Written by: Tom Berna
Directed by: Tom Berna
Starring: David Rommel, Joan Dinco,
Anna Zizzo
Well, I'm getting better about getting
around to things. The last time I got a screener from El Santo, I
think it was on my shelf for almost two years before I watched it.
This time, I managed to keep it under 12 months! Pretty soon I'll
finish all the movies still in the plastic wrap clogging up the
shelves in the dining room and not have to justify further movie
purchases to myself and my budget! No, I lie. That will never
happen. Especially since I'll be hitting at least one Half Price
Books and several used book and record stores in less than two weeks
on the annual pilgrimage to Chicago for B-Fest. As bad as my ratio
of unwatched movies is, you should see the piles and piles of books I
have yet to read. Hopeless. In fact, it's kind of depressing,
looking at all this lovely entertainment and thinking that my
lifespan won't allow me to enjoy even a fraction of what I want to
get to. So it's sure a good thing I waste that precious time
watching someone's home movies!
There's not a great deal of story to
this one, but what there is, is this: Jim is a scuzzball (who looks
like a cross between Sam Neill and Bob Odenkirk) who works at a
genetic engineering research facility. His wife Meredith works there
too, on a project to allow amputees to regrow limbs. So far the
project hasn't been entirely successful. Instead of regrowing their
own limbs, the lab mice have developed strange growths that are, for
all intents and purposes, separate organisms that develop a symbiotic
relationship with their host – they act as the missing limb in
return for the host feeding them. If you're sitting there, thinking
to yourself, But that's really stupid and makes no sense,
you're not alone. Meredith discovers that Jim has been having an
affair with his secretary, and throws a jar of symbiont juice in his
face, which turns him into a monster that must kill and eat people in
order to survive. That's it. In more capable hands, this could have
been a really cool movie. It practically cries out for David
Cronenberg to have made it around 1987.
The
rest of the movie is nothing but a series of setups to see Jim's
modular monster limbs spring away from his body and devour victims in
gory special effects set pieces. Where we really hit a wall here, is
that this movie was made for about $.75, and only $.26 of that was
budgeted for FX, so what we're left with is a bunch of special
effects set pieces that are lit and shot so that they don't actually
show the effects. It's sort of like watching an audiobook. The
effects are only limited to how good your imagination can make them!
Eventually,
Jim may or may not have eaten Jenny the secretary. Like I said, when
there wasn't enough natural or ambient light, this flick was
apparently lit with a pen light. This causes her sister Suzanne to
become suspicious of him, and lure him to her house for supper so she
can shoot him. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what was supposed to
have been going on. Imagine her surprise when he splits into several
pieces and all his pieces attack her! This is where the movie
finally manages to shine a little. The effects are about what you'd
expect from an amateur low-budget movie, but they're very
imaginative. His legs become squid creatures, one arm falls off and
sprouts a little bug creature that hauls it around, his head pops off
and grows little midget arms and legs to waddle around on, and the
fingers of his other arm each come off and sprout eyes and stingers
and bat wings!
Given
a lot more money and much better equipment, I have a feeling the
movie would have been, if not exactly a classic, at least a fun and
memorable creature feature. The hurdles it has to overcome are
clearly ones in place because of budget and equipment, not creativity
on the filmmaker's part. Hell, just four years after this, Tom Berna
made the cult documentary Wisconsin Death Trip.
Yes, I know I said the movie was made for $.75, but Berna managed to
make it look like it was made for $1.25. Last week I was bitching
about how David DeCoteau made a 35mm movie look like it was shot with
a cheap camcorder. With a miniscule fraction of the resources, Tom
Berna managed to make a movie shot with a cheap camcorder look like
it was shot on 8mm film that had been fished out of a truck stop
toilet. Especially in the world of micro-budget horror movies, a
small triumph is a triumph nonetheless.
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