Direct to Video: Straight to Video Horror of the 90s

Which is appropriate as its about 30 year old movies. The documentary creators dont try to wow the audience with a fantastic show all by itself. They keep it simple. This is mostly a collection of interviews from people famous in the B-movie industry and well-loved by fans of the community. Its also wonderful information for movie fans who didnt watch a lot of 90's horror and need some background info or perhaps a launchpad into the genre. They actually cover many movies and actors and producers & the interviews reveal lots of good info especially when paired with clips, but most of it is interesting only to B-movie fans. A wonderful example is Deborah Dutch explaining her introduction to machine-gun fire and squibs. Theres also an in depth explanation of the animation sequences in Evil Toons.

If you think you might like this I guarantee you will. If you arent sure then you are probably not going to love it. Overall I think its a great way to kill an hour and forty-five minutes not to mention get some inside stories from a lot of wonderful people.

Devoid of any narrative structure and constantly struggling to find meaning, Direct to Video is the ultimate example of how to not make a documentary, or any film. The editing is appalling, leaving long conversations without any motive behind them, footage interspliced, or any entertainment value. Direct to Video plays like a behind-the-scenes featurette on a no-budget DVD from 2006. Amateurish doesn't even begin to describe what is happening here. In fact, you really can only understand what is going on if you have previous knowledge of the subject matter because the director, Dustin Ferguson, feels as though things like structure, story, and pacing are not needed. If you are looking to see long, unedited stories from talking heads, or enjoy watching full trailers for movies after watching long boring conversations, then this may be the perfect doc for you. This is a travesty and injustice to the films that you may have grown up loving.

There's definitely a great documentary to be made about this subject but by ANYONE other than this director who seems content to just string together trailers (with no captions to tell you what the movie was) and interview subjects telling amusing anecdotes from shooting these crappy movies.

This needed a framing narrative explaining the whats and whys of the genre, some look at the major players, tropes, etc. Instead, we get nothing but interviews (shot with a terrible side angle used for who knows what reason) and clips from (mostly Full Moon movies).

Like literally ANYONE could have done this better...

What a brilliant idea to make this film, Director Dustin Ferguson has done it again, Producers Saul Mejia and Joe Willianson certainly show the best of their talents on this film, I highly recommend this film to anyone who wants to have a good time and remember the 90's.

To give you an idea of how dumb some of this is, within the first 2 minutes a guys tells you that he wrote PuppetMaster and then he says the studio wanted the writer to be union so they let the director write it and he says the following:

"It still has MAJOR similarities to my script including the fact that there were puppets."

REALLY? It's called PuppetMaster. Did we think it was going to have puppies?

The other problem with this movie, besides the clowns pretending they are important, is the exceedinly poor quality of the clips. They are blurry and practically unrecognizable.