Direct to Video: Straight to Video Horror of the 90s

Devoid of any narrative structure and constantly struggling to find meaning, Direct to Video is the ultimate example of how to not make a documentary, or any film. The editing is appalling, leaving long conversations without any motive behind them, footage interspliced, or any entertainment value. Direct to Video plays like a behind-the-scenes featurette on a no-budget DVD from 2006. Amateurish doesn't even begin to describe what is happening here. In fact, you really can only understand what is going on if you have previous knowledge of the subject matter because the director, Dustin Ferguson, feels as though things like structure, story, and pacing are not needed. If you are looking to see long, unedited stories from talking heads, or enjoy watching full trailers for movies after watching long boring conversations, then this may be the perfect doc for you. This is a travesty and injustice to the films that you may have grown up loving.

To give you an idea of how dumb some of this is, within the first 2 minutes a guys tells you that he wrote PuppetMaster and then he says the studio wanted the writer to be union so they let the director write it and he says the following:

"It still has MAJOR similarities to my script including the fact that there were puppets."

REALLY? It's called PuppetMaster. Did we think it was going to have puppies?

The other problem with this movie, besides the clowns pretending they are important, is the exceedinly poor quality of the clips. They are blurry and practically unrecognizable.

..was how they would show clips and talk about movies without telling you the name. You had to listen for it and hope they would mention it. Sometimes in the same interview clip they start talking about different movies with no indication they've shifted focus. Clint Howard's segment is the worst for this. Luckily, I knew most of these titles...but I could see someone looking to gain some knowledge being very frustrated.

What a brilliant idea to make this film, Director Dustin Ferguson has done it again, Producers Saul Mejia and Joe Willianson certainly show the best of their talents on this film, I highly recommend this film to anyone who wants to have a good time and remember the 90's.

Bad low-budget horror movies from the 80s-90s was a great subject for a documentary, addressing why this phenomenon occurred parallel to the cinema, the expansion of the home video market, the talents that emerged from there, etc. However, this film is nothing more than a series of tedious interviews with characters who are practically not identified with a character generator (there is a special effects technician, a music composer, actresses in decline), whose anecdotes would be attractive if they had been edited and also accompanied by videos of the films they are talking about, which apparently the production had neither rights nor images. Many promotional shorts for films are included, but they have no greater relation to what the interviewees speak before or later, they go from one thing to another without a narrative thread and the result is a disaster worse than the films that went directly to video .