TURD ALERTS!

Two skanky pornqueens are vampire-slain & revive as vampires, as an excuse to mix a bit of girl on girl softcore & shaved crotch shots with dripping blood.

That's the heart of Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires: The Curse of Ed Wood (2003), but it doesn't even live up to the low standards the title implies.

Now I'm not this film's target audience so perhaps there's someone somewhere -- probably a middleaged fellow still living in his mother's basement -- who'd love it. And that title at least, it shouldn't be too surprising that it's not so much a horror flick as an X-rater.

Even promising so little, it delivers less. The "barely legal" promise is as phony as the faux lesbianism, since like most hard-living actresses in the adult film world, these gals are a mite on the crusty side.

Most of the women are probably in their thirties, but look much older. They all use pornqueen pseudonyms for the cast list, as none wanted their real names associated with such crud.

As for the men in the cast are fat dinkusses, so not even good for token beefcake.

The subtitle is likewise delusioinal. Evoking Ed "Plan Nine from Outer Space" Wood as an excuse for making a bad movie is no excuse at all.

The part of the film that is supposed to evoke poor maligned Ed are the couple sequences with Mr. Creepo dressed up for Halloween, in a cemetery trying to communicate with the ghost of Ed Wood, while doing the least funny jokes you'll ever see, if you're unfortunate enough to see this film.

A fairly awful rock band called The Serpenteens gets to perform, & really they're the only thing in the film that would qualify as "so bad they're fun" as opposed to merely dull.

The geezerly Serpenteens aren't teens of course, but just some second-rate underground rockers from New York who are into zombie films, KISS, & Alice Cooper.

They're probably proudest of having written the themesong for Fangoria Radio on nobody-gives-a-shit satellite radio. That alas is their primary claim to fame. And yet, if I were making a jackshit cheap horror film I'd be glad to have them in it, though I'd hope the rest of my jackshitter would be better than this one.

Toward the end of this rotten movie, there's a vampire blood-orgy that finally justifies, somewhat, marketing this as a horror film, but it's all fairly pathetic.

This film reached the end of the trail when it was tucked into one of the "fifty packs" with no warning to the buyer that four or five of the titles are much more porn than microbudget horror, so essentially marketed to kids. Bad dirty movie vendors, bad!



Now Bill Zebub has a greater claim to the Ed Wood mantle. He makes no-budget horror films of the worst sort, but you can tell he sort of likes the genre even while being an insult to it.

If one of his films is shoved in front of me I won't refuse to watch it, as I have a masochistic urge to keep abreast of microbudget horror. But I won't pay close attention either, because everything he does stinks.

And yet like Ed Wood one does get a feeling, now & then, that he would like to make a good movie, maybe even believes he has made good movies, & is not entirely at fault for his handicap. He was born untalented , will die untalented, but that doesn't keep him from trying. Just like Ed.

Rape is a Circle (2006) is another faux-lesbian horror-film for gnomes living in their moms' basements.

A blonde babe, Isabel (Niki Notarile), who at first seems rather mainstream, picks up two hitchhiking babes who are rather goth. They all go home together & drink Isabel's specially prepared sangria. The blonde has thereby drugged them, & procedes to have bondage sex with Kerri (Yelena Sobalevski). The other actress apparently refused to do any such scenes.

Whenever the dirty bits are about to occur, the film cuts away to Barbie dolls hugging. Nothing is shown. So this terrible film can't even get the sexploitation right.

"I have the power! This is my truth!" is the best line as the blonde torments her bound & gagged victim. The dialogue has been idiotic from the s tart, but at least when Isabel's talking trash it's campy & dull instead of merely dull.

A few very soft softcore moments are provided. As horror, it's barely registering, & never particularly bloody despite that it was marketed as horror. The only time the psycho dominatrix is almost interesting is when she plays with her Barbie dolls & keeps her yap shut, but her interactions with her captives really don't amount to much.

Eventually they escape, & later on Kerri gets to have a revenge scene against some guy who raped her. This barely fits with the first part of the film, seeming to have have been spliced in from a different movie. And again we dont' get to see the revenge on screen, so what's the point.

Other vengeances are planned, most notably against Isabel. Before their captivity, the two girls had been lovers, but since Kerri's abuse at the hands of the psycho dominatrix, she has not been able to tolerate being touched, not even by Kat (Natalie Laspina). She's now frigid with either sex, & no longer even wants to be alive.

Kat feels that Isabel stole paradise away. So she sets out on her own mission to avenge Kerri. She drugs the blonde & cuts her up piece by piece. It's tepidly a gross-out, so a little more effective than anything leading up to this try at a big climax, which for once wasn't entirely off-screen.

The most suprising thing about Rape is a Circle is that it sets out to be moronically sexploitative but is too chickenshitted to show much. None of the money shots were filmed. It's almost like Bill Zebub thought that if he didn't deliver any gore or sex, what he might have left is -- get this, BWAhaha -- a serious psychological thriller.

The other weird thing is that I didn't completely hate the music on the soundtrack (Zebub knows a tad bit more about music than he does about filmmaking). Nor did I find the marginal acting, especially that of Natalie Laspina, to be unforgiveably bad. It's much more the writer-director who failed, not necessarily the actresses who did as much as was humanly possible with such bad material.

For More Turd Alerts, continue to:
Crappy Horror Movies
Or, continue to the next vampire film:
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974)

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl