A Night to Dismember

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.

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.

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?

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 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.