Chainsaw Cheerleaders (2008)

Directed by:
Donald Farmer

Farmer (DEMON QUEEN [1986], CANNIBAL HOOKERS [1987], SCREAM DREAM [1989], VAMPIRE COP [1990], etc. etc.) carries on his dubious tradition of having never made a good film in his entire career with this digitally-shot, fully-intentional cheese-fest. However, I must admit something I'm almost ashamed to admit: I was actually (gasp!) entertained by this, for a change. Dawn (Michele Grey, also the associate producer) is about to "go all Black and Decker on someone," but first - a flashback. It's 1508 and somewhere in Europe when sorceress Lucinda (Tiffany Shepis) is interrupted cutting out a virgin's heart by a pair of witch hunter monks. They tie her to trees and set her on fire, but first she promises that her spirit will "wander through the ages." Cut to present day and we're in an antique shop that looks like it's housing leftovers from your elderly neighbor's yard sale. A high school girl looking for a prop for her role as a witch in Macbeth is accosted by the purple-haired, pierced owner Angelique (Harmony Xanix), who wants to use her blood to resurrect Lucinda using a 500-year-old dagger. She and her drooling henchman Klove (Rudy Ownbey) drag the girl off.

We now get to peak in on the life of maladjusted 17-year-old Goth chick Dawn, who will soon have more problems on her hands than her mother finding the amateur porn tape she made with her boyfriend ("I don't want to be some porn slut!"). Dawn is basically a slightly older version of the angry delinquent 13-year-old hos featured on every other episode of The Maury Povich Show. She hates her parents, applies her eyeliner with a spatula and gets revenge on her cheating boyfriend by kneeing him in the balls and then kicking his nose over and over again until it breaks in three places. The boyfriend threatens to put her in jail unless she follows the orders of guidance counselor Dr. Lacey (Debbie Rochon). Lacey diagnoses her with I.E.D. ("Intermittent Explosive Disorder") and feels an attitude adjustment is in order, so she forces Dawn to attend cheerleading camp. Since this is a no budget production, "camp" consists of three cheerleaders and their butch instructor standing around in a field for a few minutes.

Needless to say, Dawn doesn't get along too well with Bambi (Misty Marie), Chassy (Jackey Hall) or Jessica (Rabecca Lee); a trio of large-breasted bottle blonde bimbos, and says "I almost wish I was Anna Nicole Smith, cause dead people don't get sent to cheerleading camp" (?!?) While out selling magazine subscriptions, all four end up at Angelique's home just in time to see her sacrifice a victim, open up a portal to another time and bring Lucinda into the present day. Probably because Farmer could only afford Shepis for a few days, she promptly possesses head cheerleader Bambi's body. Bambi sprouts horns, talks in an echo voice and starts running around slaughtering people and eating their flesh. For some reason she also wants to implicate Dawn in her killings. She targets people Dawn knows, including her shrink, her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend and a couple of detectives investigating the murders.

As dumb and as poorly made as this whole thing is, I was entertained. Most of the acting is terrible, but it's thankfully a fun and enthusiastic terrible that kind of gels with the intentional campy tone this is striving for. There's plenty of medicore demon and gore makeups, low grade CGI fx, cheap laughs and bad one-liners (plus the occasional intentionally amusing one). The only thing this really could have used some more of is nudity. Only one of the cheerleaders and Rochon show their breasts and I'm sure someone who'd be apt to get this in the first place would probably be expecting wall-to-wall T&A. Oh well, at least they got the over-the-top camp feel right...

