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Folies Murtrieres has been covered extensively elsewhere and is something of a minor sensation online due to its disted atmosphere and dreamlike approach. Less remarked upon is Pellissier's debut outing, Les Proies du Mal (1982), a three-hour super 8 excursion into madness set in a damned nursing home that is unavailable in full. From the excerpt I’ve seen, he outdoes himself for hazy candle-lit atmosphere, crafting a story that is both startlingly gory and evocative. His 1985 offering L’Elue des Enfers is a 36-minute condensation of The Exorcist that bears all the hallmarks of his singular filmmaking style.

The majority of Pellissier’s interiors are decaying mansions and desolate country homes, suggesting a grandeur and decadence long since gone to rot. His handheld tracking shots manage to capture every detail of this scenery, the bizarrely papered walls, harsh hardware lighting casting severe shadows and the ominous threats unseen in darkened corners. The camera is never static, leering between tree branches during the opening ritual, adding a spectatorial perspective and the suggestion of things meant to go unseen. Dialogue scenes repeatedly cut in on uncomfortable low-angle close-ups of faces, this invasive technique taken one step further as his limited frame often bisects characters’ features to distort them entirely.

Nothing here should be effective, and I’m not necessarily arguing it as a forgotten successor to the possession film throne. But there is something memorable in the natural distancing effect of super 8 film itself, flickering and bouncing as it es through the film gate, bearing scratches and fuzzy visuals that ought to distract from the film’s impact yet somehow enhance it. Pellissier’s filming style and isolationism give the genuine sense that these are the final two people in the world, the stakes of this battle placed front and center. There may be very little of the subtext of The Exorcist, particularly Father Karras’ crisis of faith, but he approaches the material with such conviction and glee that it’s hard not to ire his efforts. Pellissier knows his images are crafty, and that’s why he lingers on them for so long and why they stick with you.

Partial as I am to Blood Summer, this might just be the quintessential MSS Films production. Another inversion of the slasher formula improbably shot on 16mm, the real attraction to Skullface is seeing strange people hang out while a Doberman constantly barks onscreen. This is a world where multiple Pantera t-shirts, jarring camera discontinuity, long takes of Victorian baby portraits, and heating vents are all part of life’s essential fabric. I’d still be fascinated if this was nothing more than dope smoking and spray-painting pentagrams on a living room floor.

As with Blood Summer and 666 Kill, Baby, Kill, Skullface epitomizes the Marginal Slasher, leaving the kill scenes completely incidental to the meat of the story (and there are only three victims in total). I don’t think Matt Smith ever really set out to scare his audience, or even to make films that are weird for their own sake. He just happens to be a weird guy who likes gore, so he couldn’t make films any other way. Most short films work because they cut away the fat, getting straight to the point in their limited runtimes. Smith’s shorts leave the gristle intact, but they give you something to chew on, people and places to marvel at and wonder why they’ve been invested with such importance. The effect isn’t so much bringing his focus out into the real world as it is sucking the essence of those lives into a vacuum, presenting us with films that are so real they’re uncanny. This is the way that some people live, and yet it’s also the way that nobody on Earth could possibly exist long-term. It’s foreign to most people’s lifestyles, a realism that negates itself by sheer lack of willpower. Because life is messy and sometimes you get stoned and lose track of your thoughts.

Ripped from the headlines (though arriving nearly a decade after the infamous case that inspired it), Van Bebber’s short transplants the NY murder of Gary Lauwers by Ricky Kasso to the dead-end Dayton of the early 1990s. Presented as a near-documentary recollection, complete with after-the-fact narration by mostly unnamed participants, this could be Jim’s masterpiece. There’s nothing supernatural or unreal about Ricky, he’s a confused and wayward kid himself who can’t just brush off the pain in his life as much as he’d like to make others believe. Little details stick with you—Jim never excuses Ricky’s actions, but the cop’s leering face as he breaks the news to Jimmy at the start of the film is as haunting a non-violent image as the work produces. Narration informs us that nobody picked up Ricky’s ashes, that the “morgue attendants just threw them in the fucking trash.” Despite what we’ve seen before, the film ends with Jimmy weeping in his cell, lamenting the loss of a friend he always backed up.

There’s an essentially Ohioan desolation to the entire film that can’t be denied if you’ve lived anything resembling it—wasting afternoons at the bandshell getting high because there’s nowhere better to go, going to parties you know you’ll regret in the morning because they kill the time, and you might get high if you put on the right face. I can think of few better cinematic examples of the Friendship of the Damned—spending endless hours with people you aren’t sure you even like, just because there’s nobody else who will tolerate you. The eventful party at the core of the film is a picture-perfect capture of both subcultural excess and mid-Ohio abandon. Wood s, puking attendees, dim lighting, live tattoos and piercings. As excruciating as the climactic killing is, the first fifteen minutes are the essence of the film, of the desperation borne of boredom and the positions we find ourselves stuck in, trying to figure things out with no clue how it all might tie together in the end. There’s a hopeless sense of confining oneself to your fate throughout the entire film, actions cast as predetermined regardless of any moral certainties or code.

The work that Van Bebber considers his only genuine horror film, an unrelenting glimpse into the life and mind of a serial killer stranded along Ohio’s desolate stretches of farmland. Its unflinching mise-en-scène of serial killer squalor initially seems too extreme to take seriously and then the sickness of it all hits you—rats scurry in the background almost imperceptible, every surface streaked with blood, decaying slivers of faces tacked to the wall, shattered beer bottles strewn about. An ugly house in between cornfields draws no attention, and Martin’s filthy and decrepit pad is only one step away from a hoarder’s nest, the clutter less a consequence of a life of accumulation than it is the remainders of a life without boundaries. This is a film about the inherent animalism of humanity itself. When John pulls a bone fragment—or a grub, or some other unmentionable piece of human remains—from his nostril, the sick sensation of going too far but refusing to relent fully sets in.

