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8 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
An Awesome Low, 28 July 2005
3/10
Author: Chris Barry from Canada

A Night To Dismember makes any Ed Wood movie look like a Michael Bay production. Even Doris Wishman, God bless her, knew this film was a stinky disaster. According to the commentary on the DVD I unfortunately bought, Wishman says half of her rushes where lost by the lab, so she had to compensate by adding a voice-over that 'explained' the 'story'. Uh-oh. Her cameraman on the film, C. Davis Smith, is also featured on the commentary and asks Wishman if the lab lost the best parts or the worst parts. After actually sitting through the entire 67 grueling minutes of this film, I can only pray they lost the best parts.

The worst/best part of this film is that the voice-over itself sounds like it was written by Gertrude Stein. It features a lot of run-on sentences and repetition. "It was the darkest night Vicki had ever seen. Why was it so dark? Vicki wondered in the darkness. Darkness was all around Vicki.. etc... etc..." and so on and so on for an hour. The commentary never stops. It makes you wish you rented Derek Jarman's Blue or better, The Beast Of Yucca Flats! The DVD commentary for this disc is priceless. Basically, it's Wishman and Smith arguing about who should be blamed for the outcome of the film. They finally decide to blame each other. Convenient, no? As I mentioned, this film is around 70 minutes long but it feels like the longest movie you've ever seen. It makes Tarkovsky's Andrey Rublyov seem like a John Woo film. If you make it to the end, you are a true Z-film freak and should be mailed a badge.

To be fair, this isn't Wishman's worst film; that remarkable honour would go to her next film, a remake of her earlier flick Satan Was A Lady (And they say Van Sant's Psycho was unnecessary)! If you want to see a good Wishman film watch "Nude On The Moon" or "Bad Girls Go To Hell" and leave this one alone, especially if you haven't seen a Wishman film before. It's not the one to start with, that's for sure.

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8 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Rare, maybe, but definitely boring, 29 October 2000
1/10
Author: jan.verheyen from Antwerpen (Belgiuml)

It might very well be a rare find - and the video copy I tracked down was of pretty poor quality - it is first and foremost dreadfully boring. Since apparently there was no money for a set sound recordist the whole film is 'explained' in voice-over...and still it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Literally everything about it is bad, and not even funny-bad or entertaining-bad, just plain boring bad. A complete waste of time.

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8 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Released at last, but was it worth it?, 21 July 2002
Author: Erzebet von Tepes de Neirhazi (luciemanet@netzero.net) from Philadelphia, PA

What can you say about a movie with a budget so very low they borrowed music from Andy Milligan's THE GHASTLY ONES? Doris Wishman has directed stuff like BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL, ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER MAN, NUDE ON THE MOON and the classic AMAZING TRANSPLANT. Okay, so she's no Ida Lupino you deffinitely won't sleep through any of her movies! A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER is as disjointed as the hacked up bodies the killer leaves behind. Why? Because some idiot at the processing lab either lost or erased about 34 minutes of film leaving Ms. Wishman to make some sense out of the 68 minutes she had left. Well she did, sort of. Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox) is released from a mental hospital several years after the unprovoked killing of two boys. Right away her brother and sister, who are jealous of her for no reason that I can figure out, decide to drive her crazy again and send her back to the hospital. Right about this same time several brutal murders take place and the finger of suspicion points to . . .guess who. Ah, but is she really guilty? hey, it's only a 68 minute movie so you won't have to wait long to find out. The gore effects are outrageous, an obvious dummy is barely tapped with a machete and the head falls off; hatchet hardly touches its victim for blood to spurt like a fountain; a woman's finger are cut off one by one but she is just making a fist and her hand is covered with stage blood. But it's things like this that make the movie fun. Also there is a detective narrating who describes things he could not possibly know. In one case he talks about what Vicki Kent is dreaming while he watches her through a window! Ridiculous? Yes! Fun? You bet! Worth seeing? What are you waiting for?

