Written, directed and produced by some guy named David Schwartz, Las Vegas Blood Bath is a homemade horror film shot on video and so thoroughly, gloriously incompetent that it’s best enjoyed as a rollicking comedy. Camcorder sound, sub-amateur actors, zero sense of pacing, nonexistent editing: It’s all here, folks!

Ari Levin stars as an average Joe named Sam. He looks like Jerry Seinfeld, but has the charisma of Jason Alexander; he’s so remarkably inept as an actor, he’s ineptly remarkable. He’s just closed the business deal of his life when he decides to buy his wife, Ruthie, that little red sports car she’s been wanting and drive it back home to Vegas to “surprise the hell out of her.” He keeps himself awake by singing songs to himself (“Ruthie, Ruthie / You’re so pretty”), but when he arrives, he finds that he’s the one surprised. You see, Ruthie — some skank in a blonde Elvira wig — is sleeping with a naked cop. Sam snaps, shoots them both and goes tooling around town with Ruthie’s disembodied head in tow.

“All women are the same! They all deserve to die!” Sam screams, which is all the movie allows in way of motivation and plot. Still clad in tie and slacks, he’s going to exact his revenge on the female species, one slut at a time … in broad daylight along highly trafficked areas. Said plan begins when he spots a hooker (“There’s one!”) and picks her up. Some guy drives by and flips them off; she wonders why. “Oh, I don’t know,” he bellows bitterly, “maybe he doesn’t like daytime whores!”

Following the lengthiest driving sequence in which the audience is spared no left turn, Sam takes Daytime Whore to an apartment complex parking lot, where he ties her up, pulls off her top, introduces her to Ruthie’s head, stabs her through the chin and yanks off her leg with his car. No one seems to notice the bloody limb being dragged from the back bumper — this is Vegas, after all, and as the ads say, whatever happens here, stays here.

From there, it’s off to shoot a bartender in the head and — yes! — more driving. Another guy pulls up alongside Sam to give him the bird, but this time Sam responds by shooting off the man’s middle finger, demonstrating impeccable precision aim for such a nerdy salesman homebody.

His thirst for blood finally takes him to a home of one of the Beautiful Ladies of Oil Wrestling (that’s B.L.O.W. for short; subtle, this film is not), where the not-at-all-beautiful, not-true-ladies have gathered this night to scarf down sausage pizza and watch themselves on TV. But first, the frizzy haired girls — christened with monikers like Bambi, Cherry Blossom and Tuff Tiff — all try on bikinis that the most horse-faced of the bunch brought back from New York, because apparently, in a town where prostitution and gambling are perfectly legal, garish swimwear must not be.

Even Barbara, the lone pregnant one of the group, models a bikini, much to the disgust of the other girls. “Someone should harpoon that whale,” snaps one after the expectant mother leaves the room. This prompts such a litany of anti-Barbara barbs that one half-expects the girls to say, “At least we terminate our pregnancies!”

Finally, after offing a nosy neighbor with a shovel, Sam bursts in and has his way with each of the smoky chicks, and that means tying them up and drilling a head or pulling out an arm here and there. After tying up one of the girls in the bathtub, he asks what she does for a living. She responds meekly and with no sense of irony (or any semblance of emotion, really), “I’m a professional oil wrestler and also a TV star.” This sends him into a psychotic rage — “Ruthie loved oil wrestling!” — and he stabs her.

But the most pain to be inflicted Sam saves for the preggo Barbara. “C’mon,” he says, dragging her upstairs, “we’re going to play obstetrics and gynecology!” And he’s not joking. After he feels up her milk-engorged breasts and compliments her “dark silver dollars” (in a scene so humiliating, you hope the woman was handsomely paid, but know in your heart she was all too glad to do it for $20 and a corndog), he slices open her abdomen, retrieves the fetus and then hurls it against the wall! It’s all right, however, because the bedroom walls are conveniently adorned with butcher paper, should anyone ever break in and want to toss around an unborn child.

That’s the highlight of this Blood Bath, and really, where can a movie go from there? Oh, it tries its damndest, what with Sam decapitating a Jehovah’s Witness and dispatching a cop who looks like Freddie Mercury, but really — once you have a character engage in infant discus, everything else is just gravy. It’s in Syd Field’s screenwriting book. Look it up. —Rod Lott

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Shot in Paterson, N.J., this regional horror indie is best known for being the film debut of Brooke Shields, age 11 at the time of its release. What it should be known for is being a solid fright flick, better than a majority of the studio-funded efforts of that time.

Shields (briefly) plays Karen, murdered during her first communion by someone in a yellow vinyl raincoat and a cheap mask from the five-and-dime. Suspicion falls like an anvil on her older, less-adored sister, Alice (Paula E. Sheppard, Liquid Sky), who “has a knack for making things look like accidents.”

Police detectives, one of whom has an office decorated with pages torn from nudie mags, investigate the crime — or crimes plural, as Karen is merely victim No. 1 in a string of attacks, the next of which takes place on a stairway. This sequence is well-executed (no pun intended) by director/co-writer Alfred Sole (Pandemonium), and perhaps the highlight. A close runner-up would be any featuring the family’s morbidly obese landlord (Alphonso DeNoble, Bloodsucking Freaks), a character so pathetic that he eats cat food from the tin and whose shorts bear permanent, prominent urine stains.