The two big drawing cards are undoubtedly low-budget / schlock horror vets Shepis and Rochon. Shepis does her usual fine job in a small role that plays to her strengths; seductive, evil and tough, and is one of the only cast members with any noticable talent. Rochon has a small supporting role herself and is involved in this film's most tasteless scene. After her rape fantasy gets ruined, she kicks her lover (Jim O'Rear) out and then opts to just take care of herself. She accidentally grabs a CGI animated worm monster (don't ask) instead of her vibrator, which then goes inside of her and pops out of her neck. Lead actress Grey, who reminded me a lot of Clea Duvall, shows some acting promise. Ciara Richards (who appeared in Farmer's DORM OF THE DEAD [2006] along with Shepis, Hall and O'Rear) plays Dawn's best friend and Farmer himself shows up in a cameo as her father.

★★

Dorm of the Dead (2006)

Directed by:
Donald Farmer

After a Criswell-like introduction (featuring "Dukey Flyswatter" / Michael D. Sonye, a veteran of several notable 80s B movies), the action cuts to Arkham Hall Girls' Dormitory, where some strange things are afoot. A sorority girl and her boyfriend are both killed by zombies; one of whom does a back flip for no apparent reason. Tiffany Shepis then puts in a cameo and manages to make it through a long lesbian scene without losing any of her clothing. I know, I'm as surprised as you are. She and her abusive boyfriend, as well as her friend Jane (Amanda Barnett), are killed by more zombies in a parking garage. After wasting about 15 minutes on basically nothing, the film finally gets to the meat of the story. Two best friends, the more straight-laced "geek" Allison Gellar (Adrianna Eder) and goth vegetarian Sarah Hannigan (Ciara Richards) want to do "something cool" so they go visit a cemetery to do some charcoal tracings of tombstones. Afterward, they encounter Southern fried campus bitch queen Clare Ryan (Jackey Hall), who looks and sounds like a less-talented version of Tara Reid. Yes, that is possible. All three girls attend science class, where their hunky professor Dr. Xander (ugh, kill it with the "Buffy" references already...) talks about death and claims he has a vial of zombie blood he acquired on a trip to Haiti two years earlier. Clare observes in her monotone voice "Someone's been watching too many crappy movies." Tell me about it, sister. Double billing this flick with POT ZOMBIES tonight has almost turned ME into a zombie.

Well, Sarah is called to the financial aid office and is told her tuition check has bounced and she has three days to come up with 4 thousand dollars. She's kicked out of her dorm room and forced to go to dreaded Arkham Hall, a run-down building used for "charity case students" who have no money. Arkham is also the hot spot for zombie activity since Dr. Xander (Christopher Slade) had already used his blood sample to turn a female student who tried to blackmail him into a zombie. Since then, things have spiraled out of control and the zombie girl has infected several other students (including Ms. Shepis) who lurk around in the house.

Meanwhile, Clare coerces her bimbo friend Julie (Andrea Brooke Owneby, who apparently is "America's Dumbest Stripper" after her IQ score came back near the mental retardation bracket during her appearance on The Howard Stern Show) into helping her break into Dr. Xander's lab to steal his zombie blood. Julie wusses out (and promptly disappears from the rest of the film despite her star billing on the DVD cover), but Clare gets the vial after the doc is killed by zombies. Being the nice girl she is, Clare goes to Arkham Hall and dribbles some of the blood into Sarah's mouth while she's sleeping. That next morning, Sarah awakens in a daze and soon she's feasting on rare meat before graduating to human flesh. It's at this point, nearly an hour into the film, that the films gets slightly better for about ten minutes as Sarah goes on a mild rampage around town. She chews on a dummy head that's supposed to look like Kimberly Lynn Cole and kills the dean's wife. She also hitches a ride from a guy (played by Jim O'Rear) who takes her to a drive-in playing SEE NO EVIL and SILENT HILL. Poor girl. Then it's off to a bar to get back at a drunken Clare, and then to a carnival. There are a few OK metal songs that sounds a lot like White Zombie that play during her feeding frenzies.

