Death Shock

Perhaps it was all the lead paint chips I ate as a kid, but I actually kind of LIKE British exploitation films. This film, however, has a pretty bad reputation even in that generally dismal genre, so after it (quite surprisingly)became available on American DVD, I had to see if it was as bad as people say. Well, it might actually be worse. . .

I have nothing against DIY (do-it-yourself) film-making--I once was a DIY filmmaker myself in the early 90's. But there's a big difference between a true cult film like "The Evil Dead" and a bunch of fools getting drunk and shooting something on video in their backyard. Well, except for the massive amounts of softcore sex, this is actually much closer to a drunken backyard SOV effort. You could best describe it as having all the production values and talent of a hardcore quickie, but being strictly softcore and rather dishonestly trying to pass itself off as a "horror" movie (with a bunch of sex-mad daytrippers running afoul a coven of satanic nudists in the English countryside--or something like that). It's almost impossible really to create an effective horror atmosphere on 80's porn-gloss video, and it's even harder to develop any kind of real plot when everything grinds to a halt every five minutes for a ten minute sex scene.

This movie has a few good points. It's only 50 minutes long, and with that (and all the sex), it's less boring and tedious than a lot 80's American SOV "horror movies" like "Blood Cult" or "Boardinghouse" (I couldn't get drunk enough to shoot a movie as bad as those in my backyard). The girls (like future British porn starlet Linzi Drew) aren't gorgeous, but they're reasonably attractive, and being an American, it's refreshing to hear orgasms being unconvincingly faked in thick British accents for a change (there's not nearly enough "cockney porn" out there). And while it comes just about as close as possible, this movie mercifully doesn't cross into hardcore, so you you don't have those wonderful, out-of-focus extreme close-ups of Ron Jeremy's fat, hairy, and sweaty scrotum thrusting in and out of camera as he does his thing with some poor "actress" (Jeremy isn't even in this fortunately). This isn't really a horror movie, but at least it doesn't delve into THAT kind of horror!