As horrendous and visceral an experience as it may be, half of the film is spent with John alone, observing the psychological tortures and inward violence that defines his existence. Even the most prolific killer spends far more time with themselves than their victims, and Van Bebber is never one to cut his cutthroats a break. Somehow the film’s most haunting note is its final, bloodless image—Martin jogging through the cemetery that opens the film, his flannel flapping open and a shovel in his hand. Often ignored in favor in favor of reactions to his gut punch style is the fact that Van Bebber is a master craftsman, methodical and precise in his work—see the repeated dolly shots in on Martin watching TV, escalating through various states of psychological deterioration: “What do you know about reality?!”; “Why are you doing this to me??”. Questions as easily asked of the filmmaker himself as his creations onscreen.

Jon Christian Møller’s debut short is a film that gets down and dirty, from the sheer physicality of the victims and killer rolling around in the dirt and leaves, to the ample blood spurting throughout. His most infamous film may be a bloodbath, but there’s little of the pornographic offal fixations of likeminded German efforts; the film is nasty and occasionally juvenile, but not as single-minded as would be suspected from its title. At the same time, it’s as much a time capsule of teenage gore film and heavy metal fandom in a particular time and place. Eurogore efforts get dismissed endlessly for their lack of substance or innovation, but in sterling examples such as this, the entire point is the marginality of the material captured onscreen. If Steve Puchalski called the work of Chester Turner “one take filmmaking” at its worst, Møller seems to have been happy to pick up the same approach and revel in what makes it so unique and thrilling to explore.

Now available for pre-order: the first officially-licensed release of Møller's filmography on DVD. Each title is English-subtitled for the first time, and the release includes a 30-page booklet of new writing (ships May 2025).

experimentalkindergarten.bigcartel.com/product/pre-order-videogore-the-films-of-jon-christian-moller-dvd

This late period Blade release contains less humor than would be expected from the Wimp series, embracing more of a midwestern gothic atmosphere. With a decade of work under his belt, Brown was at the height of his abilities here, and his penultimate statement is genuinely impressive. Everything proceeds with a desolation and gloom that asserts A Darker Light as a far more languid, depressive experience than was typical of Brown and company. Somber as it may be, the film is full of gory sequences, including a particularly bloody lesbian shower attack and the two climactic fights in the woods and quarry, offering a perfect blend of more introspective and outwardly visceral horror that succeeds thanks to the complete conviction invested in both threads.

Throughout the film we spend a lot of time with the vampires but never learn much about them, which ultimately works as a strength. Things like Glenn’s sister’s heroin addiction and his own descent into alcoholic misery (drunk in the daylight, reviewing his own crime scene photos of his slaughtered wife) add an all-too-real note of midwestern malaise. Part of the film’s strength is in melding these real-world horrors with its more expressive treatment of supernatural elements. Most notable is the jarring dream sequence of a vampire mass, complete with shaky camera and a slowed frame rate depicting torch-lit blood rites in the dusky woods. There are repeated close-ups of candles and bizarre ephemera to give the occult overtones some weight, and the heavy red/orange/purple filtered light that bathes most interior spaces unifies Brown’s visual approach. Likewise, the majority of the exteriors carry harsh light and verge on overexposure as though we ourselves are unable to take everything in at once and remain in some form of darkness.

As we’ve come to expect from Blade, the regionalism of the finished film is one of its most intriguing attributes. Brown again crafts a world defined by the disruption of midwestern living and customs. Scenery is provided by brick buildings on cobblestone streets, overstuffed couches crammed into corners of townhome apartments, and white walled living spaces abound. At the same time, scenes abound of desolate country roads, baked by the sun, contrasted with moody autumnal scenes in the graveyard and the woods. It’s clearly a consequence of the filming schedule, but by the film’s climax the foliage has died, leaving barren tree branches and dead grass for the final showdown between Sean and Nigel in the quarry. Even in its brief sixty-eight-minute runtime, Brown’s film imparts a sense of life eclipsing itself, of days and hours ing by without so much as a second glance from those invested in the minute agonies of existence. Hardworking folks are too enveloped in daily endeavors to notice just where the time is going.

--From forthcoming Ohio writing project

Choppy and frantic, Disturbing the Peace is the perfect example of a super 8-to-video edit matching a film’s tone. The silent opening scene is indicative of where Sjogren is coming from, rapidly cutting between a slow-mo beating, someone shooting up, and solarized snippets of a woman stripping. From here, it’s a loosely organized series of vignettes and set pieces, and things feel especially disted by the final act. Along the way we get the single nastiest chainsaw bisection I’ve seen in any film, which is nearly enough to place this in the horror genre. There are also multiple impressively stupid driving stunts (Sjogren seems to get off on crashing into mailboxes especially). Still, the scenes filmed cruising along winding ocean roads point to a more elaborate production set up, and the chase with Kevin atop a rival car and assaulting it with a pick axe proves that there was a decent amount of filmmaking craft behind this. There’s also a genuinely impressive performance in Teddy, whose raving frat boy psychosis gets things off to an unhinged start.

