10 Outsider Genre Gems

By
/ 24 October 2007

Okay – so you’ve read the rules to making successful independent horror. You’ve learned the revisionist ropes and no budget parameters. Still, as a legitimate ‘learn by example’ individual, you’d like a few more examples of the digitally driven genre before stepping behind the camcorder lens and exercising your aesthetic. Well, you’re in luck. There is a wealth of worthy motion picture models out there, each one capable of proving that originality, innovation, and cinema art can indeed be forged out of blood, sweat, and poor credit rating tears. While each suggestion does suffer from the inherent limits of absent cash and amateur apprenticeships, they still remain a significant step in that ongoing clash between mainstream moviemaking and a new, more adventurous breed. On the other hand, it will take a great deal for future projection to match these movies’ trendsetting facets. They truly represent the best in handmade cinema.

Before the bellyaching starts, certain titles already championed by SE&L are being purposefully left off in order to make room for some fresh faces. These otherwise notable novelties include anything by Eric Stanze, Chris Seaver’s sensational Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker and Destruction Kings, Scott Phillips living dead deconstruction The Stink of Flesh, several crackerjack Campbell Brothers films including Demon Summer and The Red Skulls, and Justin Channell’s comic classics Raising the Stakes and Die and Let Live. A quick overview of the 15 months of content available here will reveal that, for the most part, we’ve sung the praises of these films before. No, it’s time to shed some light on those outsider gems that struggle to get recognized among the slew of Sci-Fi Channel level product tossed onto the market in the most haphazard of ways. Therefore, in no particular order, here are 10 titles you’re truly going to love, beginning with a recent jewel:

The Blood Shed

Imagine if David Lynch and Rob Zombie had a baby, gave said malformed infant to John Waters to wet nurse, and allowed Kenneth Anger and the Kuchar Brothers to come over and babysit. With Tobe Hooper and Jack Hill as godparents and Edith Massey as life coach, the results would begin to resemble something similar to the wonderfully weird brain damaged b-movie The Blood Shed. The conceptual offspring of couture auteur Alan Rowe Kelly, this tasty take on the entire Texas Chainmail Family Massacre strikes an intriguing balance between scares, surrealism, and satire. It’s an eager exploitation experiment that’s a joy to behold.

Midnight Skater

Midnight Skater is a classic example of a “look beyond” film. If you can “look beyond” the amateur antics, unprofessional production values, and overall neophyte nonsense, you’ll really enjoy yourself. Getting there may require Ritalin, a gross of sugary juice boxes, and about a hundred trips to the video store – or at least a couple readings of The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. This is horror hilarity as channeled through a TV eye mentality, issues of Fangoria, and untold reams of fan fiction. Brothers Andy and Luke Campbell pepper their film with unforgettable characters, and great gore set pieces, creating a brilliant bargain basement slasher epic.

Bleak Future

Bleak Future is simultaneously smart and stupid, realistic and retarded, wholly original and a complete and utter rip off. It borrows liberally from such future shock spectacles as the Mad Max movies, A Boy and His Dog, and A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, starting out as a solid spoof before becoming a frighteningly inventive take on humanity, horror, and the universal lack of Armageddon coping skills. Offering up a believable premise and a directing style that cribs from the likes of Kubrick and Lucas, Raimi and Tarantino, Brian O’Malley and his mates have made a true kitsch classic, a nerd’s nutzoid splatter fest.

Gory Gory Hallelujah

Sometimes, something so original comes along that it takes you aback for a moment, throwing off your usually sound and set criteria and aesthetic. Though it’s smartly realized narrative kind of falls apart toward the end, and its breakneck pacing means that much of the subtleties get lost in the chaos, Gory Gory Hallelujah is still one exciting, engaging film. Part religious rant (pro and con), part faith-based freak-out, this thoughtful provoking farce casts the keen, clear satirical eye of writer Angie Louise and director Sue Corcoran, to function as both Bible bashing and spiritual re-awakening. It’s a bloody, ballsy good time.

Jerkbeast

For a movie formulated out of a cable access program that’s premise basically consisted of brain dead pre-teens calling up the hosts to try their hand at swearing, Jerkbeast is brilliant. As an example of homemade cinema, with cast and crew working from little more than a dream and an extended credit line, it’s excellent. As a standard motion picture comedy, it’s a little wanting. Not everything works here. Some of the attempts at humor are obvious and lame. Still, as a genre joke starring a guy in an ogre suit and two tame slackers who want to start a band, it’s very endearing and engaging.

Buzz Saw

Serial slaughter…alien invasion…hopelessly inept handymen…you name it, Buzz Saw has found a way to add it into its mixed-up menagerie of the macabre. Imagine the Coen Brothers as the kings of carnage, or Wes Anderson exposing the true secrets behind Area 51 – that’s the visual vibe and narrative tone achieved by directors Robin Garrels and Dave Burnett. Beyond its bizarro world tendencies is a film that fully understands the requirements of a fictional realm. The filmmakers give their movie about murder and extraterrestrial menace untold dimensional details, making it as authentic and inviting as it is arcane and insane.

The Manson Family

Audacious, inspired and overdosing on the scurrilous and the sleazy, Jim VanBebber’s The Manson Family is one of the most remarkable films ever made about Charlie and his criminal clan. Its flaws are as obvious as the gore that flows from the victims’ bodies, and the moments of genuine revulsion are equally effusive. In his attempt to recreate the defining moment of the 1960s, VanBebber has struck upon a uniquely individualistic ideal. Instead of making that mad monk messiah the center of his story, the filmmaker strives to capture the essence of the Manson movement as filtered through a ‘70s exploitation recreationist’s approach. He manages magnificently.

Inbred Redneck Alien Abduction

The plotline couldn’t be more promising – invaders from outer space target a group of hopelessly hick hillbillies for their icky “experiments” and the government comes calling. Thankfully, writer/director Patrick Vos and his co-writer Adam Hackbarth do more than just flesh out this funny business. They create a comedy so novel and unusual that recent Hollywood horse-hockey just pales in comparison. Aside from the fact that bumpkins are basically humor gold, these devilishly deranged filmmakers find ways to give FBI agents and egregious E.T.s their own sense of silliness and savvy. The result is a misguided masterwork, an outsider opus you’ll revisit again and again.

Scarlet Moon

Dripping with ambition, dense with ideas and attempting the epic while maintaining the idiosyncratic, this attempt at a new modern mythology works, most of the time. Warren F. Disbrow is like a directorial encyclopedia of horror. We see sci-fi and fantasy elements merging with macabre to become a definitive statement of one man’s love for the scary and speculative. There are obvious nods to ’60s drive in classics, ’70s shockers, ’80s teen slasher romps, the ’90s kind of ironic eeriness – even a couple of non-horror classics get passed through the dissecting device. The final product is a mishmash of comedy and corpses, devil worship and dumbness.

Killer Nerd/Bride of the Killer Nerd

This is a certifiable classic, a perfectly executed premise of such outrageous originality that it’s amazing no one had thought of doing it before. After all, geeks are the original pecking-order punching bags, the bottom-of-the-esteem-food-chain freaks. What better way to celebrate an AV club member’s memories of how hellish high school really was than to turn a card-carrying corporal in the slide rule sect into a blood-and-guts slasher of the popular people? Bride does its predecessor one better. It takes the terror back to the hallways of senior year where it belongs, and makes the bullies of youth pay for all their verbal abuse.