Alice Sweet Alice is as much a murder mystery as it is a slasher pic, but Sole errs by solving the whodunit portion far too early (and it was exactly who I thought it was). His manner of mixing the two genres yields an oddball soufflé — slightly flat in the middle, yet still tasty. —Rod Lott

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Famously, Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Gruesome Twosome begins with a time-padding conversation between two Styrofoam wig heads, and yet, it’s not the weirdest thing among a compact 72 minutes.

Run by Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis, How to Make a Doll), The Little Wig Shop does brisk business for a Florida college town — not so much in selling them as acquiring new stock. That comes from the lovely college co-eds who inquire about renting a room from the matronly Mrs. Pringle, only to find their scalps evicted by the blade — later upgraded to electric — of her mentally challenged son, Rodney (Chris Martell, The Wild Rebels). Also part of the Pringle family: a stuffed bobcat named Napoleon.

When she’s not hanging with her sorority sisters by dancing on the bed and eating buckets of KFC while dressed in nighties, curious Kathy (Gretchen Wells) tries to figure out what happened to the missing girls. Says one of her sisters, “Honestly, Kathy, don’t you ever concentrate on anything but mysteries?” That’s a kinder way of putting it than the phrasing of her blue-balled boyfriend (Rodney Bedell, She-Devils on Wheels): “That’s all I need: Kathy Baker, girl detective. How’d I ever get mixed up with a female James Bond?”

Scenes of Kathy’s sleuthing play out in Lewis’ no-detail-spared style, so feel free to use the restroom or file your taxes while she observes an old man digging a hole in real time. If you choose to sit through it, however, you’ll be rewarded with Wells’ hilarious attempt at feigning a scream; no wonder Gruesome was her one and only screen credit. While the film is funnier than most of Lewis’ gore shows, it still is inferior to his Blood trilogy — inferior in a good way, mind you. —Rod Lott

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A young boy is caught by his mom working on a nudie jigsaw puzzle. She threatens to burn all the porn she finds in his room and asks him to get a trash bag; he returns with an ax and chops her to pieces, digging out a saw for those extra-pesky bones. Then he returns to his puzzle.

And so begins Spanish auteur Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces, an unintentionally hilarious slasher that manages to make even its excessive gore scenes exceedingly comical.

Forty years later, things are pretty idyllic at the college campus, where the students demonstrate their higher education through such lines as, “The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on the waterbed at the same time!” One fine morning, a girl skateboards through a plate glass window — a bravura scene, sure, but it has nothing to do with the story, which has female college students who are quick to get naked for the camera start dying at the whirring blade of a yellow chainsaw.

Who’s the culprit? Is it the burly groundskeeper? The university’s anatomy professor? The mousy British dean? The killer is mostly cloaked in shadows or shot from the ankles down, yet the gore is indeed gory, with limbs and noggins lopped off before your very eyes. One girl pisses herself before her torso gets cut in two. Following each kill, the murderer retreats to adding more pieces of that nudie puzzle, working his way down from the top. (And here I was always taught to the do the borders first and work inward.)

It all leads up to the expected climax, wherein the killer is shot just in the nick of time, before he can kill the hero (Pod People’s Ian Sera, playing a college student who snares an unbelievable amount of chicks, despite looking like Screech from TV’s Saved by the Bell). But then something unexpected happens that had me rolling in hysterics. And then that’s followed up by a final shot that also was greeted with unbelievable laughter, even if it makes no sense. If only all those Friday the 13th sequels had been like this. —Rod Lott

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Which is the worst part of the complicated rights issue with the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead? Is it:
A. that director George A. Romero and company were screwed out of millions, or
B. that it allowed Jeff Broadstreet to make Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation?

With apologies to those good people’s bank accounts, the answer is B. Trust me on this one. You’d agree if you saw this abomination, but I encourage you to run in the other direction. The answer is totally B.

Even if writer/director/producer Broadstreet — who also helmed the 2006 Night of the Living Dead 3D “remake” — had left the classic film’s title off his own, the results still would remain abortive. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the 21st-century Ed Wood. The difference is that nobody will be watching Broadstreet’s work after he passes. Hell, they shouldn’t be watching it while he’s alive, either.

It took me four tries to start NOTLD3D:R-A before I could muster the strength to watch it all the way through. Andrew Divoff (Wishmaster) fronts the film as Gerald Tovar Jr., a second-generation mortician who doesn’t cremate the corpses he’s paid to; instead, he piles them into one dank dungeon of a room, which characters can enter and somehow not vomit from the stench. Guess what happens to the bodies. (Did you say “zombies”?)

I suppose NOTLD3D:R-A holds a curiosity factor among those wishing to see Divoff act alongside Re-Animator‘s Jeffrey Combs, who plays Gerald’s no-good, conspiracy-prone teabagger brother. To horror-con geeks, this sounds akin to Pacino and De Niro’s diner scene in Heat. It’s not; it’s the gum under the table at that diner. And I like both actors.

This chore of a watch is all about CGI blood and green-screen antics and, because of shooting in three dimensions, intrusive angles. The 3-D doesn’t even work, so why bother? On the disc’s production featurette, Broadstreet tells you why: Because he thinks he’s making a sociopolitical statement. He’s delusional; he’s made the A/V equivalent of a bowel movement. I hate to be so harsh, but this time, it’s merited. —Rod Lott

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