(1986)
Overall: MEH
The debut from Canadian filmmaker Jerry Ciccoritti is the occasionally inventive sleaze-fest Psycho Girls. Allegedly shot in nine days with a $15,000 budget, it has a demented midnight movie aesthetic with its tongue-in-cheek the entire time. John Haslett Cuff plays a pulp author who narrates the strange tale of Darlene Mignacco who poisoned her parents when she was a kid, spent many years in an insane asylum, and eventually escapes with two also not-mentally-sound companions. People are murdered, tricked into eating human brains, and eventually kidnapped in an elaborate torture ceremony in an abandoned and different mental asylum, a ceremony which is dedicated to Sigmund Freud because sure. Though plenty gruesome, its many tasteless moments are more eccentric than disturbing, and the crude production values and grandiose performances only enhance a movie about psychopathic crazy people doing psychopathic crazy things. Robert Bergman's cinematography is elaborate at times and we are treated to other non-violent and weird moments like a couple engaging in weight-lifting foreplay and transitional text appearing as typewritten pages, so even though the movie is annoying at times and never funny, at least has some garish style at its disposal.
(1986)
Overall: MEH
Not to be confused with the infamous American 1990 Stephen King adaptation of the same name from director Ralph S. Singleton, THIS Graveyard Shift, (Central Park Drifter), was Canadian writer/director Jerry Ciccoritti's immediate follow-up to his debut Psycho Girls. An urban vampire yarn, our main undead guy Michael A. Miranda leads a more reckless existence than most, getting more ass than a toilet seat as he bites an untold slew of picturesque women who have the misfortune of hopping into the back of his cab, turning them into vampires in the process who can then go and munch on any horny guys in the city that they run into. Understandably, the police quickly get frustrated by all of the bodies that are piling up, meanwhile Miranda and his new favorite love interest are both dying, or she was and now he also is after sleeping with her or something. Coccprotti and cinematographer Robert Bergman utilize some striking giallo-esque colors here or there and there is plenty of steamy nudity, but the presentation is clumsy and B-grade at best. This is not helped by a script that cannot decide if it wants to lean into the more melancholic or sleazy kind of blood-sucker motifs, instead finding an awkward balance between the two.
(1989)
Overall: MEH
Writer/director Jerry Ciccoritti and actor Michael A. Miranda lock-horns again for The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II, the similarly-veined sequel to 1986's Graveyard Shift. Miranda has poofy rock star hair now, (think Richard Lewis with fangs), and is technically playing a different character who can appear in people's dreams and shapeshift into a woman or whatever. Flippancy aside, Ciccoritti delivers another deadly serious tale of the undead that nevertheless comes off as schlocky within its direct-to-video framework. It has a nifty if less than unique premise of a makeshift production crew filming a vampire movie while a real vampire infiltrates it, but Ciccoritti's script is muddled and does not do anything to cleverly explore its motifs within the meta framework. Miranda is your typical ruthless blood-sucker who plays people against each other, and the only inkling that we get as to why, (besides him just being an evil dude), revolves around some vague "I'll be whole again" nonsense. Some of it is romantic, some of it is atmospheric, some of it is crude, but like its predecessor, nothing here gels correctly.
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