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

..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.

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 .

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.

There's definitely a great documentary to be made about this subject but by ANYONE other than this director who seems content to just string together trailers (with no captions to tell you what the movie was) and interview subjects telling amusing anecdotes from shooting these crappy movies.

This needed a framing narrative explaining the whats and whys of the genre, some look at the major players, tropes, etc. Instead, we get nothing but interviews (shot with a terrible side angle used for who knows what reason) and clips from (mostly Full Moon movies).

Like literally ANYONE could have done this better...

This was a documentary that I found while searching for ones like this to watch while at work. What I like about these is that I treat them like video podcasts. When I have time or something catches my interest, I can watch. Other than that, I love to hear people from the industry talk. This one also covers a topic that intrigued me since this was the coming of age for me era of going to the video store.

What we're getting here is taking a handful of movies and interviewing people from them, whether it is directors, writers or actors. I did like getting that behind the scenes look at movies that I grew up with or have seen after the fact. This includes Kenneth J. Hall, Jerry Smith, C. Courtney Joyner, Jeff Burr, Tiffany Shepis, Lloyd Kaufman, Fred Olen Ray, Brinke Stevens and Kelli Maroney. They all give interesting insight to this straight to video era of cinema.

I'd also say that this is well-made. The editing is a bit harsh. I'm guessing this could also be an issue with me, since I'm not giving it my full attention. It just felt that we were talking about one and then its hard transitions to the next movie they're going to cover. It doesn't ruin things, but I did have to do a double take. Part of the issue there is a cross-over where an actor is in multiple movies brought up and they're discussing them. I still like giving love to this era of horror films. I would like an extended cut that did more of a deep dive, but for what we got, I enjoyed my time. I'd recommend it to fans of this era of cinema or if you just want to learn more.

My Rating: 7.5 out of 10.