Dir - Peter Wechsberg
Overall: WOOF
A novelty film as the title would suggest, Deafula has the distinction of being a rare genre movie done in American Sign Language. Writer/director/lead actor Peter Wechsberg, (Peter Wolf), was a member of the Connecticut-based National Theater of the Deaf before making this his cinematic debut, filming it in Portland, Oregon where it debuted in its initial and completely soundless form. Infrequent musical passages and narration where added later for wide release, but the movie remains primarily silent and unfortunately primarily tedious. Wechsberg's intentions are admirable, but he is clearly working within meager means and with insufficient talent at his disposal. His fake papier-mâché nose and vampire getup is ridiculous, the story is moronic, and the staging is persistently awkward due to lousy cinematography and drab pacing which makes long, long scenes of no audio come off as both ugly and insufferably boring. If properly atmospheric or visually experimental, the film could have endured as something more than just an historical footnote but alas, this is dull and amateurish movie-making first and foremost.
(1977)
Dir - Michael Anderson
Overall: MEH
Shot in Canada, Southern Europe, and the US with a British director at the helm and Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis setting the whole thing in motion, Orca, (Orca: The Killer Whale), was one of the many, (many), inevitable Jaws knock-offs that is nowhere near as good as Steven Spielberg's blockbuster. It deserves its own level of infamy for doing the whole "killer sea beast is out for vengeance against humans" thing a full ten years before Jaws 4: The Revenge was unleashed. Every character on screen taking the insultingly stupid story seriously aside, the film is also notable for featuring a real life unhinged Richard Harris in the lead, who was shithouse drunk, suffered a mental breakdown on set, and insisted on endangering himself by doing his own stunts. While we get an unpleasant whale miscarriage and murder early on which sets off the daddy orca on its quest for blood, things quickly stall from there, with sparse whale attacks and characters having the same conversions over and over again, trying to convince each other that yes, they are in fact being targeted by a deep sea apex predator. It is a slick and well-shot production, but also a ridiculous and boring one that pretends that it is neither.
(1978)
Dir - John Stanley
Overall: MEH
A meta horror movie spoof before such things became more abundant, Nightmare in Blood has an appropriate person behind the lens, being San Fransisco's Creature Features host John Stanley. This was Stanley's only crack at making his own bit of celluloid and while his tongue-in-cheek heart is in the right place, the results are far from clever. Jerry Walter plays a ham-fisted actor who also happens to be a real vampire, appearing in character at all times when he agrees to be the guest of honor at a horror convention held in a spacious movie theater, bringing the real Burke and Hare along with him as cronies. There is also a Van Helsing-like vampire hunter and a pretentious guy who speaks with unwavering calmness and whose religion is comic books, so we get plenty of nerdy eye candy, references, and Easter eggs scattered about. Stanley's directorial chops lack agency though, plus he and co-writer/producer Ken Davis' script forgets to put anything funny into the mix, so the film plays off as awkward and dry for such intentionally goofy material. It can only be seen as a failure in what it attempts, but it is a celebration of the genre that has some quirkiness to it for those who are forgiving.
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