Depending on one's tastes when it comes to deplorable cinematic scumbags, Archie Hall Jr.'s lead performance in writer/director James Landis' independent thriller The Sadist is either pitch-perfect or just insufferable. Taking place entirely on a dirt back lot where three people are held captive by Hall Jr. and Marilyn Manning, the premise is almost gimmick-worthy in its simplicity. For ninety-five minutes, Richard Alden is tasked with fixing a getaway car for the evil spree-killing couple, (inspired loosely by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate of Terrence Malick's Badlands fame), yet he mostly just stands still while talking shit about and/or hatching an escape plan from Hall Jr., while the latter is clearly within earshot. Instead of giving the film a mounting sense of suspense, it just makes for a tedious viewing experience where audience members may be yelling at the screen, as much for what the characters are doing as for what they are not doing. Through it all though, unibrowed Hall Jr. talks in a horrendously obnoxious "dumb guy voice", cackling, mugging, frowning, and coming off as the most punchable-faced sociopath imaginable. It is a lot to endure, but the film deserves credit for sticking to his bleak guns and slamming home the odiousness of its "sadist".
An obscure haunted house film done on a non-existent budget, The Ghosts of Hanley House is a curious entry for a number of reasons. This was the only written and directed movie by actor Louise Sherrill, and it marks the final screen appearance of vaudeville performer Elsie Baker, with the rest of the small cast being unknowns. The set-up is as formulaic as can be: two guys are discussing the existence of ghosts in a bar, one of them offers to give his car to the other if he stays in an infamous abode overnight, they agree that the skeptic friend should bring some guests along, and then noises, a seance, and a disembodied voice telling them to properly lay to rest a dead body later, indeed ghosts seem to exist. Such plot specifics are a hodgepodge of cliches that have been in other tales of the supernatural, but they provide Sherrill's story with enough to get from one otherworldly encounter to the next. Since there are clearly no funds to work with here, Sherrill is left to only utilize creepy sound effects and a late shot of a shoddy looking corpse, but these things do enhance a sort of low-key atmosphere. Sadly, the acting leaves much to be desired and the pacing is not up to snuff, but it tries harder than most Z-grade genre movies, plus the fact that it was directed by a woman in such an era is noteworthy in and of itself.
When digging through the cesspool of forgotten genre films, one is inevitably bound to come across the most horrid bits of cinema that were ever unleashed. In 1969, the jaw-droppingly untalented writer/director/producer William Edwards made the less than Z-grade nudie flick Dracula (The Dirty Old Man), which belongs on a list of things that no one anywhere should ever watch at any time under any circumstances. It has all of the heart-racing action of A.C. Stephens and Ed Wood's unwatchable Orgy of the Dead, except with the added bonus of cheap jazz guitar music that plays uninterrupted, as well as equally incessant ADRed dialog that sounds like two people doing goofy voices and mocking what is on the screen, except not humorously. The results are as insufferable as it gets, featuring one scene after the other of an asshole doing a Jewish-accented vampire and another asshole who becomes a werewolf, both simply spying on women, kidnapping them, slicing open some throats, and then chaining them up so that they can molest them. This all goes down with their rambling commentary, which is where the "jokes" are allegedly supposed to spring forth from.
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