A Night to Dismember

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.