J.T. Petty’s well-made look at the underground world of pseudo-snuff horror movies troubled me more for its final thesis than for what it actually shows onscreen. While featuring interviews with real-life filmmakers, actors and academics (including a personal hero of mine, Men, Women and Chain Saws author Carol J. Clover), the film’s dominant narrative comes from the fictional investigation into the cinematic activities of a doughy loser named Eric Rost (Eric Marcisak).
As the man behind the titular S&Man (pronounced “sandman”) series, which consists of him stalking attractive women on camera before killing them onscreen, Eric is reluctant to give away his filmmaking methods — afraid that doing so will undermine his reputation and mystique. Unable to contact any of the women who have appeared in the films, Petty (playing himself) is faced with the very real possibility that Eric’s product is the genuine article.
It’s no easy task to combine the real and the fictional as well as Petty does here, but ultimately, I found myself troubled by the conclusions he reaches. In his final narration, he tells us that we watch horror movies knowing that the violence is fake, while wishing it were real — which, in my case, simply isn’t true.
The fact is, I am generally indifferent to the violence in horror movies — I enjoy them for other reasons I don’t have the time or space to go into — and I am able to watch them without self-inflicting psychic trauma because I am able to take comfort in the knowledge that what I am seeing isn’t real. To suggest otherwise is to indict myself with a cultural crime I have not committed.
The other problem with Petty’s thesis is that in order to fully exploit it, he ruins the film’s delicate balance between journalism and fiction. It simple isn’t credible that a conscionable documentarian wouldn’t, at a certain point, take what they have learned about Eric’s activities and report them to the police. And while Petty’s inaction is meant to support his apparent contention that there is little difference between real and staged violence, it instead only works to prove how ultimately misguided that contention is. —Allan Mott
Now, the doctor’s ghost is roaming the halls and continuing to prey on young people with troubled pasts. The un-renovated wing in ruins — which, after 75 years, still has file cabinets containing patients’ histories — is attached to the dorm, so all it takes is about two minutes worth of computer hacking for the six kids who seem to be the dorm’s only inhabitants to gain access to the old section of the building.
When he informs the others of his newfound power, one girl says, “Oh, wow! What are we waiting for?” and drives herself straight into a moving van. When she, too, resurrects not long after her funeral, the other members off themselves as well — in an absurdly comic sequence — by jumping off buildings and chaining bricks to their bodies as they swim. Meanwhile, the police are pissed because the now-true-to-their-name Living Dead delight in murdering innocents and destroying grocery stores. 
Now the guy in the room next to hers is a serial killer named Volpe (Patrick Kilpatrick). So dangerous is this monster, he’s kept standing up in chains and masked so he can’t hypnotize the staff. Right, he’s in the room next to a sleeping girl. This place is not on the shortlist for Asylum of the Year honors.
Also known as simply Girly, it sounds creepy, and could be if the movie weren’t trying so hard to be mysterious in a zany sort of way. My guess is that the play was long on black comedy in the absurdist manner so popular at the time, and Francis’ tendency, naturally enough, was to play up the horrific aspects, and the two approaches to the material do not mix well at all.