Director Donald Farmer is a name somewhat familiar to fans of horrible horror films. He's been making no budget movies like this since the mid 1980s, but sadly doesn't seem to have improved much over the past two decades. Dorm was shot on digital and the picture quality is decent for the format. However, it's otherwise full of technical goofs usually attributed to amateur first-time filmmakers. There are tons of continuity errors, it's badly paced, it's padded, the attempts at humor almost always miss the mark and the editing, acting, script, gore fx and sound are all pretty lousy. The Clare character is only seen in close-up and doesn't interact with most of the rest of the cast, which makes it seem like all of her scenes were shot separately. The zombie make-up is almost nonexistent. A little dab of faint green paint and a little blood is all there is to it. There are three instances of T&A in the film, which is basically all it has to offer its target audience.

★

Vampire Cop (1990)

Directed by:
Donald Farmer

From the man who brought us CANNIBAL HOOKERS (1987) and SCREAM DREAM (1989) - it's OK to run away right now; I totally understand - comes this shot-on-video mixture of urban action/thriller, cop drama, horror flick and gratuitous overuse of slow motion. The first twenty-five minutes is an interestingly edited cluster of things to come. While the opening credits slowly roll out, we see people dancing in a club, a vampire making goofy strained faces and showing his fangs, the same vampire standing valiantly in foggy silhouette, a nightmare-plagued blonde writhing in bed, a teen girl getting forced at gunpoint into a thugs car and various other things. At the club a "Hot Body" bikini contest is in full swing. Two of the girls; Nikki and Danielle, agree to go back to the hotel with an older guy for 300 bucks apiece. Before the guy can even get going (but after one girl takes her top off and the other hops in the shower), there's a knock on the door. In marches German crime boss / drug dealer / pimp Hans Geiger (Terence Jenkins), who's pissed his two girls are freelancing. He shoots Danielle dead and then forces Nikki back onto the street.

Geiger and his henchman Kurt (Phil Newman) attempt to make a drug deal with an undercover agent. When they discover who he is, they shoot him dead and end up in a car chase with two other cops; Newhouse (Don Tilley) and Mr. Vampire Cop himself, musclebound blonde William Lucas (Ed Cannon). Things end with Kurt and Newhouse dead and Lucas vowing revenge against the crime lord. Meanwhile, teen runaway Traci (Morrow Faye) - a girl who was almost raped until Vampire Cop came to her rescue and killed the guy - goes to reporter and TV hostess Melanie Roberts (Scream Dream star Melissa Moore) for help. Melanie allows her to stay in her home while she's investigating the case and a string of unsolved murders where people are turning up dead with strange, bat-like bite marks on their necks are just beginning. Melanie eventually teams up with Lucas in hopes they can crack the case together. Naturally, the two end up falling in love too, though it takes her forever to put two-and-two together. Hey, she's investigating what the press refers to as "The Vampire Murderer" and finds herself dating a man who refuses to leave the house during the day, works only at night, doesn't cast a shadow in the mirror and doesn't smoke, drink or even eat!

This is a very slight improvement over the director's previous films in that it has an actual storyline, numerous locations, decent videography and a couple of actors with charisma and the ability to recite their dialogue without coming off like they recently received a lobotomy. Hunky Cannon is pretty amateurish as the title character, but Moore looks great and is appealing as our heroine, Jenkins does a great job as the bad guy and R.J. McKay is fun as one of his henchmen. There's also a fun role for "special guest star" Mal Arnold as a police lieutenant who ends up getting chainsawed. You may remember Mr. Arnold as deranged Egyptian caterer Fuad Ramses in Herschell Gordon Lewis' seminal gore flick BLOOD FEAST (1963). Can't say I'm familiar with most of the rest of the cat, but most at least seem like they're at least trying to act.

