A Night to Dismember

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.

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

A Night To Dismember is one of the weirdest films ever made. It's terrible and makes no sense, yet it's one you which you cannot stop watching. Almost all of the dialogue comes from the voiceover of a detective who tells us the story of a cursed family. Members of this family are always finding themselves dead and one of the girls of the family comes out of a mental institution only to have more family members end up dead. This is one of the worst made films of all time and yet I find it compelling at times. It mostly looks horrible, there's too much gore most of the time, and the acting is atrocious and yet it is a film not to be missed.

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.

Although not released until 1983, this movie was made in 1979, marking Doris Wishman's last known feature. It has all the sex (and features Samantha Fox) that her movies normally have, but it's also surprisingly chock full of gore. Heads and fingers are cut off, intestines are ripped out, and so forth.