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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And you thought Carrie had a bad prom night? In The Loved Ones, a razor-sharp slice of Ozploitation, troubled high schooler Brent (Xavier Samuel, Bait 3D) has an arguably worse one, and this six months following an auto accident that claimed the life of his father. Brent has blamed himself ever since, becoming a cutter as a result.

Cue Little River Band’s “Lonesome Loser” (which the Aussie film actually does) and enter Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), a homely classmate who asks Brent to prom. He politely declines, because he already has a date with his girlfriend, Holly (Victoria Thaine, Son of the Mask).

Lola doesn’t accept rejection well — like, at all. With the help of her father (John Brumpton, Romper Stomper), Brent is kidnapped, drugged and tortured for his “crime” of rejection, all during a makeshift, private prom in her kitchen. But, hey, at least he’s crowned king!

The Loved Ones marks a truly twisted feature debut for writer/director Sean Byrne, and his baby exhibits a mean streak of humor as black as its soul. I find this to be a good thing. More films should challenge their audience, should take turns unexpected, should cross a point of no return; Byrne does all. He also gets a deliciously delirious performance from McLeavy, whose social outcast may be screwed in the head, but somehow retains a smidge of viewer sympathy, even considering her threats to nail poor Brent’s penis to the chair. —Rod Lott

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In the 1970s, movies about paranormal and/or cryptozoological phenomena were all the rage, from Chariots of the Gods to The Legend of Boggy Creek. Boy, did they keep Leonard Nimoy and Peter Graves’ electricity running.

Not as prestigious is Blood Beast of Monster Mountain, produced by adult-film theater owner (and, if one believes the onscreen credits, world traveler, lecturer and psychic investigator) Donn Davison. Basically, Donny inserted hilarious pseudo-documentary footage about Bigfoot into the even more hilarious 1965 family film The Legend of Blood Mountain, which has next to nothing to do with Bigfoot.

After opening with a country song about Bigfoot, Donn tells us that for years he has told producers “no” to taking part in a Sasquatch picture, but changed his mind when the director promised to make “a lighthearted movie, while still adhering to the facts.” Enter the original film, which opens with a hunter tripping about and screaming, ending up with blood all over his face.

So far, so good, right? Well, you haven’t met the film’s “hero,” Bestoink Dooley (Moonrunners’ George Ellis), a newspaper copy boy who dresses like a vaudevillian Sam Kinison and looks like Buddy Hackett after a night of lovemaking with Otis, the drunk from The Andy Griffith Show. As he begs his editor for the Blood Mountain story, a guy who looks like Moe Bandy hits something in his truck, but this is never followed up, because it immediately cuts to Bestoink’s dream — a bizarre sequence about him being a good reporter and making his editor look like a doofus, as if a guy named Bestoink could do that.

After that, things get really confusing, as scenes constantly switch from day to night, women walk through in bikinis for no reason, and Bestoink get his hands on a flamethrower. Bestoink is the most appalling human being I’ve even seen in a movie (and that includes everything with James Spader); furthermore, Blood Beast of Monster Mountain is shot with a technical expertise that would even have Eegah director Arch Hall Sr. shake his head and say, “Geez, that was shitty.”

Overall, a most entertaining hour-and-a-half. —Louis Fowler

Thirty seconds is all it takes for nurse-school dropout Edith Mortley (Priscilla Alden) to kill her first victim in Death Nurse 2. As viewers of its previous year’s predecessor know, timing is not among writer/director Nick Philips’ strong points. Hell, I’m not sure he has any strong points, thereby resulting in an auto-accident watch made more difficult by being shot on video.

This sequel offers more of the same: more of Edith grousing, “You nosy old bitch”; more scenes from Philips’ Criminally Insane/Crazy Fat Ethel films passed off as her dreams; and more minutes, yet this still fails to hit an hour by a handful of seconds.

Plot? Edith continues to kill patients, but at least DN2 offers a twist: This chapter’s new admissions are indigents the mayor finds pesky, from the alcoholic Brownie (Philips’ wife, Irmgard Millard, playing a different drunk from DN1) to some crazy guy who spouts rhetoric in front of City Hall about the country being headed toward socialism. (Yes, Philips apparently predicted the establishment of the Tea Party.)

Still, Death Nurse 2 is so lazy that it even reuses scenes from its big sister. This follow-up easily boasts the saga’s best sequence, when Brownie and her butcher knife chase Edith ’round and ’round the living room furniture — so cartoony, it lacks only a Carl Stalling score.

Once more, the movie just ends by petering out mid-scene. Oh, how were all the loose threads supposed to conclude? —Rod Lott

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