This is a high ambition vision with a great deal of talent, hindered only by its juvenile single-mindedness and some technical glitches that threaten to derail things. The dialogue is low in the mix, but lines are largely stoned rumination on the daily grind, stabs at hard boiled narration, and urban legend drug horror stories. Most of the action scenes play out silently, and I’m almost certain stretches were filmed MOS, which adds to the disconnected feeling. The hand-to-hand action is awkward, captured with a frenzied camera, but compensated with copious bloodshed. What really succeeds is the film’s insinuation of how moral rot and decadence lead to exhaustion. Sjogren captures the casual nihilism of a world gone mad, playing into the subcultural vogue of 80s transgression (he’s also clearly seen some Richard Kern films). Count this as a particularly nasty pulp novel brought to the screen.

Lambert’s debut feature owes a clear debt to early John Waters, yet despite the crass potential of its premise, it manages to be less offensive than you’d expect. What really stands out is the film’s embrace of low-stakes interpersonal conflicts to keep it grounded, which often succeeds because it leans on performances and has a cast who actually are up to the job. As a result, the jokes work more broadly and are less reliant on the non-sequiturs that derail most SOV comedies. This overall lighter tone makes the sporadic outbursts of gore more disconcerting, and Lambert’s own score throughout the film adds a great deal of unexpected atmosphere. Grotesque touches abound, with heavy pancake makeup, warts, and a birthday party for a doll all contributing to the bizarre nature of this regional production. The montage of ritual preparation near the climax is arguably the most effective sequence, due in part to the ominous folk rock ballad on the soundtrack. The dimly lit action of the finale reveals Lambert’s strengths in creating moody visuals, and the final image is surprisingly stark and haunting, a nice punctuation to the rest of the film’s more unhinged stylings. This is yet another perfect example of mid-90s SOV’s potential: barely released beyond local rental outlets and with little online profile, it's another piece of the puzzle out there and just waiting to be discovered.

High grade 90s scuzz, complete with thick goldenrod carpets, bizarrely patterned couches, and pastel bedsheets on brass frame beds. The first 20 minutes play like a tour of 90s living spaces that excavate the bizarre decor decisions that held the decade in thrall. This is all punctuated with some scenes of genuinely nasty bloodletting, the tonal shifts in the plot adding to the imbalance suggested by the film’s title. Surprisingly, as unbelievably vile as several scenes are, there’s something approaching restraint when you consider how many violent moments are deliberately obscured or kept off screen. There are also more suitably grimy touches like the squalor of Al’s apartment or the couple having couch sex on top of a half-eaten sandwich. Likewise the scene with Al and Bunny’s brother Rich arguing over how much they can drink stands as a perfect encapsulation of no-count masculine aggression.

On one level, the scene where Bunny raves about the Eagles and croons “Hotel California” is skin crawling time filler, but it’s also a fascinating reveal of the barren cultural scope of so-called transgressive characters. For all the post-Apocalypse Culture button pushing of serial killer culture, this sequence nails the sheer mundanity and horrible taste of history’s most heinous figures. Al’s ignorance of the band shows what a square peg he really is, a cultureless bore unable to communicate with people or make it in the world, so the desperation of his rancid relationship with Bunny offers a far more doom-laden tone than the awkward romance of their meeting suggests.

Requiem der Teufel zeroes in on domesticity with a particular eye for the home space itself, its structural nature, and its function in routine existence. SOV tales of domestic disturbance don’t often work—much less when you can’t understand what’s being said—because teenaged creators have never lived such turmoil. Reiff seems to understand the confining nature of spaces when two people are at odds. Expressive lighting—provided by over-keyed natural sources—casts dramatic shadows, and close ups on objects and facial features reveal how details are magnified through daily routine and oppressive interaction. Emotional and physical abuse are broken down into component parts, their basest qualities all that remain or need to.

Minute details emerge after the central murder: the house turning to a pigsty via the accumulation of refuse. Even a solitary existence is defined by the space that confines it. Ultimately what emerges is a psychodrama enhanced by gore. Disembodied hands and close ups on everyday items come to greater significance in the latter half, revealing the importance assumed by objects taken for granted in day-to-day life. As with any good horror story, disruption of the ordinary is the chief concern beneath it all. Certainly the whole thing could be much shorter, but we would lose the emphasis on routine that informs the entire ideal and sets things into motion. Sure, the Raimi-esque spookshow of the finale takes it to more traditional territory, but how we arrive there carries all the more weight as a result.

Post-1995 SOV releases have been an acquired taste for me, and a lot of EI releases walk a fine line. Devil Souls is indicative of its production date with particularly rough consumer video and mechanical noise underlying everything. On the other hand, there’s little of the subcultural posturing or fixations that are abundant in this era, and it feels fairly quaint and charming. Buckles thrusts us into a world of connected garages and sterile interiors, the sort of real but uncluttered spaces that reveal little of the personalities of their inhabitants. Domestic disputes unfold in overexposed long takes, a decision that fits rather than feeling static and unimaginative, and the headache-inducing lighting decisions make everything feel true to life. By contrast, many of the exteriors are indecipherable darkness, except later in the film where the floodlit wooded scenes make great use of the open space and atmosphere. The finale itself is as brilliantly lo-fi as is possible, and displays the grubbiest image quality this side of a Falcon Video release.