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6 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
Hard to find but hard to watch also!, 14 November 2000
3/10
Author: drhannibal666 (drhannibal666@hotmail.com) from Montreal

This incomprehensible slasher movie was the last-known feature directed by cult filmmaker Doris Wishman. Making heavy use of voiceover narration, the film stars legend Samantha Fox, in a rare non-hardcore role, and deals with a cursed family and an escaped mental patient.

Gory and violent, the film is filled with bloody decapitations and eviscerations, as well as peculiar use of negative and solarization effects. The results are unbelievably bad, and it is hard to imagine that this 70-minute mess took five years to make.

My Rating:3/10

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
There are some movies you just HAVE to see..., 6 October 2002
Author: sexdwarf

A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER may not be one of them, but jesus, I honestly can't think of another film so disjointed, so visually unattractive, so inane and illogical beyond belief as this train wreck on film. So, because of that I strongly suggest anyone who seeks out the macabre, twisted, odd and unusual to do whatever it takes to see this movie. Thinking back, I'm almost sure it has to do with a woman released from an insane asylum and a whole lot of elevator music and narration. A detective narrates the entire film (!), telling us things that have absolutely no relation to what we are actually seeing. He stumbles and stutters his lines, coming across like an 8 year old with dyslexia. It's actually very funny. Occasionally, the actors in the film do get to speak (albeit they are HORRIBLY dubbed.) Much of the time when they are speaking, we aren't shown the actors' faces, rather their feet, a couch or a house plant! Oh yes, like any Doris Wishman film we get plenty of shots of people's feet. She must've had a foot fetish, like 99% of America I suppose. Ok, I'm trying to give you the plot of this car accident but it is physically impossible. Woman gets out of loony bin, her brother and sister try and drive her back there (for what reason, I have NO idea), a few gory murders take place (in the HG Lewis gory way) and before you know it, this 70 min. mess is over and you wonder to yourself JUST WHAT IN THE HELL YOU WATCHED. And just in case the movie itself isn't surreal or bizarre enough, Wishman throws in a couple of dream sequences to REALLY throw you off. In one dream, a woman is slashed and knifed to death about 100 times, slashing and knifing, over and over and over.. She moans like she's having an orgasm. Speaking of orgasm, A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER probably has a budget much lower than your average porn. Technically speaking, THIS IS UNDOUBTEDLY the worst motion picture made. Point blank. But, I found enough enjoyment to watch it multiple times. It's funnier than most comedies, and makes not a lick of sense that it BEGS to be watched. A true spectacle.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Strange, 13 October 2008
Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY

Night to Dismember, A (1983)

** (out of 4)

A woman hacks up her family and then five years later is released from the asylum only to have more bodies start piling up. Is it the same woman or is someone trying to frame her? Director Wishman is best known for her sexploitation flicks of the 60s and 70s but this here is probably the best movie I've seen from her. I don't want to come off like I'm saying this is a good movie because it's not. In fact, the movie could be called the Plan 9 From Outer Space of slashers because it's so cut up, features nothing but narration and at times doesn't make a bit of sense. Apparently the film was completed in 1979 but the lab ended up destroying a lot of the film so Wishman had to spend the next four years shooting replacement scenes as she could. The film is certainly so bad it's good but it's good because of how unique and fresh it is. Wishman's directing style is so off the wall and rather interesting that you can't help but somewhat admire what she's trying to do on such a low budget. There are numerous bloody killings ranging from decapitations to throat slashings to even a fake zombie showing up. Murders happen left and right throughout the 69-minute running time and this certainly has one of the highest body counts out there. Most of the violence is cheap looking but there's plenty of red stuff for gore hounds. There's actually one effective scene and that's when the crazy girl first returns home and hears voices coming from the closet. I won't spoil what happens but I felt the scene worked very well. The majority of people watching this thing are really going to hate it but I've seen so many terrible horror films from this decade that I realized I was watching another one but a unique one at that.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
I think the film was dismembered., 18 November 2005
1/10
Author: SickBoySimon from Brentwood, USA

Famed lame-film maker Ed Wood doesn't have anything on DORIS WISHMAN! This celluloid train wreck is apt proof too.

Girl returns home from the loony-bin and someone begins to butcher the people around her. Who is the killer.... and will we care?

