A Night to Dismember

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.

B-movies don't tend to live by many rules, but here's something that usually seems to be true: the worse the movie, the better the back story. Movies can't be as bad as "A Night To Dismember" all on their own, surely there must be something I don't know. Thankfully, director Doris Wishman (often referred to as the female Ed Wood, how's that for an endorsement?) helps out on this matter. According to her a disgruntled lab employee destroyed almost half the footage of this movie, which I guess explains it...to a degree. I get now why the movie's such a jumbled mess and why the worst narrator in movie history constantly has to fill in blanks, but that's just the tip of the iceberg really. What's with the game show music during tension scenes? Why did they only bother to dub in about a third of the dialogue, making the actors look like total morons for most of the time? What's with all the unwatchable scrambled footage, was this accidentally sent to a meth lab? I'm sure that the original material, if it ever existed, could have made this movie into well, an actual movie, but I think it would have still been an absolutely terrible actual movie. Let's all just be grateful this was Wishman's only attempt at a slasher and stick to laughing at her nudie flicks.

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?

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.

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