shot on video

Death Metal Zombies (1995)

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One essential quality I’m always looking for in horror movies during Halloween season is an essence that can only be described as “Slumber Party Appeal.” If you’re reading this blog, I hope that you’ve aged well past the point of attending slumber parties at a friend’s house under loose parental supervision, but you should still know what I mean. A horror movie with good Slumber Party Appeal is one with disgusting gore gags, gratuitous nudity, and an overall jovial atmosphere that keeps the mood light while you chomp on mediocre pizza delivery with your half-asleep buddies. The 1995 SOV horror Death Metal Zombies was made in the peak slumber party movie-watching era: back when video stores democratized film distribution so that micro-budget shock fests shared the same shelf space as major-studio productions. It immediately signals its Slumber Party Appeal in its crosscutting between intros of various metalhead characters as they get ready for the weekend by clocking out at work, headbanging to bedroom stereos and, most importantly, taking a steamy shower. Every time the camera cuts back to the showering babe in this metalhead friend group, she seems to only be concerned with the cleanliness of her breasts at the expense of the rest of her body. She’s shown soaping up her chest so many times in the first few minutes of character intros that it starts to play like a joke, setting a tone for the remarkably silly zombie picture to come. Death Metal Zombies has great Slumber Party Appeal, by which I mean it’s a harmless, cartoonish horror relic that most kids would still need to sneak past their disapproving parents. It’s got such a warm slumber party vibe that its recent screening at The Broad (presented by friend of the podcast Sara Nicole Storm, of Nail Club) wasn’t at all soured or interrupted by the one audience member who loudly snored through its back half; if anything, he added to the authenticity of the full slumber party experience.

You might expect that a backyard metalsploitation relic from the video store era would be overloaded with grotesque D.I.Y. gore gags, but Death Metal Zombies only delivers a few gross-out moments here or there: a severed hand squirting blood, an unsuspecting jogger disemboweled in a pool of blood, a stabbed anus spewing blood, a skeleton discarded in a victim’s bed — gooey with blood, of course. Overall, though, it’s way more interested in delivering quirky character comedy that is in setting up those gory payoffs. Todd Jason Cook wrote, directed, produced, starred, and bloodied up this regional horror picture in suburban Texas with his friends (including then-wife Lisa Cook, now Lisa DeWild) seemingly as an excuse to party. There’s a thin, single-sentence plot involving a radio contest and a cursed cassette tape, but most scenes involve suburban Texas metalheads sitting around in bedrooms, garages, and public parks, doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack blares tunes from then-current signees to Relapse Records. It’s just wall-to-wall metal jams playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media, foretelling Matt Farley’s career-long project of making creature features that care more about quirky side character’s meaningless conversations than they do about the monsters on the poster. The film’s heavy metal iconography promises a brutal face-melter of nonstop demonic gore, but in practice it’s a “Gee-willikers!,” Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom that just happens to feature metalheads turning into flesh-eating zombies. It’s a shockingly wholesome affair for a movie with a title card that announces “Music by Putrid Stench [et. al].” The current 30th Anniversary re-release even concludes with a blooper reel. In a just world, all Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads to be devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths would be forced to watch this film in its entirety, so they can see the truth: metalheads are just dorks in black t-shirts.

The metalhead friend group we meet during the opening credits find themselves in supernatural peril after they win a radio contest to own the only copy of an exclusive new single from their favorite death metal band, Living Corpse. When jamming out to that tape in their garage hangout spot, their headbanging choreography is interrupted by the band, who magically materialize and issue commands that they kill, kill, kill anyone in striking distance. The poor metalhead dorks are then “transformed” into ravenous zombies, which mostly manifests in dark circles of eye makeup and a slowed-down gait. Their friends who were lucky enough to not hear the cursed single are then tasked to find a way to play the cassette backwards in order to reverse the zombification process — something that proves difficult with commercial equipment. Meanwhile, a serial killer in a Nixon mask is also on the hunt to kill, kill, kill his fellow Texans in a B-plot that is ambiguously (if at all) connected to the central metalsploitation conceit. Even when the zombie & Nixon-mask violence escalates in the back half, the movie registers as deeply unserious. Every single blow is punctuated with a corresponding stock sound effect: video game foley for punches, squelches for stabs. When characters lob insults at their enemies, they read as more silly than vicious: “Dork,” “Pus-wad,” “The Baby Bunch,” etc. The ultimate heroic goal of the picture is not to destroy the zombie hoard so much as it is to reunite the disbanded friend group so they can rock out to metal tunes together once again. Todd Cook’s camcorder vision of true friendship persevering in an increasingly harsh world is a heartwarming one, even if it is best enjoyed when you’re 13-years-old and sneaking room-temperature beers past your sleeping parents while a buddy from school is spending the night.