As far as the horror elements, it’s hard for me not to love an SOV featuring a mummy, especially one with a starkly lit exhumation scene that makes great use of darkness, a single lantern light source, and low angle shots. There are also exterior long shots with zombies dressed in bloody clothes killing men in the woods, the greenery so distorted it looks like an nth generation Euro bootleg. Buckles juggles several intertwining plots and doesn’t end up with a nonsensical mess, wisely keeping things moving, which helps the general lack of gore and emphasis on a static camera. This is an SOV with a story to tell rather than technical ambitions, and that’s why it remains interesting despite the pace of the action. We also get this essential bit of dialogue via an argument:

-“You go to hell you son of a bitch”
-“Been there, done that, goodbye”

Obscurus Legatus lives up to its title with picture quality so poor it often resembles technicolor smears on the screen. The vibrancy of the colors themselves pushes through the visual murk to create an image that’s often luridly hypnotic, giving the entire film the look of having been irradiated. Despite the visual haze, the camera work is surprisingly fluid and inventive, the expected handheld tracking shots steadier than you’ll usually find in Eurogore outings. There’s also a strong visual sense, with unique compositions and framings throughout—see the scenes where a trio of video renters are filmed from within the television itself while waiting for their tape to play. Nothing is as stunted or as indulgent as you’d expect, and while it may largely be nonsense to non-German speakers, there’s a distinct sense of ambition and scope.

There’s something particularly effective about the kitchen sink approach to mise-en-scène, the mixture of simplicity and idealism. The ritual scenes mix guys in brown robes hamming it up with some genuinely stark and brutal imagery. There’s an important recognition of the stasis and everyday life, particularly when the plot shifts midway through to an investigation (cue a library scene). But the more horrific elements remain, and the climax stands out with some of the rare nighttime SOV cinematography that looks good and even pyro effects. In its final ten minutes, Felde proves that everything proceeding was just a build up. Even if the resolution doesn’t make much sense, it looks good and works on an aesthetic level.

Michael Legge carved a niche for himself with off-kilter comedies dipping into horror elements, and ads for his 1989 debut Working Stiffs were seemingly in every underground film zine of the day. He managed to stand out from the pack as a result of his prolific releases and the fact that his SOV and super 8 comedies were actually funny, avoiding the grating attempts so widespread in the underground. Potential Sins is something altogether different, a low budget dark comedy/mystery featuring an ensemble cast and based around extensive dialogue rather than broad physical comedy. Largely taking place within a single home, the action is isolated, confining the cast to an inherently unbalanced space through circumstance. Though a real house provides this setting (given the exposed plywood throughout, it appears to be in some state of construction or repair), it feels like a studio set, something colder and more distant than the domestic emphasis captured in the works of Todd Jason Cook. The recognizable signifiers of mid-90s existence do remain, including pastel duvet covers, wicker shelves, and faux brick ing. Legge employs a lot of handheld shots to negate the static sitcom style that you would expect, and there are some nice low tech tracking shots between rooms, which also produce some moments of elaborate blocking, recalling a theatrical production more than anything else. When breaking away to one-on-one conversations between the cast, there’s a genuine attempt made at character development, which may be slight given the size of the cast, but helps this effort stand out.

The film deals entirely in adult frustrations and exhaustion: disappointments at work, marriage troubles, the toll of long-simmering family tension, and neuroses surrounding faith and sexuality. Unlike Tim Ritter’s adultery narratives conceived during his teenage years, Legge brings a believable sense of world-weariness that results in a fairly cynical assessment that change isn’t possible, and people will remain in the ruts they’ve dug for themselves. The final gag injects a slight hint of the supernatural, including a lo-fi reveal that makes the predictability of the punchline count for a bit more in the grand scheme of things.

After three minutes of padded credits over driving footage, Candini dives in and means business. Low-rent clowns, unaware children, and afflicted wives mingle in unrelated capacities to suggest a diseased state of existence. Such banality exists alongside extended graphic wound care, presented in loving and gruesome detail. Illness and affliction are just facets of life, no matter how bizarre or distorted they may be through the camera lens. Despite this, the final third delivers escalating geek show degeneracy that manages to be more oppressive and distressing, leaving the screen awash in fluids and domestic misery without resolution.

There’s a special fascination with 1982 as SOV’s zero year, and Bad Taste Movie No. 1 gets some measure of interest from its early appearance on the market. Alternating between bad comedy bits, stripteases, and on-the-street stunts, this can be distilled into a parade of homely people, blow-up dolls, and rubber masks. At times it plays like a version of Killing of a Chinese Bookie set entirely in Crazy Horse West, Mr. Sophistication stealing the cameras and indulging in some extended after-hours antics. That sense of derangement carries through the runtime, giving a distinct impression of the cast doing things they normally wouldn’t just because a camera is present. It’s entirely devoid of horror but still manages to get under your skin, with the large woman dancing in a pig mask standing as a humiliating and bizarre low point. The recurring canned crowd noise and laughter do nothing to assure you and only add to the sense of forced captivity you feel watching until the end. This is eighty minutes that never achieve stasis or balance, and there’s no point meant to be understood. I’m positive that people coming here to log and review the film have watched it more intently than whatever its intended audience ever did, and as terrible as it may make you feel, I can’t deny I’ll probably revisit it again.

An efficiently grimy British crime SOV. The low-down mix of mix of heroin culture and bloody robberies/home invasion smacks of the forced nihilism so prevalent throughout late 80s/early 90s underground projects, at times ending up comically over the top. Ford manages to rein his featurette in by virtue of its bleak and largely humorless tone. The middle section drags a bit (nobody needs to see a spliff rolled in real time) and loses some of the manic energy of the first third, but it all settles into a groove that works. The reliance on longer takes once inside the flat stands as a nice contrast to the more frantic style of the opening scenes, so there at least seems to have been a considered approach to the work's structure. The shooting up sequence is a highlight, contrasting some striking nightmare imagery with an especially brutal torture sequence.