Hilariously awful slasher is a doozy from beginning to end. All the characters are dubbed (by about two people), the editing is completely chaotic, the gore FX extremely cheap, and the plot is nearly incoherent. Word has it that half of Wishman's shot footage for the film was destroyed and she had to go back and re-edit and re-write the film with the remaining footage. The film is just sloppy enough for it to be true.

The only good thing about A Night to Dismember is its memorable title and an amusing DVD commentary by director Wishman and her camera man. The bickering conversations between those two are worth more than a few laughs! The movie itself though is so terrible it's amazing that it was ever released.

BOMB out of ****

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5 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
A Self-MSTing movie!, 1 August 2003
7/10
Author: Vornoff-3 from Portland, OR

For those of you who will not enjoy the surreal experience of a film completely composed of dubbed out-takes and low-budget gore without the companionship of certain silhouettes, there is hope! Simply rent the DVD version of this film and listen to the "commentary" by director Doris Wishman and her cinematographer, Chuck. They had me in stitches all the way through. It is obvious that neither one could follow the plot, or really figure out what to say to an audience about their opus, so they spend most of the time insulting each other and trying to remember who's apartment each scene was shot in. Doris: why won't you answer poor Billy Szarka's letter?

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A mind boggling awesome bad movie epic., 27 August 2009
7/10
Author: t-birkhead from United Kingdom

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?

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1 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
What the...?, 20 May 2009
1/10
Author: adriangr from United Kingdom

I must have some kind of death wish to sit through Doris Wishman's "A Night To Dismember"...very rarely have I used the term "unwatchable" and meant it, but in this case it's absolutely true.

Where to begin? Wishman seems to have wanted to cook up some convoluted slasher-horror movie about insane girl released back into the care of her family only for mysterious killings to begin again. But what she ended up presenting was a muddled mess of catastrophic proportions, even by her standards. Apparently much of the footage shot was lost in a fire, so when the film was edited, large chunks were missing and lots of out-takes had to be substituted. Well, it sure does show.

Watching the movie proves to be a fractured, almost hallucinatory experience. Not a single shot has any location-sourced or ambient sound, all the soundtrack is made up of music, over-dubbed dialogue/narration, and slapped on sound effects. It's like watching a silent movie that has been given a hasty "make-do" soundtrack by someone else. In fact it's like watching a film with the sound off, in a room full of improv actors who are making up the lines as they go along, and bashing pots together to try and make matching sounds to go with the on-screen action. Then again, very few of the lines are actually spoken by the characters. A narration goes on for the entire length of the movie, explaining everything that is happening – however due to the incoherent nature of the film it's the ONLY way of understanding what's happening! And the music! Oh dear...Every type of stock music is laid on with a trowel, from lounge jazz to rock to Gothic chimes, and none of it EVER matches the mood of the on screen action. Maybe Wishman just threw whatever she had handy onto the turntable. And if this wasn't bad enough, the film jumps, cuts, jumps ,and jumps again, in fact every few minutes there is an abrupt change of music or lines of dialogue are abruptly cut off. And I do mean EVERY few minutes. Actually there are a few scenes when the music switches styles every 2 or 3 seconds.

There's all the usual Wishman madness such as shots of feet, hideous interior décor, backs of people's heads, someone moving position and the camera not realising they aren't even in shot any more, etc, etc. In a new level of excitement, we get close ups of people lifting slices of cheese off a dinner plate. Some scenes look as though they were shot twice or even three times – and all the shots are included in the film, so its like some horrible demonic rewind button that forces you to see everything multiple times. Oh and before I forget to mention it, about 30-40 percent of the movie is out of focus.

OK OK, I know there are some Doris Wishman fans out there who find this all part of her peculiar charm. The only other movies I have seen by her are the two Chesty Morgan films, and both of these are hilarious and highly recommended to any bad cinema junkie. So I do see the appeal of her unique style. But watching "A Night To Dismember" was nothing more than a trial. By the time I had reached the 15 minute mark I had had more than I could stand, but by some sheer force of will I managed to sit through the whole thing. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT try this at home. Utterly, utterly, mind-blowingly bad.

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