This is one of the "trippiest" movies I've ever seen, and I consider myself an expert on trippy movies! I literally felt like I was going insane while watching this flick, and that's not a bad thing! I picked it up for $2, are drugs that cheap? I thought it would be another tired old slice n' dicer. It turned out to be much more.
This is not standard horror, and I'd love to know how it got made, it absolutely defies definition. It has slapstick comedy (lots of mugging and over-acting, even using twirping bird sound f/x when characters get hit on the head), there's a love story, mystery, even some comments on racism near the end. But what in hell is it all about? Don't ask me, and I don't really care. It was many things, but never dull, especially at only 72 minutes. It looks cheap, like a video-for-film t.v. show, maybe an expanded episode of the old late-80's series "Monsters," which I adored.
It begins with an opening credits montage that clues you in that this will be a "different" kind of movie, when you get a long shot of a traveling salesman of mortuary supplies, played by Mark Miller (who seems to be the only actor who had a "career" in the cast) peeing beside his car on the road. Next you get a quick-cutting montage of a group of convicts escaping from prison. The lead convict kisses a security guy full on the lips, then butts his head. We're definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
Everyone meets up at a spooky old inn in an undefined location. There they find a creepy, old, wheel-chair bound innkeeper with one eye sporting a black pupil, corpse-like skin and a slow, confident "South'n Hos'p'tality" way about him (wonderfully played with droll confidence by a relative of Edgar Allen Poe...?!). Is the un-named innkeeper a ghoul? The walking dead? A demon, or wizard? The answer, if there is one, isn't easy to say. The traveling salesman finds kinship, and falls in love with, the innkeeper's beautiful, sincere, but ghoulish daughter who, ironically (and oddly!) works with cadavers. The convicts, trying to avoid the roaming local police, take over the whole place and their leader tries to terrorize everyone with acts of violence.
And this concludes the "sane" portion of the movie.
The violence of the crazed convicts escalates, bodies begin to pile up, then turn up, re-animated. People start seeing visions of Romero-like zombies, there's something about a reoccurring spider motif, a "reviving" powder is introduced, there's a séance with a bunch of old ladies in which, literally, all hell breaks loose. The whole thing recalls "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the "Evil Dead" series, the Romero zombie series, the "Basket Case" series, Pasta-land chunk blowers and even Bugs Bunny cartoons. In the final scenes, the film takes a direction that is so absolutely unpredictable and incomprehensible I have no idea what it meant. It ends up much like an art film, or something by David Lynch, ambiguous and startling and strange. However, Lynch was never able to keep it this brief, and stopped being this fun many, many years ago.
Among the plusses: **decent acting **good make-up and gore f/x **some random but not gratuitous nudity **a demon puppet that looks fake, but maybe it was supposed to? Anyway, it's cool **demented atmosphere and **surprises.
If you can relax and enjoy each scene for what it is and not hope for a linear plot or "Hollywood Script 101" logic, you might enjoy this movie. I personally would have liked it if they'd toned down the goofy humor a little and played up the scares more--there was plenty of potential for sincere fear. But this is a movie that refuses to play by "the rules." Either the creators were completely incompetent, or geniuses, or both. Regardless, if you like off-beat movies that don't necessarily make sense, and if you can even find this sucker, stuff it in your VCR, sit back and go on a trip to insanity! It might help to have a lot of alcohol handy.
"We'll keep the light on for ya!"