-Brandon Ledet

Video Violence (1987)

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I wonder how true film snobs feel about the current moment in restoration & distribution. In past decades, Janus Films & The Criterion Collection were the standard-bearers for cinephilic home media, putting a heavy emphasis on getting classic art films into customers’ living rooms before they were lost to time. Nowadays, that effort has been overrun by a gang of boutique distribution labels that produce high-gloss prints of low-class genre schlock, best represented by Vinegar Syndrome’s dozens of genre-specific sublabels and its pornographic sister company Mélusine. Instead of collecting the cleanest scans possible of masterworks by the likes of Bresson, Godard, and Buñuel, modern cinephiles spend hundreds of dollars hunting down pristine copies of bargain-bin martial arts novelties, shot-on-video slashers, and vintage narrative pornos. I am not complaining. Personally, I love that there’s a Blu-ray company that specializes in every disreputable subgenre you can name, catering to an increasingly niche clientele of antisocial freaks (myself included), but I also imagine there’s a silent class of classic film snobs out there distraught by the sordid state of things.

To see some of that old-fashioned film snobbery in action, I recommend returning to its roots in retro video store culture, as represented in the 1987 cult curio Video Violence. It’s a shot-on-video horror film about a video store owner who’s disgusted with his gorehound clientele, directed by a real-life video store clerk who was disgusted with his gorehound clientele. For classic film snobs, it’s a cathartic screed against the scumbag schlock gobblers who overrepresent low-brow genre trash in the all-important Film Canon of great works. For the horror nerds  actually likely to watch it, it’s the filmic equivalent of getting smacked on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper. For the vast majority of us who fall somewhere between those polar extremes, it’s a documentary relic of 80s video store culture, with lengthy explanations of video-return drop boxes, membership cards, late fees, and the democratizing nature of the display shelf (wherein when a customer requests “that chainsaw movie” they’re handed a copy of Pieces, not the more obvious Tobe Hooper classic). At a time when retro hipster video stores like L.A.’s Vidiots (or, locally, Future Shock) are making headlines and Alex Ross Perry is constructing feature-length essay films entirely out of video store representation in pre-existing films (Videoheaven), that temporal snapshot of 80s video stores in their prime is just as essential as documenting the film nerd-culture bickering that terrorized their aisles.

Gary Schwartz stars as director Gary Cohen’s onscreen surrogate, a disgruntled cinephile who used to program art cinema in an New York City repertory theater and now finds himself renting out video tapes to local yokels with no discerning taste. He’s trapped in small-town America, where everyone is an anti-social loner with a VCR, frustrated that his customers would rather watch cheap-o horror movies or “the occasional triple X’r” in the privacy of their own homes than chat about “the Woody Allen or a classic Abbot & Costello” with the knowledgeable store clerk. Hosting a podcast would have fixed him. Instead, he grows increasingly disgusted with the mouthbreathing ghouls he peddles tapes to, especially once they start returning home-made tapes to the store instead of the professional movies they rented. Several mysterious blank tapes land on the poor movie buff’s counter, which he soon discovers are real-life snuff films made by the gorehound townies, torturing & dismembering outsiders who don’t fit in with the local culture. Of course, he foolishly investigates these horrific deaths on a vigilante mission and eventually becomes a videotaped victim himself, with his humble video store ultimately run as a co-op by the bloodthirsty freaks who used to come to him for their gore flicks before they started making their own.

The only thing Video Violence hates more than its audience is itself. While describing the mysterious snuff tapes to his incredulous wife, our video-store-clerk-in-peril explains that he knows the violence in them is real because it’s all shot on video, likening the production values of that format to soap operas & TV commercials, not a proper film. Its most hateful “fuck you” to its audience is a scene in which a customer asks whether a horror film titled Blood Cult is rated R for violence or for nudity, since she’s only willing to show it to her young children if there’s no nudity. So, when the staged snuff footage then lingers on grotesque shot-on-video violence—like a human arm being processed by a deli slicer or a basement sadist giving his screaming stab victim a bloody kiss—it feels like being potty trained by having your face shoved into your own piss. You can absolutely feel the difference between this self-hating, “Is this what you sick fucks want?” approach to video gore vs. the more self-indulgent, guilty-pleasure gore of Lucio Fulci’s Cat in the Brain, which delivers the same goods with introspection rather than revulsion. Video Violence is a movie made by a classic cinephile who’s disgusted with what’s been done to his artform of choice, and I imagine that sentiment is still lurking out there somewhere in the ether now that the vintage-schlock lunatics are running the boutique-label asylum.

