A Night to Dismember (1983)

Director:

Doris Wishman

Writer:

Judy J. Kushner (story)

Genre:

Horror

Plot:

A woman from a "cursed" family is released from a mental facility, and soon dismembered corpses start turning up. |

Plot Keywords:

Blood | Female Nudity | Gore | Slasher | Dismemberment

Cast

Samantha Fox	...	Vicki Kent
Diane Cummins	...	Mary Kent
Saul Meth	...	Adam Kent
Miriam Meth	...	Blanche Kent
William Szarka	...	Billy Kent (as Bill Szarka)
Chris Smith	...	Sam Kent
Dee Cummins	...	Vicki Todd
Larry Hunter	...	Larry Todd (as Norman Main)
Mary Lomay	...	Ann Todd
Rita Rogers	...	Aunt Bea Todd
Nina Stengel	...	Nina
Frankie Sabat	...	Frankie
Alexandria Cass	...	Nancy (as Alexandria)
Rob DeRosa	...	Marty
Heather Sabat	...	Sandy

Runtime:

69 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Juri Productions

Trivia:

Doris Wishman's house was used for the Kent home, in fact the majority of the movie was shot around her house.

Movie Connections:

References The Immoral Three (1975)

A mind boggling awesome bad movie epic.

A couple nights back I settled on this one for my evening viewing, a bit of a random choice but it payed off. I was glad to go for it, because it truly is barking and something I would heartily recommend to fans of the kind of trash that puts the awe in awful. The plot sees unfortunate young Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox), released from an asylum after she offed a couple of kids, tormented by her siblings who want to make her go nuts again and return to the institution. Oh yes, and lots of people die. Now this is a bad, bad film, bad from shonky start to shoddy finish, but its beautiful too. Not beautiful and bad in a Selena Coombs/Brigit Gregory kinda way mind, more a naked drunk broad orally pleasuring a cripple with Parkinsons kinda way. This is truly backward, screwy and degenerate stuff, a production no doubt hurt bad from the loss of 40% of the original negative, leading intrepid director Doris Wishman to spend the next couple of years cobbling together replacement footage in between other projects. Barely coherent and filled with ineptitude, the film ascends the realms of mere car crash cinema in its adept assimilation of different varieties of badness into one multi layered whole. For a start, rather than having conventional acting and dialogue, this one is designed more like Coleman Francis' masterpiece "The Beast Of Yucca Flats", in that it has narration, music and just a few lines of chat, all post dubbed, rather than any semblance of actual acting. Performers are all devoid of passion, and the music, constructed it seems entirely out of stock tunes, swings wildly in terms of tone and appropriateness. The plotting is sorta bad melodrama meets deranged hack 'em up schlock with a weak finale, but it does at least make way for plenty of slaughter. This is at best reminiscent of Herschell Gordon Lewis, with very cheap dummy work, gooey red splatter by the bucket, soft hitting violence and directed and edited in a fashion that is nearly always funny but often punishingly inept. Then as a final bit of mentalism there's some kooky visual work that nods to bottomed out bargain basement 60's psychedelia, for a few groovy badness kicks. All swirled together in an intoxicating witches brew of bonkers, this isn't a film that should ever be watched by people who incline towards "quality" cinema. Also short though it is, some minor pacing issues prevent it from being a constant source of entertainment. But for seekers of the insane, the horrendous and the boggling, well, what are you waiting for?