Tulsa, Oklahoma: birthplace of The Gap Band, porn star Stacy Valentine, 1921’s most incendiary race riot and, depending upon who you believe, the shot-on-video horror movie made expressly for home video. Following that trail blazed by Blood Cult were such Tulsa-lensed terrors as Revenge and The Ripper. As recently as the late aughts, T-Town was still at it, with the slasher known as The Stitcher. It’ll have you in stitches, whether you want it to or not.
Thanks to a freshly dead aunt, hot girl Brittany (Carmen Garrison) has inherited a luxurious lake house. Although she is not pleased the place is located in “hillbilly hell,” Brittany invites seven pals to make the trip for a par-tay weekend of bikinis and brewskis. Unfortunately, most of them show up! I say that because several of The Stitcher’s characters are exceedingly annoying, none more so than the obnoxious Digger (Justin Boyd), an obnoxious writer for the fictional (yet likely obnoxious) Blast Zone music magazine. He is the worst, because he is an obnoxious misogynist, because he is an obnoxious stoner with a bong seemingly glued to one hand, and because his name is Digger. Among all of Brit’s friends, he’s the one you cannot wait to see killed off, by that mysterious masked man for whom the movie is named.
The Stitcher is to this Blackstone Cove what Jason Voorhees is to Crystal Lake, the difference being that across the dozen or so Friday the 13th chapters in existence, not once to my knowledge does Jason leave behind a handful of buttons as a calling card. Limbs, heads and entrails, yes; sewing materials, nay. As the backstory explains, back when the textile-mill biz was boomin’ and The Stitcher was just a wee lad, he was abused in a rather unique manner: Ma would sew a button to his bare skin every time she felt he was a bad boy.
And if you think that’s outlandish, wait until you see how at least four local yokels are presented: with missing teeth! (While the whale-like feed store employee escapes this indignity, he is saddled with an arguably worse social ill: uncontrollable flatulence.) Writer/director Darla Enlow (Toe Tags) also fills a role among these Okie rurals, but you won’t catch her with blacked-out chompers or an overactive anus; instead, the blonde is running and bouncing in just tight shorts and a tighter bra while fleeing The Stitcher in the flick’s prologue. I’m willing to cut her some slack, because she has made a deliriously entertaining movie. It’s amateurishly acted (although there are exceptions, like Garrison and Laurel Williamson), but what do you expect for $70,000? As much as I desired to punch Digger, I wanted even more for The Stitcher to keep going past the point at which Enlow decided to stop. —Rod Lott