Summary
In short, a painfully bad, painfully unfunny, just plain painful indie anthology. To be avoided at all costs.
The framing story involves the world's most annoying investigative journalist doing his very worst Monty Python imitation. He's ostensibly delving into the myth surrounding the life of H.P. Lovecraft, which leads us into a series of totally unrelated short films hammered together to form a movie. The only decent segments were a couple of British shorts made by entirely different group of filmmakers, who really should have thought twice before agreeing to be associated with this mess. The rest is unfunny, tedious, and gross (annoying gross, not fun gross), and that's not even counting the ZOMBIE PORN which showed up without warning with actual people having actual sex, which I did not sign up for, thank you very much.
Or to put it another way, if you really love Troma movies but you think they're way too high-brow and sophisticated, this is totally the movie for you.
Warning! Spoilers ahead!
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Barbara's Rant
Ok, so I would have known to expect the porn if I'd actually paid attention to the DVD case, since it clearly states that it features "horror-porn queen Joanna Angel". I have no doubt that she's produced the finest zombie/mad doctor sex available, and I must admit that "Re-Penetrator" is an excellent title. Also, it's kind of funny that Herbert West apparently goes commando underneath his lab coat. But still, it's kind of a mean trick to have a surprise porno in the middle of a movie. (SURPRISE! I brought you a PENIS!) As I understand it, that was the shorter, soft-core edit, which I find hard to believe since we watched most of it on 16x fast-forward, and it still lasted roughly forever. Also, to me "soft-core" means those movies they show on USA Up All Night with lots of breast implants walking around wearing gauzy nightgowns and saxophone music, not an edited-down porno. I think a truly soft-core edit would have been about 57 seconds long.
As for the rest of the movie, it's a measure of how soul-crushingly awful it was that when the sex started up we were too dazed to find the remote, leading to a mad scramble and lots of yelling, "Fast forward! Fast forward!" once we finally snapped out of it. It's like somebody gave a camera and a film crew to that weird, annoying film geek kid you knew in middle school, and he invited a couple of his equally annoying friends over and they spent all night hanging out in the basement drinking Cokes and eating Fritos, and once they were good and buzzed on the caffeine and sugar they sat down and put all their most shocking jokes into the script, borrowing heavily from the Monty Python sketches they stayed up all night watching the previous weekend.
And just like my hypothetical 13-year-old boy, I have no doubt that the filmmakers will take my disgust as a badge of honor, because hey, any attention is good, right? So, congratulations, guys.
BARBARA MAY
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