Not that this film doesn't have major problems. In fact, it's loaded with them. Farmer seems inept in the ways of continuity and making sure everything that needs to be filmed actually is filmed (notice how many times shots of police cars and exteriors of houses are spliced into the middle of scenes). Slow motion is constantly used for no good reason and we even get flashbacks to things we just saw a scene earlier but put in slow motion. I also had a big problem with how sloppy the Vampire Cop was. He bites many people - including the main bad guy - and then just leaves them there so that they'll return as vampires (and naturally be harder for him to defeat). You'd think he'd be a bit smarter after having lived on the fringes without being detected for over 100 years. Several characters who are bitten transform into vampires and are never seen again. And speaking of never seeing characters again, Geiger's henchman AND even the main character miraculously just disappear in the middle of the big finale, leaving out heroine alone with the crime boss! The last scene rips off the final scene in THE HOWLING.

Farmer financed the film and also wrote it. Tim Ritter (TRUTH OR DARE?) was an associate producer. For some reason, it was filmed in three different cities in three different states; Pensacola, Florida, Atlanta, Georgia and Los Angeles, California).

★1/2

Scream Dream (1989)

Directed by:

Donald Farmer

Like most of Farmer's output, this is very cheap, very badly made, full of continuity errors, padded out with whatever will stretch the running time to about an hour and has terrible amateurish acting. However, it's slightly better than his two previous efforts (the seemingly-unfinished DEMON QUEEN and the enticingly-titled though nearly insufferable CANNIBAL HOOKERS) thanks primarily to second tier 'B' queen Melissa Moore, from Versailles, Kentucky. Though Moore (a blonde, six-foot-tall model) never quite reached the height of fame as some of her Scream Queen sisters, she was one of the most beautiful in her category, a decent actress and had a pretty good ten year run lasting from the late eighties until about the mid-90s, racking up credits in numerous low-budget horror films such as Jim Wynorski's Sorority House Massacre II and HARD TO DIE (both 1990), Vampire Cop (1990; Farmer again), the horror spoof REPOSSESSED (1990) and Mad at the Moon (1992; an arty horror western for director Martin Donovan), among others. Scream Dream is the actresses' first leading role, and all things considered, she acquits herself fairly well here... especially in comparison to the rest of the atrocious cast!

No lame jokes about how cut-throat the music business is, I promise!

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Things begin when a topless chick lying in bed gets chainsawed between her legs in a 'shocking' music video for bitchy heavy metal queen Michelle Shock (Carol Carr). Michelle is rumored to be a devil-worshipper and once word gets to the press that people have been mysteriously disappearing from her concerts and that her music contains subliminal Satanic messages, she's fired from her band. Michelle turns out to be a blood-drinking demoness who's been murdering her fans. In one scene, she goes down on a guy and bites off his dick. She also has some kind of rubbery little mutant hand puppet cat familiar that kills people. Derrick (Nikki Riggins), a bandmate and former lover of Michelle's (who's now dating a jealous girl named Linnea, played by Michelle Uber), stumbles upon her secret and ends up having to kill her with a medieval axe. Strangely, her dismembered hand takes on a life of its own and must also be stabbed. So band manager Lou (Gene Amonette) decides to replace Michelle with up-and-comer Jamie Summers (Moore). Jamie becomes possessed by the scorned Michelle and, in between overlong musical numbers, morphs into a murderous demon-creature with horns and claws.

The horror genre misses Melissa!

Definitely nothing to write home about. There's cheap gore, lots of charmingly dated hair metal from a group called Rikk-O-Shay, a couple of topless scenes and an unexciting, anti-climactic ending. Make-up artist Rick Gonzales (an assistant to Tom Savini on Day of the Dead) contributes a decent demon costume to the works for what it's worth. So what became of Melissa, you ask? She now trains American saddle-bred show horses, has 50 World Championships to her credit, is the owner and manager of Sunrise Stables and was a 2007 Wilhelmina 40+ Model Search finalist. I guess she's no longer acting, but she still looks great and I'd like to see her in film again.

Hide your junk, girlie men!

Tough-to-track down these days, Scream Dream was released to VHS on the American Video label and hasn't been picked up for distribution since. It's so rare that I can't even find a box scan anywhere online. Someone out there hook a brother up!

