Cemetery High

I rented the DVD of this movie because I saw it was written and directed by the people who made the hilarious cult classic PSYCHOS IN LOVE. However, this effort falls far, far short of that movie. First, I want to mention that the picture and sound of the DVD is among the worst transfers I've experienced. The movie goes all blurry when something moves, and the sound is so faint that it's near impossible to make out what people are saying.

However, even if the DVD transfer had been up to snuff, I would still find this movie terrible. The director (Gorman Bechard) has disowned the movie, saying that it was taken out of his hands and reworked by others. The movie sure comes across as a patchwork job, with obvious new footage awkwardly edited in, and a central story that moves at a crawl and lacks things like character development with the central characters. But whether it's the original footage or new footage, the movie is extremely unfunny. There are only three or four gags in the entire 81 minutes that are mildly amusing.

It was apt to put the word "cemetery" in the title, because this is one movie that should be deeply buried in one and never dug up again.

Cemetery High is part of a trio within the Full Moon catalogue. Director Gorman Bechard and much of the crew and cast worked on this and before it both 'Psychos in Love' and 'Galactic Gigolo' for Full Moon. Basically a group of average looking young women decide to eliminate all the perverted and criminal men in town including naughty corrupt town mayor. Fortunetly for the bullet manufacturers pretty much all the man are very bad. Though most are vulgar there are moments when the vigilantes seem to be coercing men in order to find them guilty and deserving of death. The death scenes are pretty amusing and as mentioned in a spoken introduction there will be different noises for nudity (a bike horn) and violence and so on. The cast regularly refer to the fact that they are in a film and that it needs to be entertaining for the viewers. Of course by these women's 'all men must die' standards the viewing audience would probably be a victim of the very gang they are watching. Relative fun.

I detest this film.

Long story short: it was originally called "Assault of the Killer Bimbos." It was a black comedy. We filmed it as written. Charlie Band, who ran Empire, called me the day after we wrapped and said he just read the script and it was too dark for his liking. He was taking away the title (because I had gotten such great publicity, including PEOPLE magazine), and keeping only half of what I shot. He was having his staff write some back story.

Thus my story about girl who offed scum bags just because they knew they could...now became a story about girls who were abused, etc and so on. But it was the film that was ultimately abused (and I'm using a nice word) by Band.

I talk about this at length on the commentary of the new PSYCHOS IN LOVE DVD release. (Of course, if I had seen what they did to Galactic Gigolo in post prior to filming this, I would have never made a second film for Band.)

Rent PSYCHOS. Avoid this piece of crap.

And if you're a filmmaker, and an idiot with money tries to tell you what to do with your film...I don't care how badly you want it...WALK AWAY.

I found out about this movie from a friend. He said it was the only movie ever that he was not able to watch all the way through. That sounded like a challenge to me and I am so glad I watched it. It's very Troma-like except that the jokes are actually funny and they don't show the gore. The only thing I didn't like was that they rarely used the Gore Gong. It would have been funnier if they had used it every time someone died. Most low budget movies have a lot of things that don't make sense and this movie really only had one instance of that. They show an older married couple in their kitchen for eleven seconds. They never talk and there is nothing in the movie to explain why they are there or who they are until the end credits. I've seen some reviews here crying that the title is misleading. Those people must only watch Oscar winners because at least half of the movies I watch have titles that don't make sense. This is a good movie. Watch it.

After being raped and/or beaten up by men, high school grads Kate (Debi Thibeault), Michelle (Lisa Schmidt), Dianne (Simone) and Kathy (Karen Nielsen) turn vigilante and aspire to wipe out "scum-sucking @SSholes!" Slobs, bikers, barflies, wannabe rapists, anyone who hits on them with a bad come-on line and, in one case a guy who's just harmlessly walking down the street, are all wasted.

Each time violence or nudity is shown, the warning gimmicks "gore gong" and "hooter honk" (a horn) are sounded. It's fun at first, but runs itself into the ground pretty quickly. The girls tell each other it's time to get naked, whine when they get blood on their shoes and fight over who gets to kill who. The mock documentary approach (also used in Bechard's PSYCHOS IN LOVE), where characters talk directly to the camera, is fun and used well.

OK, this is desperate, stupid, senseless film-making and the cheap comic gags are often irritating, but it did make me laugh out loud several times.