MICROBUDGET MASSACRE 12:
The Good, The Bad and the Butt-Ugly!

DRIFTWOOD is the name of an attitude adjustment camp for troubled kids. After teenage fuckup Dave loses his influential older brother to drugs, his parents read his journal scribblings about suicide and put him in Driftwood, run by Captain Kennedy, played by ex-wrestler Diamond Dallas Page. In TV ads, he claims he’ll stop parents kids’ from being the next Columbine killer. “I’m the cure for Columbine.”
Placed in Level One, the Driftwood Dave encounters is a weird place with rigid discipline, and every jailhouse stereotype is there. There’s a gay kid, a stoner, and of course some tough guys. There’s a sympathetic but scared doctor. In a tender moment in church on Sunday, Page gives the boys an uplifting speech about crushing a quarterback’s sternum during a big game.
Dave goes for a walk at night and sees an apparition of a boy, Jonathan, who died in some mysterious accident the boys are scared to talk about. Walking the halls afterhours again, he notices his own picture on the wall, with a ghost image of what looks like the kid who died. Is Jonathan trying to tell him something? Catching him out of bounds and afterhours, the Captain makes him run the gauntlet – go through a military training course while being beaten with whips. “Do you feel worthless, Dave? ‘Cause you are.” says the Captain.
We learn later that Jonathan died after being forced to run the gauntlet while the boys used baseball bats instead of whips, and he died from those injuries – or did he?
It appears that Jack works for a hot milf property owner. They buy up shitty properties and use the kids as slave labor to clean up the sites, then flip them on the real estate market for a hefty profit. Dave’s parents won’t believe him and pull him out of Driftwood, so he’s gotta solve things himself.
The gay kid is harassed by a teacher (that seems a flamer himself), and the kid takes the teacher’s gun away and runs off. Trying to help his friend, Dave ends up knocking the gun out of his hand and taking a shot in the wing. He is well rewarded for his bravery, with barbecue, beer, and a night with Jack’s daughter. But he can’t keep his mouth shut about his plans for escape, and she turns him in to Daddy.
When the Captain realizes things are closing in on him, he puts a bunch of Level One kids in the van, and cuffs them to pews in the church, and telling his faithful trustee to douse them with gasoline and light them on fire.
Dave sees Jonathan’s ghost in his isolation cell, too. The ghost of the kid looks cool, with a wide mouth like The Joker or Mr. Sardonicus, with the teeth exposed.
There’s a showdown, and with Jonathan’s ghostly help The Captain is stopped, and Jonathan’s death is revenged. “You mad at me? Why? Because I’m a businessman?” says the Captain.
For Diamond Dallas Page’s first role with substantial screen time, he pulls it off pretty well. Of course, he is supposed to be a swaggering dickhead ex-marine with a strong physical presence, so no problem there, but he shows moments of restraint, and was better than anyone expected.
Directed by Tim Sullivan, whose last feature was the over-the-top 2001 Maniacs. This film could not be more different. Not at all campy, this sober mixture of ghost story and crime suspense film is blended with coming-of-age and prison drama elements. It’s actually a good mystery film, even if you removed the supernatural elements of the film. And the unique setting will make you feel for all the powerless Jonathans still trapped in real-life Driftwoods.
With the usual special features. DDP Mentions Stone Cold Steve Austin as one of the touchstones of his portrayal, and apparently was highly annoying on-set because of his tendency to remain in character and forcing cast and crew to refer to him as “Captain.”
Recommended. Check out the Myspace page for more: http://www.myspace.com/driftwoodthemovie.

It’s hard to know what to make out of MEATBALL MACHINE. It comes from the makers of Battlefield Baseball, which I also enjoyed, but whereas that film took its’ cues from superhero comics, this is informed by monster comics.
A bunch of very surreal gory set pieces centered around weird gore effects, hard to hate on that! Chain shoots out of nipple, rips guy’s face open. Lots of arterial spray and miscellaneous splatter. Tons of fluids, puke, blood, god knows what all over the place. With an eyeball-type beastie, gooey puppetry, boobs and industrial metal.
The necroborgs, as they are called, are weird parasites that poke people’s eyes out and create techno-alien/human hybrids with crab-like shells and appendages, saws and other weapons, and writhing tentacle-like wires that grab people, looking like a Gwar show gone horribly wrong. One creature has a very phallic drill.
Obvious Tetsuo influence; if we had never seen any of the Tetsuo movies, this would seem much more original. As it is, an obviously low-budget experience, but it’s still a bizarre and amazing splatterfest, full of odd details, like the windshield washer on the suit that wipes blood out of the way.
Our nerdy hero gets beat up by a tranny. He finds some sort of spider creature that one guy takes back to the machine shop at his house. His friend takes him to get laid at a professional’s; he can’t do it. He sees factory girl he has a crush on attacked by her boss, and gets beat up again. Scarred-up girl gets raped by a machine thing, she seems to like it. A mutant baby is born within minutes.
He meets other refugees, including one woman whose daughter was retrieved, but is still infected. The necroborgs seem to occupy humans in order to fight each other, then kill and eat the loser, and move on to a new host. They are attracted to negative , fucked-up people. They feel their pain, and can access their memory. Our hero resists possession.
Gaping wounds and throbbing gristle. Wisely there is little dialogue. The acting is not that good, but come on, is that why we’re watching this film?
Techno-rape theme, both literally and figuratively. Obvious influences: Tetsuo, David Cronenberg, with hints of spaghetti western, Evil Dead, and various eurotrash.
Meditation on pain? Allegory for loss? Or just some freaky-ass shit?
I don’t know, but it’s more fun just enjoying the frantic gross-out. From www.TLAReleasing.com.

