[TURD ALERTS!]

Imagine you have a dirty-minded sicko little brother, twelve or thirteen years old, & he's making a horror movie that he hornswoggled you into being in. He's also written fan letters to porn stars, & they'll show up later to add a semi-adult flavor to his childish film.

You're one of two guys walking in the "wilderness" -- or grampa's weedy back acre -- searching for a cave that's supposed to have a magic dagger in it. The story doesn't make any sense of course but the motivation is the dagger will help out with a class project.

Well, imagine no more, that film is Blood Legend (2006), & its badness would make sense only if the filmmakers were junior highschool dorks. The pornographic elements suggest the kid might have been molested at home so has been prematurely sexualized.

A babe of a witch-girl appears unexpectedly. She's from that same class. She's wearing a cape which are apparently the fashion statement of the hour.

She's promising one of the guys he can have a B-J, & is he eager. But instead, she stabs him multiple times, he being a virgin offering hacked up with the aforementioend magic dagger.

She rips out his heart while a really stupid looking devil-costumed guy (Robert O'Connor) stands nearby.

The second guy in that opening scene dies by the old-timey "knife in skull" gag. And Blood Legend is off & stumbling.

One hopes the miserable cast had no interest in or expectation of ever being actors, because they failed to be such. They're obviously older than thirteen, so they can be forgiven only if they were picked & random & paid in meth crystals.

Diana (Heather Jacobsen) is the witch out to claim her family legacy. She has slight qualms about the lives she must take, but take them she must.

She delivers the ripped-out heart to her fat swishy uncle Isaac the Warlock (Randal Malone) who says, "MAHvellous, MAHvellous," then gives a didactic explanation of what the story is supposed to be about.

There's a flash-back to witchburning days to go with Isaac's explanation to Diana who you'd think had already heard it. With worse & worse acting, we experience the reenactment one of the lamest-ever witchburning scene, with a pretty witch named Moira (goth porn star Syn Devil) promising to return in 300 years.

Actual dialogue goes, "I'll be back." "Burn, witch, burn!" It was all filmed against a bush in the back yard.

Resurrecting that ancestress is Diana's purpose. She seems to think she has something to gain from doing this, but will she be in for an inane surprise.

An unsexy sex scene culminates in the resurrected witch who turns into the previously observed silly monster-suit half sasquatch & half Jerry Garcia. "She & the demon are one & the same," explains Uncle Isaac. "She must feed or grow weak."

To make the resurrection permanent requires the coven to sacrifice innocent blood. A completely different magic dagger must be found, used for some mediocre gore stuff in the woods, & there are victims among some rather elderly looking teenagers who're throwing a party, seemingly edited into the tale as an afterthought & not really quite fitting.

A "twist" ending wasn't necessarily the worst thing, but to have worked, something good had to have led up to it. Nothing did.



I had three of director James Fotopoulos's films on my to-see list -- including Migrating Forms (2000) & Back Against the Wall (2002), but deleted the other two after seeing Zero (1997).

He might've gotten better after Zero, but half as bad would still be hard going.

Zero is the story of an isolated misanthropic grubby cancerous pervert (Matthew Buckley, who I would happily cast in a cave man epic) alone in his crap apartment doing his manniken to a raucously amateur film score.

The forgiving have compared it to Eraserhead (1977), but that's like comparing a rubber chicken to a T rex. Had there been anything whatsoever interesting about the film the black & white photography might've been praiseworthy in its imperfection, but with everything else about the film inept, the weaknesses rather than the s trengths of the photography end up underscored.

I could imagine pompously approaching the film as a piece of avant gard art & thinking it at least sufferable in that context. Or anyone who likes Plan Nine from Outer Space (1959) might like something equally inept but with the bonus of vulgarity. To me it was simply a boring film not worth the length of time I permitted it to take from my life.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl