A Night to Dismember (1983) Reviews

• An Awesome Low

  chris-25122005-07-28

  A Night To Dismember makes any Ed Wood movie look like a Michael Bay production. Even Doris Wishman, God bless her, knew this film was a stinky disaster. According to the commentary on the DVD I unfortunately bought, Wishman says half of her rushes where lost by the lab, so she had to compensate by adding a voice-over that 'explained' the 'story'. Uh-oh. Her cameraman on the film, C. Davis Smith, is also featured on the commentary and asks Wishman if the lab lost the best parts or the worst parts. After actually sitting through the entire 67 grueling minutes of this film, I can only pray they lost the best parts. The worst/best part of this film is that the voice-over itself sounds like it was written by Gertrude Stein. It features a lot of run-on sentences and repetition. "It was the darkest night Vicki had ever seen. Why was it so dark? Vicki wondered in the darkness. Darkness was all around Vicki.. etc... etc..." and so on and so on for an hour. The commentary never stops. It makes you wish you rented Derek Jarman's Blue or better, The Beast Of Yucca Flats! The DVD commentary for this disc is priceless. Basically, it's Wishman and Smith arguing about who should be blamed for the outcome of the film. They finally decide to blame each other. Convenient, no? As I mentioned, this film is around 70 minutes long but it feels like the longest movie you've ever seen. It makes Tarkovsky's Andrey Rublyov seem like a John Woo film. If you make it to the end, you are a true Z-film freak and should be mailed a badge. To be fair, this isn't Wishman's worst film; that remarkable honour would go to her next film, a remake of her earlier flick Satan Was A Lady (And they say Van Sant's Psycho was unnecessary)! If you want to see a good Wishman film watch "Nude On The Moon" or "Bad Girls Go To Hell" and leave this one alone, especially if you haven't seen a Wishman film before. It's not the one to start with, that's for sure.

• Released at last, but was it worth it?

  Nozze-Foto2002-07-21

  What can you say about a movie with a budget so very low they borrowed music from Andy Milligan's THE GHASTLY ONES? Doris Wishman has directed stuff like BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL, ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER MAN, NUDE ON THE MOON and the classic AMAZING TRANSPLANT. Okay, so she's no Ida Lupino you deffinitely won't sleep through any of her movies! A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER is as disjointed as the hacked up bodies the killer leaves behind. Why? Because some idiot at the processing lab either lost or erased about 34 minutes of film leaving Ms. Wishman to make some sense out of the 68 minutes she had left. Well she did, sort of. Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox) is released from a mental hospital several years after the unprovoked killing of two boys. Right away her brother and sister, who are jealous of her for no reason that I can figure out, decide to drive her crazy again and send her back to the hospital. Right about this same time several brutal murders take place and the finger of suspicion points to . . .guess who. Ah, but is she really guilty? hey, it's only a 68 minute movie so you won't have to wait long to find out. The gore effects are outrageous, an obvious dummy is barely tapped with a machete and the head falls off; hatchet hardly touches its victim for blood to spurt like a fountain; a woman's finger are cut off one by one but she is just making a fist and her hand is covered with stage blood. But it's things like this that make the movie fun. Also there is a detective narrating who describes things he could not possibly know. In one case he talks about what Vicki Kent is dreaming while he watches her through a window! Ridiculous? Yes! Fun? You bet! Worth seeing? What are you waiting for?

• Rare, maybe, but definitely boring

  jan.verheyen2000-10-29

  It might very well be a rare find - and the video copy I tracked down was of pretty poor quality - it is first and foremost dreadfully boring. Since apparently there was no money for a set sound recordist the whole film is 'explained' in voice-over...and still it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Literally everything about it is bad, and not even funny-bad or entertaining-bad, just plain boring bad. A complete waste of time.

