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

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?

Doris Wishman's "A Night to Dismember" is an ultra-cheap and sleazy slasher flick that simply has to be seen to believed.Wishman was an innovative low budget filmmaker.Her directing,editing and marketing of her films was all self-taught and almost all of her films were self-produced."A Night to Dismember" is her only full fledged horror film.It is also a big mess.The editing is beyond awful,the use of same location in several scenes is painfully obvious,the acting is amateurish and the story is illogical and confusing.Still the film is never boring and there are some fairly nasty scenes of gory carnage including ripped out hearts and chopped off fingers.Basically "A Night to Dismember" is about psychotic woman who gets out of an insane asylum and promptly starts butchering people around her.Give this low budget trash a look.4 out of 10.

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.