(1980)
Dir - John Strysik
Overall: GOOD
The Music of Erich Zann is on the long list of H.P. Lovecraft stories that have been brought to the screen more than once. This particular version is a short film and the debut from John Strysik, who would continue in the horror genre having directed a number of Tales from the Darkside episodes in the late 80s. Very deliberately British in style, (it follows the tone set by the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas series rather closely), the movie omits several details from Lovecraft's original work but otherwise adapts it rather faithfully. Taking the more popular Lovecraft character name of Charles Dexter Ward, (though he was left unnamed in the Erich Zann source material), Robert Rothman is a bit weak as the narrator/college student, lacking the proper, charismatic voice needed to eerily convey the unusual, madness-inducing goings on. Yet that is a minor qualm as it is otherwise appropriately atmospheric in its low budget form.
(1983)
Dir - Cecelia Condit
Overall: GOOD
*Cue Troy McClure looking at the camera in utter bemusement* Less than a minute into Cecelia Condit's student/whatever film Possibly in Michigan, (a video which has since gone viral and garnished the much deserved confusion and chuckles from anybody who has viewed it), it is already overwhelming how confoundingly stylized it is. Part new wave music video, part PSA video maybe kind of, part incompetent filmmaking, part feminist propaganda, and all "Ummm, huh?", Possibly in Michigan is ultimately indescribable now matter how many ways you go about articulating it. How it qualifies as a horror film can come down to the fact that it is so exasperatingly bizarre that it could be seen as inadvertently, (or intentionally for all we know), creepy. Plus there are guys with masks and cannibalism in it because why wouldn't there be? Avant-garde to parody levels, it is something to be experienced alright and easily in the upper tears of "What in the fuck did I just watch?" cinema.
(1985)
Dir - Tommy Turner/David Wojnarowicz
Overall: WOOF
Experimental films are fine. Unless they are not. Which brings us to the tortuously unwatchable Where Evil Dwells. Part of the cinema of transgression movement in New York which started in the 1980s, two assholes from who cares made this piece of shit that apparently is influenced by the 1984 stabbing of Gary Lauwers by Ricky Kasso, a drug dealer scumbag whacked out on PCP. Not that you would have any idea that was the case by watching this. All of the wrong kind of pretentiousness for an excruciating twenty-eight minutes, it is a bunch of random, impossible to make out garbage shot in black and white on 8mm film that plays over one of the most deliberately terrible sound designs in all of movie history. There is no way to decipher any of the dialog present either, including way too much from a ventriloquist dummy that obnoxiously sets the tone from the first scene. Whatever the hell visceral, avant-garde experiment this was supposed to be comes off as unrelentingly boring nonsense instead.
(1988)
Dir - Alex Winter
Overall: MEH
As nice as it would be to enjoy a ten-minute film made by Alex Winter and staring the Butthole Surfers, sadly the result that is Bar-B-Que Movie leaves a mostly craptacular taste in one's mouth. Nothing happening here is meant to be taken seriously and that is made crystal clear from frame one. Man is it stupid though, (probably too stupid), for its own "trying way too hard to be terrible" good. The juvenile factor is turned up to eleven since there is literally nothing more to it than middle fingers, farts, horniness, cartoon sound effects, and the most eye-ball rollingly lame and lazy "jokes" you can imagine. The highlight is easily the Surfer's quasi-music video for "Fast", (a.k.a "Fart Song"), which for any fan of the band will provide a chuckle or two. Elsewhere, it is more or less a moronic waste of time and only a horror movie in the fact that a family of idiots ends up eating their son. Which sounds funnier than it is.
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