Cover Art

Credits

Directors Ray Schwetz/Joseph Zaso, Joseph F. Parda Starring: Tina Krause, Joseph Zaso, Darian Caine/Sasha Graham, Joe Zaso, Alexandra Paulhiac, Ruby Honeycat, Joseph Marzano Screenplay: Ray Schwetz/Joseph Zaso, Joseph F. Parda Country: USA Year: 2004/1997

Home video cameras are a blessing and a curse. On one hand, they have completely democratised the film industry; now anybody with a few hundred bucks and an enthusiastic cast and crew can make the jump from wannabe-director to budding filmmaker, producing short or feature-length films in their backyard for a fraction – no, more like a microcosm – of Hollywood film budgets.On the other hand, all this democracy – this freedom to film – also means that any talentless hack armed with a video camera, a couple of hundred bucks and a cast of inept drama school dropouts can churn out 82 minutes of badly scripted, poorly produced, horribly edited, shoddily directed, turgidly acted RUBBISH for their amusement and your utter dismay. The lesson we should learn from And Then They Were Dead is that just because it is possible for anybody to make a low-budget horror film, doesn't mean that it is always a good idea.

Several people are lured to a mysterious house to discuss a lucrative business proposition with an anonymous entrepreneur. Coincidentally, the mysterious house is located near the woods where a student went missing recently. Things are clearly not all that they seem: the reclusive businessman is yet to show himself and his staff are reluctant to answer any questions regarding his absence. Things take a turn for the bizarre when the maid is carved up in the shower and one of the dinner guests kills his wife in the bathroom, mid-coitus. As the guests act out a scene from Cluedo, trying to guess the culprit, the doctor happens upon the decapitated head of the missing student in the fridge! In a hardly surprising turn of events, party guests begin turning up dead but, with no apparent means of escape (aside from the front door!) the unintelligent survivors – too stupid to leave the house – must outwit a rampaging murderer and a mysterious Big Brother like figure who delights in watching their torture in a secret viewing chamber. What follows is the sorriest excuse for a film I have ever had the misfortune of watching, for which I can only blame Ray Schwetz, the writer, director, editor and co-producer of And Then They Were Dead. Thanks to this appalling effort at horror, Mr. Schwetz has made my Top 10 Most Hated People in the Film Industry, surpassing even Tom Cruise.

Obviously shot on a hand-held camcorder, the picture quality is so grainy I actually felt my eyesight deteriorate as I struggled to focus on major details. The cinematography is the filmic equivalent of wallpaper and the camera repeatedly shakes and jolts around to maximise nausea – it's almost as if someone were poking the cameraman in the side in the middle of shooting! Scenes in this movie stretch on forever, degrading into painful tedium, whilst the accompanying synthesiser soundtrack relentlessly pounds the cerebral cortex to gelatine. The acting in this movie is so poor it actually causes nosebleeds and what little of the script is audible above the grating synthesiser sounds as if it were cobbled together from the in-between segments of a dodgy home-made porn film; I've read scribbles on bathroom walls that had more plot nuance.

Speaking of porn, And Then They Were Dead attempts to raise its sub-sub-mediocre status – if only just by a fraction – by including some gratuitous female nudity. The unfortunate actress who had the dubious honour of appearing naked in this beyond-salvation project was Darian Caine; star of such prestigious films as Orgasm Torture in Satan's Rape Clinic, Lust In Space: The Erotic Witch Project 4, The Lord of the G-Strings: The Femaleship of the String and Darian's Naughty Webcam – all of which indicate that Darian must've fallen on hard times when she agreed to star in ATTWD. The perverted Doctor (Joe Zaso), one of the many dysfunctional guests at the party, accidentally spills some wine on poor Gabrielle's (Caine) French maid outfit. When the Doctor retires to the bathroom to clean himself up, he stumbles on a very convenient peephole through which he can see Gabrielle showering in all her silicone-enhanced erect-nippled glory. The inference in this scene is that the Doctor masturbates in the next room, but the inept nature of the actor to even simulate this act combined with the antics of a drunken cameraman results in a sequence in which the doc appears to be humping the sink. Busted by his wife, the doctor then suffocates her during painfully simulated angry sex and then stuffs her in the shower, hoping nobody else will notice.