I’m certainly guilty of lionizing the most obscure trash for its own sake, but this is a good example of one work that stands on its own merits and needs no contextual justification. The video image on my copy is degraded and often flicks to a sickly orange tint, which makes for appropriately queasy viewing. This is the sort of inadvertent technical glitch that adds to the strengths of a low budget work, making even an otherwise padded scene like the extended mopping of blood off a tile floor a particularly expressive moment.

Thanks to ScourCinema for rescuing this one.

Ranko began as a series of super 8 shorts and featurettes, with attempts along the way to secure government funding for a feature-length installment. Failing this, Stevenson and his collaborators bought high-end video equipment and took production into their own hands yet again. Distribution never followed and the film was essentially shelved after a few screenings and mention in Michael Helms' Fatal Visions zine, going unfinished for the better part of a decade (hence the 1999 release date listed on the copy reviewed here). Less an out-of-date Rambo parody than its title and set-up would lead one to believe, the film’s Antipodean origin means that Mad Max is a far bigger influence on the finished product. Stevenson updates that template to a recognizable and inhabited world rather than one of desolate squalor, though the final showdown at an abandoned mill brings provides some needed wasteland atmosphere. A review in Independent Video lists a nearly-two-hour runtime, so the version I found seems to have been edited and tightened up, with early scenes in particular moving along quickly. There’s not much wasted space as a result, and it’s better for things to jump around than overstay their welcome and drag on.

It isn’t nearly as goofy or insubstantial as the satirical title would lead you to believe, and Stevenson displays some serious craft in constructing his tale. As should be expected with underground comedies, it’s rarely successful in generating laughs, though the darker sequences show some sick humor that connects. The murder of Ranko’s family, even played for black comedy, is a surprisingly dark deviation, especially coming after such lighthearted normalcy. The latter half of the film packs some ambitious and bloody gunfights, along with impressive car and motorcycle stunts. The first half defies the expectations of action with tranquility and goofy romantic comedy, only to reassert the carnage in an over-the-top fashion in a climax that sees splattered brains and organs and even a chainsaw employed in dispatching the villains. Stevenson uses a choppy, elliptical editing style during action scenes to heighten the impact of the gunfire and explosions, and there’s interesting and professional camera work throughout, including dolly shots and unique angles. The original soundtrack music (“Grunge Score” by The Breed) is competent, but also serves to date this firmly to the 1990s. Thankfully, the film is free of other turn-of-the-millennium technological decisions, and stands on its own as an interesting and effective underground action film when it drops the goofy comedy.

--From Subterranean Cinema: Missing Pieces of the US Video Underground

A work that stands alongside Doug Ulrigh’s Scary Tales as the platonic ideal of SOV horror. Chuck Gotski is a family man, horror fan, and aspiring writer, and there’s little reason to believe his character, John, is far removed from the man himself. Bobo is set within his suburban townhome and features every detail of his life in 1994, yet again tapping into that vein of home movie familiarity that those of us who endured the 90s can recognize from our own pasts. There’s an everyman quality to the short that’s endearing, even as Gotski’s realization of his bizarre scenario is anything but average.

What really stands out is the go-for-broke abandon evidenced onscreen. By its reputation, SOV horror is lauded for teenagers capturing unsupervised fun and bad decisions on camera, but here a grown man gets into the action. It’s impossible for Bobo to scare you, but there is a fascinating sort of derangement at play in its one-man construction, and envisioning Gotski rolling around his house alone is a deranged scenario. When his family was away at his mother-in-law’s, Gotski didn’t want to drink beer and watch TV, he wanted to film a self-contained horror story featuring a clown puppet. At the same time, there’s the sweet realization that in making Bobo’s horror’s so mild, he set out to create something that his young sons could appreciate. Also fascinating is the matter of John’s failed horror writing career, potentially (or at least speculatively) a representation of Gotski’s own frustrations as an independent creative. In a way, it becomes a fitting capture of an entire swathe of video makers’ desires cast onscreen.

It’s easy to laugh at projects like this for their rudimentary grasp of film construction, weak performances, and the sheer comic potential of the scenario. But it’s also a perfect example of SOV’s value as cultural documentation. This is what horror fans were doing with their time in the mid-1990s, and in constructing these personal visions, they were unable to lose sight of their daily lives and responsibilities. More than celebrating amateur creativity, it also captures the very way of life that sustained such ambitions.

Before Saturn’s Core released this and Gotski’s follow-up The Body Man on a limited-run VHS, Bobo found a bit of life in James Stanger’s Independent Video Magazine. There, Gotski wrote a short history of the video and promoted it to open-minded fans of no-budget horror. Also worth noting is another issue’s mention of Gotski’s as-yet-unreleased slasher comedy short, Hockey Mask Killer, which won an award at Kelly Hughes’ Lucky Charm Awards in 1993.

An agonizing film, both in the extremes of its final revelation as well as its unflinching depiction of loneliness and despair. On its surface a story of necrophiliac obsession, Claypool’s West Virginia-lensed B&W obscurity is actually a largely sexless portrait of one of life’s unfortunates grasping to make a connection. Wafting with fumes of garbage, decay, and spray paint, the film’s aesthetic decisions prove to be far more polished than its rough exterior would suggest. Fluid dolly shots predominate alongside expressive canted angles and harshly-lit crosscuts between apartment residents and display mannequins. The busy soundtrack featuring distant voices and mournful calls from around the building, and especially the constant moaning from the theater downstairs, also adds a busier sense of restless urban squalor. All these elements should add up to something completely lurid and exhausting, but Claypool depicts a world entrapped in filth rather than an entirely nihilistic vision of abandon.

