Kaatskill Kannibals

This amateurish horror video is a bit of an anomaly. Director Michael Rose has put plenty of research and sweat equity into the project of an historical horror movie set in Upstate New York and reflecting the history of his home turf, but the result is a mess. Its allegiance to schlock cinema, notably the '60s achievements of Herschell Gordon Lewis right through the genius (by comparison) of George A. Romero is one more evidence of wasting time and talent on a dead end -namely adding to the thousands of crappy horror features saluting bad influences (throw in Franco, D'Amato Deodato and innumerable low-end Euro schlockmeisters). Oh for the days when budding film students/filmmakers worshipped Fellini and Bergman instead.

The nearly hour-long (padded with endless credits) video is rendered hard to watch at first due to inept post-synch dialogue, either ADR or dubbed or just botched, which fortunately improves to direct-sound later on. The amateur-night acting (perhaps proudly amateur) is awful, and the requisite gore merely ridiculous. If this were a teaching moment about New York history, that doesn't sit well with a gorefest. The show reminded me of the historical horror movies from England like Witchfinder General starring Vincent Price, but those were professional productions.

The video is a YouTube freebie linked to director Rose's website, where he indulges in crazy self-promotion, including a silly fake biography of himself and an even goofier (and pretentious or mock-pretentious?) manifesto about "post-contemporary art", apparently to justify the portfolio of paintings of his for sale at about $1,000 a pop.

While I enjoyed the idea of Kannibals running around and eating people, I feel this missed the mark as the storyline made no sense and the time scales were confusing. Of course, the budget was low and the acting was a little off but nothing a good director and producer couldn't have dealt with. In all, I think there should be a second movie about this and it should be written and slowly processed to all parties involved. The set was amazing and looked decent in parts of the movie. The sound effects may have lasted longer than they should have but nothing major or off-putting. I had a good time watching it.