It’s surprising it took this long for Full Moon Features to jump aboard the found-footage bandwagon, since the horror subgenre thrives on an element that is the low-budget production company’s specialty: cheapness.

Reel Evil centers on a three-man crew of struggling filmmakers, headed by the practical, beautiful Kennedy (Jessica Morris, Role Models). James (Jeff Adler) runs camera, while sound is handled by Cory (Mega Python vs. Gatoroid‘s Kaiwi Lyman, who looks like a real-life Thor). They’re hired to shoot behind-the-scenes footage for a horror movie being lensed in an abandoned insane asylum in downtown Los Angeles.

Connected by tunnels, the sprawling complex makes for built-in ambience for a backstory of a doctor whose mental patients harbored cannibalistic tendencies. Of course, ghosts of these guys pop in and out, strongly echoing 1999’s House on Haunted Hill remake and more effective when practical vs. computer-generated.

In typical Full Moon fashion, director/co-writer Danny Draven (2002’s DeathBed) finds a way to wedge a great deal of wholly gratuitous nudity into the works, yet somehow lucks upon a recipe that’s more fun and fulfilling than the bulk of its Handycam brethren. Being concise sure counts, as the show stops at the 72-minute mark, seguing into a terrific title sequence clearly influenced by Seven. That said, keep expectations low, as you should with each and every found-footage film. —Rod Lott

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At once inert and incredible, the shot-on-video Death Nurse is a true test of pain tolerance among movie watchers. The good news is it runs exactly 57 minutes and 15 seconds; the bad news is it runs exactly 57 minutes and 15 seconds.

Fake nurse Edith Mortley (Priscilla Alden) helps her wannabe-MD brother, Gordon (Albert Eskinazi), run the Shady Palms Clinic, which writer/director Nick Philips of both Criminally Insane/Crazy Fat Ethel films (with which this shares cast, crew and mismatching footage) makes no attempt to hide is a hideously decorated condominium. The Mortley sibs perform “surgery” on patients (read: kill them for kicks), either bury them in the backyard or feed them to the rats in the basement; and then bill Medicare for services rendered.

If Gordon isn’t stabbing knives into one patient (whose mouth is shut with mere masking tape), Edith is smothering another with a pillow (and her considerable girth). Shady Palms also houses a female patient who’s battling alcoholism (Irmgard Millard, Philips’ wife), but she’s considerably safer because Gordon is balling her in exchange for sips from Edith’s bottle of sherry.

Family members and authorities start to get suspicious just before the flick ends, with no movement toward any level of resolution. Imagine a TV show fading to a commercial break and never coming back … well, until the following year’s Death Nurse 2, that is.

This no-budget effort — apologies to the word “effort” — is inept in every aspect imaginable. Philips (aka Nick Millard) includes sequence after sequence of interminable non-action that have nothing to do with anything other than padding the running time to a feature length, and he fails even at that. The blood of victims sometimes is orange, like tomato soup stirred with milk. Such a meal possesses more character. —Rod Lott

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To mix similes, Sledgehammer moves like a snail through molasses rolling down a glacier. In other words, it’s slow. On purpose. And not in a “not much is happening here” way, but a “the director is using the slow-motion effect so much, we should check to see if he fell asleep” way.

That said, as the film played, my fascination with it grew to an obsession by the time it hit the last of its 87 minutes. Sledgehammer is remembered as one of the most successful of the shot-on-VHS slashers, and not just by virtue of being among the first. For all its ineptness, the seven-day wonder is oddly compelling and, against all odds, as hypnotic as it is illogical.

A boy is locked in a closet by his mother so that she and her no-good boyfriend can screw around in the living room. As they engage in foreplay, the grade-school youth somehow escapes, acquires the titular tool, and bashes in their heads. Fast-forward 10 years, and a group of throughly unappealing 20-somethings arrives at the same out-of-the-way cabin for a party weekend. You know what happens next, yet you’ll want to see it happen, anyway … provided you can stand the likes of seemingly interminable establishing shots.

What debuting director David A. Prior (Killer Workout) manages to do with so little may be accidental, but not entirely. His actors (headed by brother Ted Prior, Surf Nazis Must Die) are beyond help, and the script is as woefully lunkheaded — how else to explain the food-fight sequence, the chubby jock who licks people, the John Oates doppelgänger spurring the sexual advances of what passes for a hot blonde? However, the mood created by a creepy mask, a John Carpenter-esque synth score and dreamlike imagery lift the crude, homegrown effort from mere crap to at least really interesting crap. —Rod Lott

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