In short: Scream Dream (1989)

In a curious turn of events, her manager fires heavy metal star Michelle Shock (Carol Carr) from her own act and replaces her with some random blonde chick (Melissa Moore). There are rumours, you see, that Michelle is a Satanic witch who not just hides EVIL MESSAGES in her incredibly lame music, a peculiarly large number of her fans simply disappear without a trace after one of her shows.

Of course, that’s because the rumours are true, and Michelle is sacrificing a fan or two a night to Satan and her rubbery little zombie dog rat thing familiar. Given this state of affairs, firing Michelle turns out to do very little but piss her off. Turns out, not even getting killed in self-defence by her guitarist does the trick, and she soon takes over said guitarist’s dreams (and kinda-sorta his sex life), as well as the body of her replacement.

Having gone all “this is basically arthouse” on Donald Farmer’s probable debut Demon Queen, I just had to continue on to this next film – as usually, shot on video for the video market – in the man’s output. This is rather a lot more typical of what I know of the one-man-movie factory’s later output. Most of the surreal and dream-like elements of the earlier film have been replaced by “that’s the best we can do”-style cheap-o filmmaking, where a darkened room has to stand in for a sold-out concert, definitely false and really rather crap metal is supposed to be scandalous as well as a hit, and sleepy gyrating stands in for a sexy stage performance.

The film plods from one rubbery, fake and actually rather likeable gore gag to the next, stumbles upon total ignorance of how the real world works in any aspect – human relations, the music biz, fashion, walking, talking, you name it – and just runs with it. It’s pretty much what you can expect from your typical SOV horror affair, not quite crazy enough to be truly interesting – you can only show scenes of a woman rubbing some organ she’s just ripped out of someone over her naked torso so many times before it starts to feel a bit naff – yet just off enough in its view of the world – and its camera angles – to be not completely devoid of interest.

In short: Demon Queen (1987)

In a chance encounter, vampire Lucinda (Mary Fanaro) saves a low-level dealer (Dennis Stewart?) from some rather incensed colleagues of his. He’s clearly fascinated by her, and is all too willing to let her cohabit with himself and his girlfriend in their crappy apartment when she asks for a place to stay.

Random sex and murder ensues, while our dealer friend has dreams/visions/encounters with Lucinda in which he is very willingly sexually dominated by her. So it’s a vampire romance, right?

I’ve never written about any of the many, many films made by Donald Farmer, mostly because Farmer’s the kind of SOV schlockmeister whose films usually lack the style and madness I enjoy about these movies, and for the most part – as far as I have experienced - do tend to the “crappily shot gore and tits delivery service” side of the ultra-cheap local SOV horror equation. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and I certainly admire the man for still making movies today in a very different low budget world. The films are just usually not my thing.

This first or second (depending on who you ask) full-length – if you can call a film with a duration of less than an hour full length – outing by the man is rather different. Sure, it does include copious amounts of nudity and gore, but there’s a moody quality to the film that can not just be accounted for by the extra fuzzy visual quality of the version of the film I watched. There’s no plot whatsoever, but a heavy insistence on creating mood by any means available. And most means available are strange: so expect moments here that seem more influenced by experimental film than the bread and butter straightforward (if awkward) style of your typical Farmer joint, editing that’s not exactly good but always interesting, and a general feel to the film that reminded me more of Rollin and Franco than Farmer as I knew him before. That doesn’t mean the film’s ever as well-made or successful as the movies of those two filmmakers were – even at their worst – but it’s genuinely as interesting and feels like the product of an actual personal vision. Which is probably a weird thing to say about a film with more than one scene in which a woman rips open the body of a guy she just had sex with and starts to rub very anatomically incorrect innards over her breasts.

But then, this is also a film where our protagonists first dream encounter with Lucinda features long, long half-profile shots dominated mostly by his right eye, so I just may be onto something here.