The film thrives in its choice of settings and impressive production design, alternating between trash-strewn alleys, the crusty porno shop with its funhouse lighting, and Leonard’s own squalid living space. Claypool’s focus within the apartment isn’t the perversion of the scenario itself, but the minutiae of his protagonist’s situation, revealing the one-sided exchanges of his unhealthy devotion to Anna. A lot of the film’s success comes from Jack Griffith’s performance, fresh faced and naïve even while performing aberrant acts. There’s also a chasteness to his desires and their representations, a complete disconnect with the reality of what he’s doing. Leonard’s only engagements with sex are his inhalant-induced visits to the theater, his presence there a matter of habit rather than any expressed desire. Inundated with erotic stimulation, it’s the furthest thing from his mind. Leonard’s own culpability in what transpired is directly confronted at the film’s conclusion, and while there’s no neat moral summation of the film’s messy ideas, there’s plenty to read into. This is a film where tenderness and genuine love aren’t impossible, they just seem to be unreachable.

The film’s sole color sequence is its only moment of outright violence, and it manages to be genuinely gut-churning. The frenzied handheld camera stands as a contrast to the mannered styling of the rest of the narrative, another assertion that what we see on film is realer than life itself. Beyond this, the film’s horror is minimal, though there is an inherently disturbing quality to Leonard’s delusions of care manifested as propriety over Anna’s body. There comes a point where Leonard himself acts on violent impulses that cast him in no better a light than anyone else in the film. What difference does it make that he takes his aggression out on a corpse when it represents in his mind a real person? Every detail of and expression in the film is tainted irreparably, though it does struggle with the question of whether this must be so. There’s an ever-present tension between the morbidity of the scenario and the very real representations of decay—physical, mental, and spatial. This is a vision of existential rot that sees the potential for escape, a pinhole vision of the other side. In the end, Claypool suggests that only an absolute break, the complete destruction of everything we’ve known and depended on, can bring about release and the potential for a new life.

Matt Smith’s first distributed short film is all over the place, mixing prehistoric aquatic creatures, a masked slasher, pot growing Klan , and UFO sightings into one unresolved mess. It looks like utter dogshit, the film-to-video transfer completely distorted and ruining any chance of visual coherence that might make up for the narrative disconnect. Things don’t add up at any point, which gives the kaleidoscopic weirdness of the movie a more endearing, see-what’ll-stick feeling. Midway through, the film lapses into mundanity despite the multiple unresolved narratives, and seems to lose track of them all. Before going to the beach, the students around a t for a full thirty seconds, and before swimming the girls lather each other with sunscreen for several minutes. Later, a man works a charcoal grill as Johnny prepares and marinates barbecue skewers in real time. It feels as though Smith couldn’t focus on any one idea for longer than a day of filming, debuting with a patchwork of weirdness that somehow manages to coalesce into a distinctive statement. I’m underselling just how much happens in this film without any of it meaning a thing, and that alone makes it eminently rewatchable.

Just as you’d hoped, this fifteen-minute short features more washed out photography and Johnny Smith as both actor and composer. All of Matt Smith’s movies look psychedelically bad, but this one in particular resembles what 11th gen Brazilian boots of Last House on Dead End Street must have looked like. While you can rarely tell what each film was actually shot on due to the abysmal picture quality, I’m fairly sure this one is super 8 given the constant camera whirring that overpowers the soundtrack. Or maybe my copy was a videotaped wall projection. Smith expressed his displeasure with his film-to-video transfers in one of his zine interviews, but judging by this short, he never learned his lesson. That said, something about the obscurity of the image quality suits the murkiness of his films themselves. So before you get too disappointed at the impossible-to-read visuals, take heed of what one character warns: “Jesus is just alright with me. But you can’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.”

As you might expect, the shorter length does very little for narrative clarity: a man was committed for wanting to hurt himself and his mother. His friends are busy partying and half-heartedly worrying about his release or escape. There’s a lot of pot smoking, including a deep conversation about ts which is interrupted by one partier announcing, “I got some news, the guy escaped from the mental institution.” Apparently, they don’t know his name either. One friend announces, “Man, I don’t even care, I’m so high!” But in the next scene he’s panicking on the phone to the sheriff, who he tells, “I know I made some mistakes in my life, but I’m ready for a change, a positive turnaround.” Similar to Sometimes at the Cherokee Sink there’s
an apocryphal element of Indian burial ground disruptions and the resultant hauntings. This doesn’t seem to impact the slasher narrative much, as the escaped friend shows up dressed as a lumberjack in an old man mask, complete with wig. From here, a series of kills follow in rapid succession: a panicked stoner gets speared with a trident, a fisherman on a dock is drilled through the gut (maybe Matt’s best kill scene) and a girl in her car gets knifed. The final kill sees a POV shot filmed from the perspective of a decapitated head flying through the air. Then it ends.