-Brandon Ledet

Furious (1984)

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I’m generally positive on the current state of film culture, at least on the audience end.  Thanks to organizational hubs like Letterboxd, Discord, and the podcast circuit, it’s easier to find a wider cultural discussion on the niche cinematic artifacts I care about now than ever before in my lifetime, which leaves a lot of room for sharing & discovery outside the traditional print-media forum.  Growing up, my familiarity with movie titles was determined by video store curation and magazine articles, but now there’s an infinite supply of Movie Discourse to delve into in all directions, if you care to look.  It’s a blessing in terms of expanding the public library of accessible titles, but it can also be a little exhausting when it comes to those films’ analysis.  Pinpointing what every movie is really “about” (i.e. Grief, Trauma, Depression, Isolation, etc.) gets to be a little tiresome over time, since it feels more like solving a literary puzzle than indulging in the art of the moving image on its own terms.  Every modern film discussion tends to boil down to deciphering metaphor or interpreting the career-span mission statement of an auteur.  As a civilian with a movie blog, I’m among the guiltiest participants in that constant ritual, and I genuinely don’t know how to stop compounding the problem with my own inane analysis of every movie I watch.  How else could I justify logging all this stuff on Letterboxd?

The shot-on-video martial arts cheapie Furious is a huge relief in that modern context.  A subprofessional, no-budget production from wannabe Hollywood stuntmen before they worked their way into the industry proper, it’s the exact kind of vintage cinematic artifact you never would have encountered in the wild unless it happened to be stocked at your specific neighborhood video store.  Now, it’s accessible for streaming on several free-without-subscription platforms, backed by thousands of glowing Letterboxd reviews highlighting it as an overlooked gem.  Better yet, it’s a film that sidesteps the need for any concrete analysis, since its story was obviously figured out in real time during its month-long shoot, purpose or meaning be damned.  It’s all supernatural martial-arts nonsense that’s so light on plot & dialogue and so heavy on for-their-own-sake magic tricks that it plays less like a metaphorical puzzle to solve than it is a meandering dream dubbed direct to VHS.  Sleight-of-hand card tricks and droning synths pull the audience into the opening credits with a chintzy sense of mystery, followed by 70 minutes of incoherent action adventure across the cliffs and rooftops of sunny California, with no particular destination in mind.   Furious is much more concerned with convincing you that its stuntmen are jumping to their deaths from great heights or that its evil sorcerers are casting actual magic spells than it is concerned with filmic abstraction or metaphor.  It’s illusion without allusion, the perfect salve for modern film discourse.

In the opening sequence, a nameless warrior fights off attackers through some very careful cliffside choreo while attempting to operate what appears to be a magic tusk, as it spins like a compass.  It’s unclear where that compass is meant to lead her, since she’s soon overcome by combatant goons, who then bring the magic tusk to a sorcerer who runs a karate dojo out of a nearby 80s office building.  The fallen warrior’s brother leaves his own mountainside dojo to investigate and avenge his sister’s death, which throws him into the middle of a wide conspiracy involving wizards and, possibly, aliens.  Really, he just punches & kicks his way through a series of fights until he works his way up to the Big Bad, occasionally stopping to gawk at screen-illusion magic tricks, like the Big Bad’s ability to levitate or the main henchman’s ability to shoot live chickens out of his hands like bullets.  Nothing about Furious makes much linear, narrative sense, but its curio collection of spinning tusks, severed heads, flaming skeletons, and so, so many chickens has its own distinct sense of magic to it.  Our hero’s loopy revenge mission recalls the SOV surrealism of Tina Krause’s Limbo – Lynchian in the sense that they’re better enjoyed at face value than they are as 1:1 metaphors that can be unlocked through critical interpretation.  Furious just happens to feature more punching, kicking, and stunt falls than Limbo, along with more bright California sunshine.

