A Night to Dismember

A really bad attempt at an independent horror film from Doris Wishman. This has no real plot and is just a jumble of nightmarish sequences in which a series of people are hacked and slashed by an escaped psycho. It's laughably poor throughout, totally inept from beginning to end, and even the gore attempts are so clumsy that they make next to no impression on the viewer.

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.

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.

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?

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.