call this movie entertaining, though it is. Instead, I will call it a Canadian Stan Brakhage Frankenstein adaptation on the marijuana with a Yo La Tengo soundtrack. While The Fiend lived at the end of the film and lives in our hearts to this day, it's just a shame he didn't make the end-credits promised follow-up appearance in "Return of the Fiend." That would have been next level.

That's right, we aren't dead. In fact, VHShitfest just turned four years old today. What started out as a review website strictly for movies viewed on VHS has turned into a distribution company and a film company. I never thought it'd go from shitty reviews of shitty movies to traveling the country doing what we love to do. I can't thank everyone who has supported us along the way enough. It really means a lot to still get messages and comments about old reviews or videos we did that we basically have forgotten about and to hear all the positive responses to Adjust Your Tracking.