As if America’s current discourse over this amendment and that amendment weren’t enough of a Gordian knot, Todd Sheets’ Final Caller lays down even more convoluted rules from our crazed druid ancestors: To appease the gods every eight years, eight people must be killed on Aug. 8. So says cannibal/serial killer Edward Ray Hatcher (Jack McCord, Sheets’ Dreaming Purple Neon), a pot-bellied pig of a human being who dubs himself “The Outsider.”
Hatcher relays all this info by calling into the live radio show hosted by FM shock jock/gaseous blowhard Roland Bennett (Douglas Epps, Sheets’ Bonehill Road). What Hatcher doesn’t specify is how many of the endangered octet will be sacrificed on station property. As a murderer, Hatcher doesn’t screw around. Among other savage things, he removes fingers via DeWalt hand saw, hammers foreheads, nails palms, razor-knives necks and, most sphincter-clenching, jams wooden handles into poop chutes. As little as you’d want to carry on a conversation with him (“You’re already seniors. With cobwebs in your pussies.”), you wouldn’t want to pay even the minimum amount due on his Home Depot bill, either.
Unrelated to his radio DJ-centric segment of 2013’s Hi-8 horror anthology, Final Caller is well-trod territory for Sheets as a showcase for torture-porn gore and gallows humor. Although the very bloody effects are convincing in their refusal not to flinch, one still can sense a giddiness among the cast members in making this microbudget mash-up of Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio and, oh, every subtlety-free indie slasher. A character’s T-shirt boasting the logo of Wild Eye Releasing, the flick’s distributor, establishes the level of seriousness we’re supposed to take all this.
An icon of shot-on-video horror, Sheets boasts a filmography of 50 some-odd titles across an astounding near-four decades. With that much hands-on experience, you’d expect progress and growth; indeed, Final Caller allows him to demonstrate a true knack for the rhythms of editing and setting up his shots. I’d love to see what he could do with an actual budget. Until then, however inconsistent, this effort lives as an example of doing better with next to nothing. —Rod Lott