The substratum of shot-on-video cinema is mighty strange...a twilight world where penniless Promethean amateurs can get their creative rocks off, and pretty much anything goes. The small but sworn patronage for this material is typically more interested in extreme, transgressive, and subversive content than polished efficacy, so it stands to reason that critically reputable examples are as rare as an Honus Wagner baseball card. Of those I've personally seen, BLONDE DEATH tops the list.
The sole feature film from gay militant rejectionist James Robert Baker flips the bird at family values, Christian conservatism, teen romance, and pretty much every other respectable ostent of vested American heritage(all in fitting tandem with the classic punk melodia of THE ANGRY SAMOANS). It details the sordid urban odyssey of foxy teenage Tammy, who's left to mind the house while her demented, Bible-thumping parents are away. She first gets truffle-hogged by an eyepatch-wearing lesbian, then bound and gagged during a home-invasion. She finds herself attracted to her virile young ex-con assailant, and romance blooms. It's latterly learned that the hunky hoodlum had a hot slab of man-meat in the poky, and Tammy's twisted tango soon becomes a peccant pas-de-trois when the psychotic pretty-boy gets released. The torrid trio blazes a speed-dizzy trail of violent crime, inclusive of a bloody murder at Disneyland(shot guerilla style on location). The action spirals wildly into an appropriately rancorous final curtain.
This jackleg little exercise in acid-spitting acerbity is so wholeheartedly anti-everything, it's no surprise that the director opted to chuck his mortal coil into a dumpster at age 50. The movie crackles with gnashing, risible dialog, delivered with amateur enthusiasm by a surprisingly able no-name cast. It's variably resonant of John Waters' early period projects, and veers occasionally into a more in-your-face nihilist style redolent of Richard Kern's notorious output. A highly entertaining and buoyantly misanthropic slice of razor blade cheesecake, sprinkled with snarling spit and vinegar.
6.5/10...an almost brilliant underground wonderwork.