--From Vision Holidays: The Films of Matthew Samuel Smith

What makes Happy Halloween II stand out from other fan films is its honest maturity (which is not the same thing as sophistication), which never masks its shortcomings in mere enthusiasm. There are no head scratching attempts at comedy or bad taste misjudgments, just the purest imitative adulation. The movie works precisely because it plays things straight, the energy and ideas shining through rather than the audacity and immaturity that for so many SOV films’ reputations. We know from the title what we’re getting into, and they don’t just meet us halfway but take us off from there. This is a spin on Carpenter’s franchise that brings us into the actual cluttered bedrooms of the films’ biggest fans, with no staging or recreation. These guys weren’t sitting around arguing who would win in a fight between Michael, Freddy, and Jason; they were watching intently thinking to themselves about how they could put their own spin on the stories they loved so much.

Of course, being an amateur SOV production at the turn of the 1990s, a number of aesthetic and prop details stand out as well. The consumer-grade camera and heavy green lighting in early scenes couples with the picture’s blur to give a queasy atmosphere not possible in film offerings. Interior scenes make perfect utilitarian use of home architecture in lieu of cinematic technology, with a nice spiral staircase aerial shot early in the film adding some spatial depth. In of entertaining everyday vérité, Curtis’ room is introduced with a long montage of swimsuit model posters on his wall, as well as a Guinea pig playing on what is later revealed to be a waterbed. The staircase of Curtis and his friends’ place is adorned with stolen road signs for décor, which is the sort of perfect mildly degenerate touch nobody could hope to recreate with endless imagination or funding. Everyone speaks in a thick Massachusetts accent, which enhances the dialogue immensely, rendering the believability of uttered words secondary to their sheer aural impact. There’s a conviction in these exchanges that supersedes any lack of acting prowess. All in all, this is a perfect testament to the need for the arts in our communities, and thank god for the Peabody-Lynnfield, MA Cablevision community television facilities that enabled this production.

--From Subterranean Cinema: Missing Pieces of the US Video Underground

Sleep and dreaming are regular fodder for gore-soaked amateur films, so it’s heartening to see a work take those ideas out into a larger scale world and reject interiority. Shots are both expansive and revealing, the camera not subjugated to a single protagonist’s perspective, and its wandering eye reveals the role of gestures as much as it does architecture in constructing a nightmare. Every close-up face or canted sideways angle of a doorway reveals Panneck and Hollmann were actually taking notes during The Evil Dead, not selectively ing what they thought was cool. This is why the 10 minutes of gore we get matters, wading through the confused and imitative set up makes us appreciate where they are coming from and the decisions made. When our killer peels his face in the mirror and dons a skull mask, it isn’t how he dispatches his peers that I take note of, but how slow a response his onslaught generates in the rest of the house. A rare instance where dragging things out to feature length would be entirely deserved. The slasher condensed makes us realize just why the interstitial and marginal moments are so fascinating even when done poorly.

Schmantz is another anomaly with incredible and primitive video art, not to mention an animated title card. It’s also overexposed to the point of fluorescence and features male voices providing chattering overdubs for female characters. This dubbing trick lends an air of instability elsewhere, as in the cackling security guard melting down behind a video monitor or the random babbling of voices in the background of several scenes. Whether a misguided error or deliberate aesthetic decision, it grants the film a destabilizing audio component. This is occasionally a dialogue heavy affair that lessens its emphasis on communication as shock effects take over. The overall purpose is broad comedy, stitched together as a series of gory skits, but context isn’t essential to understanding what’s going on when a grown man playing a toddler rips open his pregnant mother’s stomach as his beer bellied father watches on. In contrast to its juvenilia, a lot of things here work prove craftier than anticipated. The deranged security guard is played with manic glee and devotion to the part, and as the insanity of its scenarios ramp up, Wind’s camera and editing techniques are impressively claustrophobic. Schmantz is a short that understands the disturbational potential of aimless provocation, or at the very least comes to define it in its lunacy

The American underground was seemingly proliferated with clowns for a brief window in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Think the teaser trailer for the possibly non-existent Mr. Socko’s Last Day, or Steve Sharpe’s public access nightmare parody Ranky the Nazi Clown. That these remain largely unseen speaks to the volatile nature of the direct sale video market of the period. Tapes put out with meager means got lost in the shuffle, if anyone bought them at all, and unfinished projects were left to molder in camcorders forgotten in attics and basements. One perplexing example of this trend that did manage to resurface is Rick Groel’s mysterious 1990 mockumentary, The Clown Tape.

The film unfolds as a fragmented road trip, presented as a straightforward documentary or exercise in found footage, but becomes increasingly untethered from these expectations. Whether his journey was real or not, Groel was certainly placing himself in some of these situations, hence the uncomfortable stares captured on the faces of confused cashiers and irate truckers along the way. Likewise, the scenes driving through the desert offer a real travelogue function, and there’s no question that a great distance was covered during production. As the film progresses it becomes a series of identical motel rooms and endless inner reflection, the empty strips of asphalt connecting our country false signifiers for any sort of coherence or understanding, revealing only the true isolation of modern existence.

Following this, the narrative becomes increasingly disturbing and despairing over its short forty-four-minute runtime. This is hinted at in the opening camera address, where the frame pulls back from Rick as he details Chet’s story, revealing a multicolored optical screen. His voice gets more comically high pitched as he shrinks, introducing the dissociation Rick will experience. The first major disturbance finds Rick driving the rental truck, the camera sloppily panning to the enger mirror to reveal that he’s filming himself as he drives. His face flickers with a moment of terrible recognition before the scene ends with a swirl effect. Later, in an event that repeats itself several times, he is sprawled helplessly on yet another motel mattress, looking at nothing but the ceiling. The television broadcasts his conversation with Chanel, the soundtrack a loop of static noise and her repeated interrogation, “Am I an excited clown?”. Late in the film, when his spirit is nearly broken, Groel asks a cashier whether they have clowns in Wyoming and is told that he is not even in that state. A canned laugh track overtakes the soundtrack, mocking his very endeavor but never giving the impression that we’re meant to laugh.