The “remastered” version of Furious currently available on most streaming platforms still looks like it was dubbed over an already-used VHS, which only adds to its charm as a vintage martial-arts novelty.  Its narrative incoherence is also echoed in its editing style, in which every shot is either one beat too short or one beat too long, constantly keeping its rhythm off-balance.  The fight choreography is just as precise as the editing is sloppy, however, with each punch & kick sharply delivered on-target.  If I were to put on my 2020s movie blogger thinking cap, I’d say that the film’s narrative and editing incoherence reflects the protagonist’s hazy, disjointed mind as he recovers from the grief of his sister’s sudden death.  Really, though, the movie just kicks ass because the fights look cool and there’s a wizard who shoots chickens out of his hands.  It’s not that complicated.

-Brandon Ledet

Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine (2000)

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The streaming era has democratized film distribution in many ways, offering direct user-uploaded platforms like YouTube & Vimeo to publish your work for a worldwide audience alongside lower-tier streamers who are hungry to fill their libraries with cheap-to-license titles like Tubi, Hoopla, and PlutoTV.  Good luck getting anyone to actually watch your work, though.  Because there are so many platforms for low-budget productions, the likelihood that an audience will stumble across your particular no-budget movie in the endless #content wilderness shrinks every year.  There are some ways that the scarcity of earlier eras was healthy for the independent filmmaking landscape, if not only because it was a lot more likely that your film would get noticed outside your local friend-circle bubble.  For instance, a digi-SOV sci-fi novelty from Korea could break out of the genre film fest circuit to reach an international audience and land a belated review from luminary critic Jonathan Rosenbaum despite being shot on home video equipment in empty alleys & warehouses.  The try-hard edginess of Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine tested my patience as soon as I read its title, but there was something about its “Let’s put on a show!” no-budget earnestness that made me weirdly nostalgic for a recent bygone era.  Nowadays, you have to be Steven Soderbergh if you want your handheld digi-cam experiments to earn a sizable audience for anything longer than a TikTok clip.  So, even when I was wincing at the grotesque ribaldry that Teenage Hooker wanted me to find humorous, I still found myself compelled to pour one out for the D.I.Y. cyberpunk gore hounds who’ve been left behind by the cruel march of time. 

Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine is SOV genre trash about an underage sex worker who’s murdered by her schoolteacher then brought back to life by a mad scientist as a killer cyborg on a revenge mission.  Because the movie is only an hour long (and bookended by at least ten minutes of opening & closing credits), there isn’t much else to divulge beyond that one-sentence premise.  All I can really do here is spoil its one great idea: the strap-on machine gun our undead heroine uses to shoot her teacher dead from crotch level in the final scene.  Everything before that final act of criminally horny violence is either a goofball non sequitur (like an impromptu dance break when the evil teacher first discovers his student turning tricks in an alley, disturbing his mother’s sleep) or a home movie level restaging of more substantial, professional work (including a cosplay version of the cyborg-construction imagery of Ghost in the Shell).  Had the entire movie been a revenge rampage in which the main weapon of choice was a cyborg’s killer strap-on, this would still very likely be making the rounds as a must-see cult film for dorm room stoners everywhere.  Instead, it’s just outrageous enough of a stunt that you can see how it briefly held audiences’ attention in the early 2000s.  There’s little scene-to-scene cohesion in its hurried shaky-cam tours through the back alleys of Seoul, but every few scenes there’s a detail that’ll perk you up in your seat: nighttime sunglasses paired a schoolgirl uniform, sex set to Benny Hill-style novelty jazz, a bed that is also a lightbulb, etc.  It’s the kind of movie where the protagonist is shot in the chest, exposing the wires inside, just so you can turn to your nearest bro and shout “Whoa, her tit exploded!” between bong rips.

I mostly had a good time with Teenage Hooker despite my dorm room days being decades behind me.  Its humor is flat, its sex is sour, and its comic book stylization can be a little embarrassing for an adult audience … and yet, there’s something mesmerizing about its digi-cam cinematography that makes it a thrilling watch.  The absurdly wide fish-eye lenses and the handheld jerkiness of its framing—combined with the late-90s record store staff-picks soundtrack—gives it the instant cool cred of a vintage skateboarding video, a relic of a time long gone.  I dare say there’s even a Wong Kar Wai quality to the digital red, yellow, and green hazes of its fluorescent-lit color palette.  There are dozens of Japanese genre titles from this era that I would recommend someone check out before prioritizing Teenage Hooker (the playful handheld camera work of Hideaki Anno’s Cutie Honey and the vicious, supernatural schoolgirl violence of Sion Sono’s Suicide Club both immediately come to mind), but the D.I.Y. production values and the Korean context of this specific title do make it tempting to root for as an underdog.  Even now, while we’re living under the illusion that every movie ever made is affordable & accessible, I had to access Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine through Archive.org, since it wasn’t commercially available through any official means.  At least that low-quality, heavily pixelated transfer accentuated the early-2000s nostalgia of the presentation, recalling a time when it would take 20 hours to download no-budget schlock like this through a torrent tracker – a time when no-budget schlock like this was enough of a buzzy online attention-grabber to be worth that all-day wait.

