TURD ALERTS!

As Dee Flowered (aka, Deeflowered, 2008) begins, a young couple (Jessica Del Monte & Marc Tresendrider) go into an abortion clinic & get ragged on by the filthy snaggletooth homeless man (John Link) working as receptionist.

The abortionist Doctor Sunny Day (Mike DeKovic) is a drunkard with a cheap beard & mustache glued to his face. The boyfriend masturbates in the waiting room, while a guy in an easter bunny suit watches through the window from the street.

The girl goes in the back for the abortion. A doll representing a full-term baby covered in fake blood is aborted & tossed in the sink. When the girl mentions she can't afford to pay $1,500, the doctor gives her a few days to come up with the money, or he'll shove the baby back into her.

All this is obviously suppopsed to be funny. Why competely talentless filmmakers who know they couldn't possibly do suspense or drama or action or anything else believe comedy is easy I'll never guess. Comedy is hard. And way too hard for anyone involved with this film.

More characters & scenarios are given one after another, more to do with gross adolescent "comedy" shtick than storytelling, with lots of unsexy sex & titty action thrown in since porn sells no matter how badly done.

As it's supposed to be a horror film there will be some truly lame gore, such as the mannikins & plastic dolls representing dead adults & babies covered in red syrup, or the plastic baby put on a cooky tray & popped in the oven.

Only in one scene do any of these props look convincingly gory, & that's the mannikin decked out to represent a young woman with the top of her head sawed off. For the most part, it all just looks like department store dummies & toyshop dolls.

The clinic's aborted fetuses & full term dead babies are used by the local satanic cult in their rituals. One of the cult members is the town butcher who makes ground-round out of dead babies & women, so there's some of psycho killer action. The amazingly homely fat-faced chief of the Keystone cops encounters the goofy ghost of Jack the Ripper & tries to give him a hug.

None of it adds up to a cohesive story. Everything's supposed to be funny, though the humor invariably fails. Even the bunny suit guy now & then hopping through isn't funny. A typical "joke" is peeing on a sleeping bum. In its absolute "best" moments it reminded me of the kind of "jokes" the geekiest seventh-graders tell each other in the lunch room: "What's funnier than a busload of children driving over a cliff? A dead baby on a pitchfork! Ha ha ha!"

There's a legitimate instinct or skill required in making a movie entertaining no matter how bad. This one had no such underlying instinct, hence it possesses no entertainment value.



A panhandling kid on an old dirt road asks a guy with monster-hands & a sack over his head for spare change. He then acts surprised that the guy's zombie-like philosophy is summed up in the film's title Kill Them & Eat Them (2003).

The panhandler runs away terrified, picks up a rock, throws it vaguely at the guy with the sack on his head, causing one of the guy's monster-hands to fall off.

Why anyone throught it would be profitable to panhandle on an old dirt road, let alone from a lunatic with a sack on his head, & how a guy whose body parts could just fall off can be so dangerous, are just not the sort of riddles one should pose, as no answers will be forthcoming in this just-for-laughs home movie.

We soon see a second sack-head-man that eats flesh, zombie style. They are mutants created by terrible genetic experiments that seem to have no real purpose, conducted by a mad scientist & a madder scientist.

Their secret lab looks like the filmmaker's basement set-decorated with an old table & some kitchen utensils. Soon they're making more mutants until they eventually turn into mutants themselves.

This is an exceedingly foolish Z-grade gore slasher comedy. When the head-sacks come off, we see some really idiotic make-up & masks, like blue-clown-face, & some halloween masks.

But mixed in with the silly mutant designs are a couple that I actually thought were creepy, those being the gruesome gory-skull faces. Nothing else is so praiseworthy even within the limited notion of praiseworthiness in lowgrade exploitation.

Toward the end we get a climax involving a lot of "wrestling mutants" perhaps inspired by Mexican wrestler monster films. These scenes are so ridiculous they actually amuse & fascinate for a few moments, but go on much too long with neither imagination nor variety.