LOVECRACKED! THE MOVIE is a goofy schizophrenic movie you want to like, but it just beats the same horse to death. It’s a low-budget Monty-Python inspired (I almost expected to see a naked man playing piano) mishmash of a bunch of skits with some decent short takes on Lovecraft stories hidden amid the linking comedy bits.
Had to shut it off approx. 20 minutes in and take a breath. There are several segments that are good, but they’re much too short, and the “comedy” linking bits go on much too long. The fake reporter interviewing people in the street on the impact of Lovecraft was just ill conceived and poorly scripted, and needed to be edited heavily. They kill any momentum the previous short may h ave built. I liked the comic-book animation parts, especially the one near the end, which had flash animation of H.P. singing his story as Cthulhu chases him. Pretty good! But it’s the only music part, except for some metal playing during certain portions of the film.
Other parts I liked: the guy emerging from a cocoon, the segment with the hot pagan redhead (although how does she remove his heart with her bare hands and no blood?), and the part with the violin player and creepy puppets. Oh, yeah, and Burning Angel’s explicit take on Herbert West, entitled “Re-Penetrator”, where Herbert injects the green goo to make his female corpse a sex fiend, with hilarious results. He obliges when she says, “Eat my zombie pussy!” and earns his red wings as fountains of blood erupt from her snatch.
Just as any development begins, the short segments are over and it’s back to the uncomfortably unfunny segments with the reporter. His investigation leads him to Troma offices, where Lloyd Kaufman does a cameo as himself (Geez, it seems like he’s in practically every indie film lately, doesn’t it?) in which he manages to namedrop nearly every Troma release.
Inconsistent as hell, there’s parts I liked, but I can’t recommend sitting through the whole thing. Just who is the audience for this film? (Besides the filmmakers and their friends and families.) I understand that they solicited Lovecraft-themed shorts from various filmmakers and didn’t have total control, but it’s still a big mess. The shorts are the best part. The film would have been tighter and more thematically consistent without the attempts at humor.
But don’t let me bully you. Make up your own mind and order it from the filmmakers for only $9.99 at www.biffjuggernaut.com.

DYING FOR DOLLARS
That’s the title of a SOV film from Ray and Migdalia, who directed STONED DEAD, reviewed in MM#8.)
It’s the story of a Benny, a simpleton living with a dysfunctional family and how they try to get some money. Pop has a row of phones dialing radio station contests, and Mom mails in contests and waits for the daily TV movie show to call her for the big prize. The son took the utility money and blew it on a nag at the racetrack, and now owes a local gangster some more money, the amount of which keeps going up. Everyone abuses Benny except for his loving Grandma, who he talks to on a toy phone when he has trouble communicating. If any acting scenes can be called harder to watch than the others, it is these scenes between Benny and his Grandma. None of the actors is very skillful, but Benny mugs it up with his retard act. I found him so annoying, which I suppose is in character, I really started wishing someone would shoot him.
The family gets their barstools repossessed, and then the phones and lights are turned off. Discussing their limited options, Grandma conveniently falls down and can’t get up. They make sure she never does, and wait for reading of the will. Meanwhile, Benny gets kidnapped by the gangster’s stooge, Vinnie, who holds him until he gets his money. Grandma’s will left everything to Benny, and they have to talk Vinnie into bringing Benny to the lawyer’s to sign the will. And Grandma’s dead, but apparently she still talks to Benny on the toy phone.
Glaringly bright, they experimented with color filters to vary the shoot (most scenes seem to happen in the same room or two.) Music is a little noodley and the comic compositions undermined at least one potentially dramatic scene. Camera-work seems a bit static. But yes, it’s in focus and you can hear everything.
I liked the premise, but thought the execution was illogical at times, and not at all suspenseful. Not offensively bad, but amateurish and unrewarding.
For more info see: http://www.createspace.com/239373/.

-Hysteric Eric