-Brandon Ledet

Blood Sick Psychosis (2022)

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There’s nothing punks and metalheads love to debate more than authenticity and scene cred, so that’s the only critical lens I could think to apply to the no-budget slasher Blood Sick Psychosis. Set in Philadelphia’s D.I.Y. metal scene, Blood Sick Psychosis is a dual throwback to SOV camcorder horrors and the earlier metalsploitation trend of the Satanic Panic era. So, I’d argue it loses a few punk authenticity points for indulging in retro genre pastiche instead of being true to its era.  It clearly admires no-budget horror “classics” like the Canuxploitation slasher Things, Tina Krause’s surrealist headscratcher Limbo, and the Paloma Brothers’ home video gross-out Hallucinations, only modernizing its feature-length homage to that era with an updated crust-metal soundtrack and a few stray shots of cellphones.  It’s a loving copy of a pre-set SOV slasher template, presented in the exact way most of the movies it emulates are seen by modern audiences: frequently interrupted by ad breaks on subscription-free streamers like Plex.  Whether you find that style of pastiche charming is a question of taste, but the movie opens with its villainous lead having a Crispin Glover-sized emotional breakdown while wearing a River’s Edge promotional t-shirt, so you can’t say you were not warned.

Where Blood Sick Psychosis racks up its punk-cred authenticity points is in the way it continues the true mission of retro SOV slashers: documentation of its filmmakers having a good, wholesome time.  Like all great regional, no-budget horrors, it’s basically community theatre.  Blood Sick Psychosis drags its audience through a guided tour of the drive-in movie theaters, squat basement music venues, and cheesesteak shops of modern Philadelphia, all presented through the prism of VHS tape warp.  No detail in its plot about a depressed metalhead loner who goes on a senseless killing spree with his acid dealer matters as much as its survey of a local D.I.Y. show starring the Philly-based black metal band Spiter, who encourage their audience “to kill yourself for Satan” before serenading them with the mantra “Suicidal bloodfucker, vampiric bloodsucker”.  This is an on-the-ground document of a scene and, even though I’ve never been, I’ve always gotten the impression that Philly is the exact performatively cold & cruel D.I.Y. subculture captured in this gnarly self-portrait.  Even when the camera cuts away from reality to indulge in LSD vampirism, paranoid rants about bodily mutations, and the ritualistic slaughter of animals, it still plays like a charming little caricature of the City of Brotherly Love.

Punk infighting about posers & stolen valor has always been incredibly tedious, and I don’t mean to participate in it with any sincerity.  I just thought it would be fun to pick at this movie from that angle, since it’s about the exact scene-obsessed dipshits who would care about that kind of thing.  In its most telling scene, our two LSD-crazed serial killers chat outside the Spiter show about how annoying it is that punk screenings of Extreme Cinema are all tagged with trigger warnings now, both voicing a genuine frustration with modern punk culture sensitivity and, by the time the conversation reaches its punchline, mocking the reprobates who would oppose that sensitivity.  Its playdough claymation credits, Jackass-style “creepy crawl” home invasion pranks, and spectacularly lazy Dave “The Rock” Nelson cameo (seemingly a direct homage to legendary pornstar Amber Lynn’s half-hearted participation in Things) are all overt signals to the audience that it’s just having a laugh, often at its own expense.  That willingness to self-satirize really helps smooth over the overtly retro genre nostalgia and slasher-standard misogyny that creeps in at its weakest points.  Personally, I’d be more interested in a version of this movie that actually reflects the tools & textures of its digital-video times, but this movie wasn’t made for me.  It was made for the cold-hearted metalhead brutes of Philly, who appear to be having a lot of fun.

-Brandon Ledet

Hallucinations (1986)

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As a fan of low-budget, over-the-top horror movies, I’m used to art I like being dismissed as frivolous, juvenile, and needlessly grotesque.  When it comes to an exquisitely styled wet nightmare from David Cronenberg or a tightly constructed splatstick comedy like Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, that kind of snooty dismissal of practical-gore horror as a lower artform can be infuriating.  I cannot summon that same defensive fervor for 1986’s no-budget horror comedy Hallucinations, though.  It is exactly the frivolous, juvenile grotesquerie that better funded, more thoughtful pictures in its genre get dismissed as outright.  Not for nothing, it’s also a delight.