The incredibly bad In the Woods (1999) begins with fireman Alex (D. J. Perry) getting hysterical at the scene of a fire. He's obviously not suited to the job of fireman, but the screenplay doesn't seem to think his coming unhinged while lives are at stake is any big deal.

Not that the film's positing good mental health for the jerk. He's an alcoholic who goes home to fight with his wife Helen (Aimee Tenaglia), who is admittedly a complete bitch. As both are so unpleasant they sort of belong together, but she leaves him anyway.

No one can act, of course, & the attempt to pad out the film with dramatic scenes of domestic strife is laughable. All lines are delivered in such a deadpan manner I suspected the film was shot silent & the actors read their lines onto their own faces after the fact.

None of what has happened up to now has anything to do with the rest of the film. The story proper sort of gets going (actually it never gets going) when Alex & firechief Wayne (Jim Greulich) head out on a hunting expedition by trespassing on private land.

With highpowered rifle Wayne takes a potshot at a little bird. Had he hit it, there wouldn't've been enough left of it to stuff a dollhouse pillow.

They get lost in the woods & stumble upon a grave with an odd large cross made from a couple tree limbs. Wayne with army shovel is eager to dig it up with his little camp-shovel.

Alex thinks that's crazy, but Wayne explains there've been a lot of people gone missing from the town, & this might be where a serial killer buried the bodies. Well, that's all Alex needed to hear, so he helps by destroying the odd cross.

What they dig up is a bag of bones including a giant skull, rather like a cow's skull but with devil-horns on it. This is the film's only good prop. Then they hear a creature roar in the woods, & it turns out Wayne & Alex aren't lost after all, as they run right to the truck & drive to the nearest bar to get wasted.

The skull they left behind out of its grave apparently reconstituted itself & became a monster-dog that looks remarkably like a man crawling on hands & knees with a bear rug on his back, horns added to the bear rug's intact head.

Exactly how the rest of the story goes is hard to work out because the script is so fantastically inept. The outline of the story on the box is incorrect, but I pity the ad writer who had to guess what's going on. I've got my own idea of what's going on, but who the hell knows if I'm right.

Consider this a SPOILER ALERT! if you really intend to waste time as I did watching this movie, as I'm going to tell you the rest of the ridiculous story.

Thus you should stop reading this review right now if you want to experience the awesomely incompetent film's storyline without foreknowledge.

The creature that roared & scared the firemen out of the woods was not another of the horned bear-rug dogs, but an upright guy in a rubber monster suit. It appears to be the enemy of the bear-rug dog.

These two creatures extend their range out of the woods to where Alex lives, killing visitors to his place. The upright rubber suit communicates telepathically with Alex, explaining that the two monsters were conjured by sorcery centuries ago in order to fight on different sides of a great battle between two nations. In a flashback we see guys in ad hoc "period" costumes duelling with Spanish rapiers, representing the two warring kingdoms. This in the backwoods of Michigan, mind you.

The bear-rug dog wants to kill Alex, & the upright creature seemingly wants to protect him. Both creatures want to kill anyone who gets in their way. Why any of this would be is not part of the story.

Alex tells Wayne it's up to them to stop the two monsters they unleashed. But they don't manage to do that. Instead, the two creatures engage in battle, with lots of growly sound FX. That's pretty much the whole film [END SPOILER ALERT].

Now to give this feeble effort its due, it kind of seems like the bad writing had in mind to treat the two monsters as manifestations of Alex's personal demons, which is what he more or less says they were in the brief coda when he visits Helen in the hospital, who as it happens is perfectly all right despite having had her arm ripped off earlier in the film.

If the director were ever capable of making a decent film, the best thing to do with In the Woods would be to include it complete as an "extra" with an introductory note apologizing for how bad it is, with the excuse that Lynn Drzick was a talentless dweeb at that time.

Instead, & unbelievably, In the Woods has had a "deluxe" re-release adding a commentary track with the director (a dude despite being named Lynn), & a little documentary In the Woods: Behind the Scenes (2007) interviewing director, cast, & crew.

Continue to two more turds:
Granny (1999) and The Abberdine County Conjuror (2006)

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl