I DISMEMBER MAMA

Welcome to VHS Tuesday, where I dig up one of my old, awful horror videos and share its delightfully stupid packaging. When horror videos first started flooding the market, the marketing geniuses really went to town thinking up the best taglines and the most hilariously literal summaries. Today we have I Dismember Mama, an awful, awful video nasty that I never want to see again. But its packaging: pure genius.
   

This is the cover. Look! It’s Roy Scheider playing a washed-up magician.

   

   
Note the tagline: May she rest… in pieces. Damn. Gets me every time.
     
And the summary:
        

POOR ALBERT IS JUST CRAZY ABOUT WOMEN.

     

Albert (Zooey Hall) is a mentally disturbed young man incarcerated in a rest home run by Dr. Burton (Frank Whiteman).

    
A nurse’s reprimand (Elaine Partnow) causes him to lock her in his room, strip off her clothes and attempt to murder her. Then an attendant (James Tartan) is brutally murdered and Albert escapes. And so starts a killing spree more brutal than any ever seen in the annals of filmmaking. First his mothers servant goes, then a call girl in a series of chilling murders culminating in a terrifying Hitchcockian climax that will leave you breathless time and time again!
      

Not only do we know exactly who dies (and in what order!) but we also know that this is the most brutal, Hitchcockian story ever put to film. God bless whatever minimum wage copy-writer wrote this description. You almost make me want to see this movie again. Almost.

WARLOCK III

       

WHA’ HAPPENED?

The WARLOCK is back, and this time hes played by some random guy who isn’t Julian Sands. He lures a bunch of lusty college students to an old house and kills them off. The only girl who stands a chance is Kirsty from Hellraiser, because seriously, she survived Pinhead and this guy is just some Eurotrash poser.

   

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

Coming a decade-plus after the original and its surprisingly enjoyable sequel, this installment always seemed to have that late-90s, early-2000s horror vibe: a little younger, a little sexier, a little more Scream-inspired. At least, that’s what the cover reminded me of. A demon-shadow (one of the all-time great horror posters) has been replaced by a bunch of pretty young people looking blankly at us.

    

SHIRTS AND SKINS:

Yup. There was basically nothing in the first two movies to satisfy the T and A quotient, but this one has that in spades. Basically, that main girl can have sexual chemistry with a toaster. She really brought it for this movie, especially considering how haunted she has to behave and how lame her family-drama-backstory truly is.
           

                         

BLOOD AND GUTS:

Yeah, but the director made the regrettable decision of ratcheting up the tension by cutting everything like a music video, complete with random flashes of light. It’s a horror movie aesthetic that has thankfully died down a little in the last few years, but holy crap is it intrusive.

          

PLOT HOLES AND CRAZINESS:

Something about a doll and a magic knife. Fun fact: I pretty much ignored the attempts at story here. Everything just felt a little low-rent for me, and not in an awesome look-it’s-a-warlock-adjusting-to-life-in-the-80s kind of way.

           

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

Whatever happened to Julian Sands? And does he still keep Sherrilyn Fenn in a box?

VALENTINE

Valentine's Day just happened, and you know what that means, ladies and gentlemen. I'm still in a Reese's-induced sugar coma. It also means that I get the chance to talk about one of my least favorite guilty pleasures, the Denise-Richards-getting-harpooned-to-death slashfest Valentine.

Now, full disclosure: I have a soft spot in my heart for this movie, and there are two reasons why: First, it is the only Katherine Heigl movie that I can bother sitting through all the way (besides Bride of Chucky or Wish upon a Star). I enjoy the fact that she gets murdered at the very beginning. Such is my hatred for Katherine Heigl.

And secondly, it was a date movie for me. One of my first. I was in junior high; I was really nervous. It didn’t go well. But… I look back on that memory fondly. And ironically.

Aside from that, Valentine doesn’t have a lot to recommend. It came at the tail end of the late-90s slasher resurgence, and it comes across as stale and perfunctory. The final revelation is really dumb. And the acting (except for dead-eyed superbitch Denise Richards) is subpar. It’s not campy enough to be enjoyable, nor legit enough to be watchable. It’s just sort of there, limping along through wildly implausible death scenes at multi-media art installations and dimly lit mansions. Even David Boreanaz is weirdly charisma-free (and I don’t mean Carpenter).

But considering all that, I still would recommend it. It’s like a time capsule. It’s a quaint little window into the horror trends at the turn of the millennium. It’s basically the perfect distillation of everything that was wrong with horror movies at that time. The bad plotting, the hyper-verbal yet completely unnatural dialog, the long scenes of exposition, the dozens of unnecessary red herrings. Watch this and you’ll remember what it was like in the late-90s, early-2000s. For some people, that’s reason enough to sit through this dreck.

If you don’t, this lady will cut you.