Rating: C+
Dir: Eric Brummer
Star: Jenine Lake, Dookie Flyswatter, Deborah Roberts, William Smith
I certainly cannot deny the ambition on view in this. Made for less than a thousand dollars, it tells the story of a war in hell, in a combination of very low-rent live-action, shot on Super 8 B&W, and occasionally impressive stop-motion and Claymation. It all appears to take place in somebody’s garage and/or basement, with copious use of cardboard for the sets, and apparently, adult film stars in the cast [director Brummer has a lengthy IMDb filmography under the Garbage Pail Kids-inspired name of Slain Wayne, featuring titles like Cock Crazy Quickies 4]. I can’t exactly call this good, yet it has a weirdly compelling watchability. Or perhaps it just seems that way, after the awfulness which was Mini-Skirt Love.
Debbie (Lake) is in hell, and the only way to escape is to do a job for Satan. There’s been a bit of a rebellion in the demons under him, and he has been robbed of the source of his power, his horns. If Debbie will battle her way through the underworld and retrieve them, he promises to release her from the scheduled eternal torment. This probably needs a budget at least 10,000 times what was actually spent, and probably closer to 100,000 times it, in order to do the creative vision anything like justice, and it’s clear Brummer has never heard about the concept of making the film your resources permit. On the one hand: well done for not compromising. On the other: are you mental?
The results are likely to be equally as divisive, because of the wild swings in quality. You’ll go from a startlingly effective piece of stop-motion violence, such as a devil being bisected, to the most cringeworthy delivery of barely audible dialogue imaginable, in consecutive shots. Debbie spends the entire film naked, and there are an awful lot of scenes which appear to be intended to cater to somebody’s specific fetish – probably the director’s – including bondage and spanking. But, hey – if you can’t indulge yourself in your own movie, what’s the point? I’d just rather Brummer had gone the whole Mad God hog, and done it all stop-motion, thereby saving us from human performances which could easily be surpassed by a stick of PlayDoh.
It clocks in at a scant fifty minutes, not including a making-of doc, which more or less confirms what you suspected about the use of cardboard here. This is probably for the best, and I laud Brunner for knowing when to stop (a lesson many micro-budget film-makers could use). It is a little sad his talents thereafter went into things like Asian Party Sluts 2, which I imagine are not renowned for their creative use of stop-motion. While in many ways, this is not very good on any objective basis, there’s no shortage of potential here. If studios can spent $230 million on the likes of Snow Brown and the Seven Shitty CGI Dwarfs, surely they can afford to throw a hundred million bucks at Guillermo Del Toro to remake this.