Things only travel downhill from this point: the picture quality gets worse, the soundtrack gets louder, and the plot drifts into inanity. The drama-school drop-outs flail about like the morons they are, spouting poorly scripted filth and dying unimaginative deaths. The sole survivor, pregnant prostitute Sara (played with incompetent malice by Tina Krause) eventually confronts her tormentor, exclaiming "This is for the father of my child, you bastard!" before shooting him in the face. This horrific display of ham-fisted tomfoolery actually reminded me of the film-within-a-film misadventures of Eddie Murphy in Bowfinger, when he screams the immortal line "Die, you suckers!!!" That's right: Ray Schwetz' film is so bad that it actually prompted a recollection of a Nineties comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin…a pox on his house!

Guilty Pleasures

The sight of Joe Zaso's name in the writer/director credits certainly sent chills up my spine: the image of him humping a sink was freshly branded onto my brain from And Then They Were Dead, so needless to say, I wasn't looking forward to seeing what he came up with in the director's chair. Thankfully, Guilty Pleasures is not nearly as tedious as its companion feature; this is partly due to the fact that it is not a single feature-length film, but two loosely connected short films, Nocturnal Emissions and Method to the Madness, spliced together. Although Guilty Pleasures is certainly a product of the home-video no-budget school of filmmaking, the acting, scripting and directing could only improve on And Then They Were Dead.

Nocturnal Emissions - With its opening shots of murdered women and pulsing strobe lights, Nocturnal Emissions announces itself in spectacular fashion. There's an emphasis on style here that was completely absent from ATTWD, and directors Parda and Zaso have a keen eye for over-the-top visuals, and a flair for the ridiculous. The plot revolves around Silvia (Paulhiac), who has been getting some seriously perverted phone calls lately. Who's to blame: the abusive ex-boyfriend, Jerome, or the infamous "sex killer"? Fantasy becomes reality when Silvia's best friend Kim (Honeycat) is killed with a meat cleaver whilst posing for a porn magazine. Enter Phillip Dargent (Zaso), an equally perverted cop who takes a 'special interest' in Silvia's case; whilst interviewing her he masturbates to her testimony, egging her on with questions like "Did he ever talk about your ass?" When Jerome is killed during the investigation, Silvia believes her nightmare is over…but is it?

For an exercise in rank amateurism, this was a pleasing and amusing effort: there are plenty of boobs to gawk at, some soft-core S&M, and the cheap gore effects are intentionally comical. Some of the visual and lighting effects are downright ludicrous, but given that the tone of the piece isn't too serious, they never undercut the mood. To call this an erotic thriller is going to depend on what your version of 'erotic' is; the lead actress has a very saggy bum that's quite off-putting and the quality of the visuals give the impression you're watching a poorly produced home-made porno, rather than a low-budget exploitation thriller. That said, the filmmakers clearly have their tongues firmly grafted to their cheeks, so it's best to view this as a mild comical diversion.

Method to the Madness - Rosemarie (Graham) is an aspiring actor with big ambitions, but zero talent. Feeling her dream slipping away with each failed audition, Rosemarie decides to take a method acting course with renowned coach, Claude DeCarlo (Marzano). However, Rosemarie is troubled by the return of an old friend, Monica, into her life: the two share a dark past with long-buried secrets, and Monica's pleas for reconciliation are becoming more desperate and threatening. Suffering from the pressure of her acting course and increasing paranoia over her stalker, Rosemarie begins to see hallucinations and ghostly apparitions from her troubled childhood. As her mind degrades under the torment, we begin to wonder if Monica is real, or just a figment of Rosemarie's imagination.