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

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.

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.

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.

..was how they would show clips and talk about movies without telling you the name. You had to listen for it and hope they would mention it. Sometimes in the same interview clip they start talking about different movies with no indication they've shifted focus. Clint Howard's segment is the worst for this. Luckily, I knew most of these titles...but I could see someone looking to gain some knowledge being very frustrated.

Bad low-budget horror movies from the 80s-90s was a great subject for a documentary, addressing why this phenomenon occurred parallel to the cinema, the expansion of the home video market, the talents that emerged from there, etc. However, this film is nothing more than a series of tedious interviews with characters who are practically not identified with a character generator (there is a special effects technician, a music composer, actresses in decline), whose anecdotes would be attractive if they had been edited and also accompanied by videos of the films they are talking about, which apparently the production had neither rights nor images. Many promotional shorts for films are included, but they have no greater relation to what the interviewees speak before or later, they go from one thing to another without a narrative thread and the result is a disaster worse than the films that went directly to video .