★1/2

Cannibal Hookers (1987)

...aka: I Will Dance on Your Grave: Cannibal Hookers
...aka: I Will Dance on Your Grave, Volume 3

Directed by:
Donald Farmer

There's always going to be an audience for titles such as these (like me!) but most of the time you end up getting burned, and this is no exception to the rule. After some deranged, bald man eats a human heart, another guy picks up a hooker in a bar. She takes him back to her apartment, removes her top, bites off his finger and then chops him up with an axe. Meanwhile, college girls Hilary (Amy Waddell) and Dee Dee (Annette Munro) decide to avoid "all the social status of being raped by Nazis" by joining Gamma Zeta Beta, "the sleaziest sorority on campus." Stephanie (Sheila Best aka Tara the Southern Belle on G.L.O.W.: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), queen bitch of the sorority house, decides that for initiation Hilary and Dee Dee must dress up like hookers and parade around on Sunset Boulevard until they can find a trick. The two pledges, as well as Hilary's boyfriend Bruce (Tommy Carrano) and his friends Darrell (Donald Trimborn) and Dwight (Matt Borlenghi), end up running across a slew of cannibal hookers who work out of whorehouse instead.

Oy ve. Where shall I even begin describing this exercise in cheap gore, cheap T&A contributed by ladies who certainly look their parts and camcorder production values? Let's just say I had more fun making the screen caps than I did actually watching the movie. So maybe you'll have more fun looking at the screen caps than you will reading my description? Enjoy...

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Cannibal Hookers love chewy man fingers and Cherry Kool-Aid.

Do these come in a Size 8?

You've ruined my career, Donald Farmer!!

Lobo esta loco!

The 80s called, they want their hair bac... Ah, nevermind.

Honey, could you take the trash out to the curb?

3, 2, 1, Action! Argh! Cut! Cannibal Hooker #314, could you please stop staring directly at the camera? Ah, fuck it, nevermind... And rolling!

She was Courtney, when Courtney wasn't cool.

You still here, you big masochist, you? Trust me when I say that if the amount of fun were only half as big as the hair, this might actually be worth sitting through. Sadly, it doesn't even have enough cheap oomph to fill up 60 minutes. Actually, they didn't even have enough material to fill up 60 minutes either judging by the fact that an entire scene is actually repeated in its entirety for no reason whatsoever toward the end! Strangely, neither of the two protagonists even make it to the finale (nor is their any resolution to their story) and it's bookmarked with scenes of characters who don't interact with the main cast at any point during the rest of the film (likely because their scenes were tacked on later). Even more strangely, victims of the cannibal hookers return as vampires who attack and infect others. Or were they zombies? Hell if I could tell, but now that I think about it this movie is awfully similar to the terrible 1979 Filipino horror-comedy VAMPIRE HOOKERS (1979).

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The opening credits theme song was also used in Farmer's DEMON QUEEN (1986) and footage from THE CURSE OF THE SCREAMING DEAD (1982) can be seen on a TV set. The cast includes Drew Godderis (EVIL SPAWN), Sky Nicholas (FATAL PULSE), Katina Garner (HACK-O'LANTERN; also an associate producer) and Marya Gant (A POLISH VAMPIRE IN BURBANK). One scene was filmed at the Hollywood Book and Poster Company, where owner Eric Caidin makes a brief appearance. And who could forget Gary J. Levinson (another of the producers) in his star making role as the big, bald, bug-eyed, human-heart-eating retard henchman Lobo? "No give? Lobo take!"

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First released to unsuspecting video stores by Camp Video, the same folks who gave us the similar but much-better HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS (1987). It was also later included in a fake four-part video/DVD series (distributed by Tapeworm) entitled I WILL DANCE ON YOUR GRAVE. Others in that "series" include KILLING SPREE (1987), W.A.R.: WOMEN AGAINST RAPE (1987) and SAVAGE VENGEANCE (1989).

★