Everyone in the film seems to bear the psychological scarring that Rick unwittingly forces himself to confront. His friends berate him on the couch as he sits between them, staring blankly ahead. Initially we read this as revealing the psychological damage his undertaking has wrought on him, particularly as she asks, “Is this the futility of your life?”. Only they seem to realize the toll of the entire thing on his personal and public life. However, they soon reveal that they are no more secure or functional than he is, quickly devolving into an argument over their finances and the deep trouble in their relationship. Without Rick saying a single word, they prove that one needn’t wear face paint to mask inner turmoil.

Certain dispatches from the underground succeed not on their own aesthetic merits, but instead operate as uncontrolled expressions of mania, pulling in too close on things that were never meant to be seen. In selecting Rooney’s story as its starting point, Groel’s video builds on this very concept, prodding at the uncomfortable realities of our fascinations and how getting too close can cause lasting harm. What begins as an existential journey very quickly reveals itself as an epistemological exercise with no precise answers. Even in its very existence, The Clown Tape reads as a sort of exercise in futility, despite whatever aesthetic or philosophical triumphs it manages. Every detail of the production is unassuming, down to its existence as a recreation of an undoubtedly minor event. We know nothing of Groel and his fascination with Rooney’s story, and it’s never clear just what is on the level despite the obvious staging of many sequences. There’s also the matter of risk to reward, for given its obscurity and the scarcity of the tape itself, many questions remain about just what Groel put himself through as an artist to complete this feverish little project. Even as a mock piece of existential crisis art, the entire undertaking seems so unsettling and mysterious that it begs for an understanding it isn’t willing to give.

--From Skree: The Clown Issue

Teenage productions are a rite of age for aspiring underground filmmakers, and the horror genre has proven the most fertile realm for such adolescent experimentation. In approaching these films, there’s the obvious pull of their naïve charm, where the rudimentary construction of many SOV works can be further excused due to the creators’ inexperience, as well as the relative wholesomeness on display. These are films that disarm with their pubescent sincerity, not to mention their general confusion regarding serious adult matters and the emphasis on juvenile splatter as a means to an end. What remains most remarkable, perhaps, is the sheer fact that many of these films saw legitimate and even relatively successful commercial releases upon completion.

Among the teenage SOV efforts, none strikes as strong a chord with me as Jim Larsen’s Virginia-lensed Nigel the Psychopath, released in 1994 by Todd Jason Cook’s Cemetery Cinema. Shot between 1986-1989 as a series of five shorts, the feature began as a five-minute super 8 short, portions of which are included in the released version as a dream sequence. Cobbled together from these disparate but thematically linked segments, the At Large cut of Nigel is a fragmented opus of suburban expression that thrives on its distedness, and arguably couldn’t function any other way. As a result, this scattershot construction hardly matters when the released version has come to define the film for almost 30 years now.

There are some surprising moments of onscreen abandon that make Nigel stand out from other good-natured gorefests. In one now-shocking but still comical moment, Sheriff Alderman mistakes a boy returning from the bathroom for Nigel and shoots him dead. His partner, Covina, reassures him that it’s not a big deal and they continue on their search. In the background, a mother in a pink coat is visible walking her happy toddler home from the park. Filming was such an instantaneous and naturalistic act that pockets of the real world bleed into the insular universe of Larsen’s creation, providing fascinating glimpses at what existed just beyond Nigel’s own diegesis. Later, Alderman shoots Joseph while aiming for Nigel but is let off the hook because Nigel would have killed him anyway. In these scenes, as well as others, the child-killing taboo is strangely undercut, largely as a result of the general lack of gore. There may be severed limbs and occasional oozing wounds, but Nigel is free of the prurient bad taste of Splatter Farm. Rather than lacking an edge, there’s something refreshing in such a polite approach to serial killing. The film’s goofy humor may not always land, but it fits perfectly within its narrative fabric because every tonal element falls into place, creating a cohesion that could not have been intended during the scattered production.

Too often we look at teenage SOV projects with a tint of nostalgia, a sense of putting ourselves in the cast and creators’ shoes or trying to recapture years long past in our own lives. In many cases, the inspiration of commercial horror cinema kneecaps amateur films, rendering them as spirited imitations and little more. This is not true of Nigel, which resolutely refuses to play by any logic other than its own. It’s a film that exists and succeeds because it is so skeletal and unadorned. The brief glimpses at character and plot development are results of its various original sources, but in the context of the assembled At Large cut, they make it stand out for what isn’t there and for what is accomplished in its stead.

SOV horror movies are often made the butt of a joke, as if those who watch them and bother to write are offended by the quality, as if it’s an imposition on their time despite their election to do so. At the other end of things, the 1990s saw an increase in self-aware humor, as if the directors themselves felt the need to head off lowered expectations and show they were in on the joke themselves. Larsen’s work on Nigel provides plenty of laughs and clues us in without obnoxiously distracting from the charm and sanctity of the narrative itself. Ultimately, my affection for Nigel is indicative of the very possibility of the SOV underground — the film has minimal gore and little of the transgressive edge increasingly displayed to set these films apart, dealing instead in pure energy and naivety.

Full interview with Jim Larsen: www.splittoothmedia.com/jim-larsen/