In Hallucinations, amateur gorehounds The Polonia Brothers stage a series of barely-connected gross-out gags in their mother’s suburban home.  The gangly twin teens are best known for their surprisingly successful video store novelty Splatter Farm, but this unassuming follow-up gets their lizard-brain appeal across just fine.  The plot is a direct echo of the production’s circumstances: three teenage boys are left home alone while their mother’s at work and “hallucinate” various goblins, ghouls, and gore gags.  Sometimes, their nightmare vignettes are adorably low-tech, like when a spooky monk figure seems to have traveled back in time into the frame from Matt Farley’s Druid Trilogy.  Elsewhere, their low-fi effect is genuinely horrific in its gross-out juvenile spirit, as when one of the brothers mysteriously shits an entire dagger(!!!) while the camera fixates on the resulting blood & viscera that collects in his tighty-whities.  It’s alternatingly cute & gnarly with no sense of control or rhythm to that tonal pendulum, and most of its momentum is in the dread of anticipating where it’s going next.

I have no real context for how typical Hallucinations is to the Polonia Brothers oeuvre, as I have yet to see Splatter Farm or any of their other classic-era dispatches from the Pennsylvanian suburbs.  This just happened to be the title from their catalog that’s currently free to stream on Tubi.  Between the chainsaws, the puke, the loving nods to Herschel Gordon Lewis, and the VHS camcorder patina, I’d say its place in the larger horror canon lands somewhere between Things (’89) & America’s Funniest Home Videos, with all the charm & limitations of both amplified a thousandfold.  More importantly, it’s a great opportunity to test the boundaries of your appreciation for practical-gore juvenilia.  The film reeks of a teen boy’s bedroom, from the monster doodles drawn in the margins of otherwise untouched school notebooks to the moldy pile of mysteriously “used” athletic socks.  If you have any stomach for this kind of for-their-own-sake practical gore showcases, here’s your chance to test out the claim that you have low-brow, undiscerning tastes.  In my case, guilty as charged.

-Brandon Ledet

Limbo (1999)

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The trash angels at the American Genre Film Archive recently restored & distributed a shot-on-video horror relic from the late 90s that both transcends & typifies its era in no-budget filmmaking. Limbo is a warped-VHS headtrip that’s all disoriented disgust with the world and nothing remotely resembling coherence. It’s more of a cursed object than a Movie, so that AGFA’s restoration feels less like a standard home video release than it does a black magic spell. The Blu-ray disc includes a feature-length commentary track with director Tina Krause, which I’m hesitant to listen to even though it might help make sense of the film’s eerie, disjointed imagery. I’m worried that any context or explanation would deflate its delirious 3a.m. mystique.

The IMDb logline for Limbo is “A woman makes a descent into Hell after she kills a man she brought home as a one-night stand.” That’s a relatively accurate way of describing the final third of the one-hour runtime, but as a whole the film is far too meandering & self-distracted to support any kind of one-sentence plot description, especially one so concrete. Most of Limbo finds Krause dicking around with camcorder effects & morbid ephemera in a spooky warehouse locale. Lynchian horror imagery—complete with a Laura Palmer surrogate wheeled around in a clear-plastic body bag—is filtered through a D.I.Y. video art aesthetic in a haunted, scatterbrained haze. The only unifying sensibility on a thematic level is a disgust with the nü-metal dirtbag men who ogle & harass our traumatized lead. Parsing out anything else feels like trying to make sense of a half-remembered nightmare.

It’s tempting to dismiss Limbo as something that would be best served as a background projection at a Halloween party or raw footage for a music video re-edit. Yet, there’s something potently angry & distraught about its mood that cuts through its lost, dizzied narrative to save it from being tedious (a quality that’s majorly helped by its succinct runtime). Judging by the bonus shorts included on the disc, Krause was mostly working in sleazy SOV softcore around the time she made Limbo, and her sole feature as a director feels like a defiant protest of that genre. This is a deliberately anti-sexy, impossible-to-pin-down video art nightmare with no patience or interest in the typical genre signifiers of its era. It may not satisfy the usual metrics for A Great Horror Film, but its off-kilter details linger with you longer than with more focused, technically proficient works of well-funded mediocrity. In fact, it’s practically spitting directly in those films’ faces.

-Brandon Ledet