• This may be the funniest movie I've ever seen

  happyendingrocks2011-04-04

  This bizarre, hilariously inept offering must be seen to be believed. In a film as rife with gaffes and outright incomprehensibility as this one, it's probably pointless to articulate the unintentional comedic gold on display here. But it might be fun, so let's give it a shot. For starters, this whole outing is so clumsily constructed that it seems impossible to imagine that creator Doris Wishman had ever even SEEN a movie before, let alone made one. The entire film is comprised of a series of choppily edited scenes that rarely follow any sort of logical sequence and are augmented by dubbed-in dialogue that doesn't match the moving of the actor's mouths. In keeping with the disjointed arrangement of the film, there are times when two distinctly different performers' voices are used for a character, sometimes within the same scene. The majority of the plotting comes courtesy of a voice-over narration that blessedly spares the actors the trouble of having to actually talk to each other very often, but even this audio exposition seems to have been edited with the hatchet on the DVD cover. At times, the narrator's monologues cut off or start up in the middle of a sentence when the film leaps to the next scene, and the oration is so poorly written that even though the voice-over is describing exactly what we're seeing on the screen, it's still often completely impossible to understand any of it. The almost silent-film sensibility is reinforced by the constant presence of a background score, the majority of which is '80s grocery store music. Like the video, the audio score jumps around with reckless abandon, sometimes in the middle of a scene, and there are times when you can actually hear the source record skipping. The soundtrack is used without regard for the unfolding images, so we often witness brutal (albeit extremely silly) acts of carnage accompanied by music that wouldn't be out of place in the elevator at a dentist's office. The killings in the film are plentiful and loaded with gore, but the effects are staged with a sophomoric touch that matches the rest of the movie, so these scenes end up being the most humorous bits. Best of all, the film-makers used a real hatchet for several of the murder scenes, so we have the privilege of witnessing the deeds of a thoughtful killer who takes special care to only gingerly tap their victims with the edge of the blade. The story, such as it is, revolves around a young woman named Vicki Kent who is released from a mental institution after murdering two neighborhood boys (I think) for no apparent reason. It's actually hard to tell who she killed because this part of her back story is nestled between vignettes of other homicides that are ostensibly committed by members of her extended family upon other members of her extended family, such as the quick introduction of another young Kent woman who murders her sister in the bathtub before inconveniently slipping and impaling herself onto her own axe. There's also a brief mention of a Kent aunt who walks around in her garden once a day with her ample breasts hanging out of her blouse, a habit that apparently irks her husband enough for him to hire a man to kill her, which he eventually confesses to before hanging himself. This brings us to about the three-minute mark of the film. Upon Vicki's release, her sister and brother (who is played by two different actors within the course of about 30 seconds) start scheming to drive her insane so she'll be committed again. The first step of their nefarious plan is to lure her into a dark bathroom, where they fondle her breasts and smear blood all over her, which vanishes by the time a jump cut finds her fleeing into her bedroom. Later touches of brilliance include the brother dressing up like a zombie and chasing Vicki through the woods. Vicki also has a beau of sorts, her beloved Frankie, who, in addition to shagging her sister, also has another girlfriend with whom he shares a hysterical semi-soft-core make-out scene in which the couple's awkward smooches make them look like they absolutely despise kissing each other. On that note, another definite absurdist highlight is our heroine's bizarre erotic hallucination later in the film (ably described by the narrator: "Suddenly Vicki felt like someone was making love to her in bright flashing colors"), where repeated shots show the lovers' bodies entwined in a way that would make any sort of sexual congress uncomfortable, if not impossible, while super-imposed images of crashing waves and psychedelic lights mingle with their naughty parts. Frankie's demise is notable because of the way he screams with terror when a cat jumps out at him during the obligatory "is someone there?" build-up, yet barely reacts while he's being hacked to death. In fact, several of the hapless victims in the film look downright bored while they're being killed, which is pretty fitting because we do too. I could go on, but space is a factor. Suffice to say that the rest of the film is as delightfully absurd as you can possibly imagine. Frame by frame, ANTD is a glorious example of awful, unwatchable cinema at its finest. If you're a disciple of the "so bad it's great" school of film fandom, you absolutely have to see this, because what we're dealing with here is "so bad it's the most amazing thing you'll ever see". All others should not only avoid this film, you should probably burn your computer after reading this.

• There are some movies you just HAVE to see...

  sexdwarf2002-10-06

  A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER may not be one of them, but jesus, I honestly can't think of another film so disjointed, so visually unattractive, so inane and illogical beyond belief as this train wreck on film. So, because of that I strongly suggest anyone who seeks out the macabre, twisted, odd and unusual to do whatever it takes to see this movie. Thinking back, I'm almost sure it has to do with a woman released from an insane asylum and a whole lot of elevator music and narration. A detective narrates the entire film (!), telling us things that have absolutely no relation to what we are actually seeing. He stumbles and stutters his lines, coming across like an 8 year old with dyslexia. It's actually very funny. Occasionally, the actors in the film do get to speak (albeit they are HORRIBLY dubbed.) Much of the time when they are speaking, we aren't shown the actors' faces, rather their feet, a couch or a house plant! Oh yes, like any Doris Wishman film we get plenty of shots of people's feet. She must've had a foot fetish, like 99% of America I suppose. Ok, I'm trying to give you the plot of this car accident but it is physically impossible. Woman gets out of loony bin, her brother and sister try and drive her back there (for what reason, I have NO idea), a few gory murders take place (in the HG Lewis gory way) and before you know it, this 70 min. mess is over and you wonder to yourself JUST WHAT IN THE HELL YOU WATCHED. And just in case the movie itself isn't surreal or bizarre enough, Wishman throws in a couple of dream sequences to REALLY throw you off. In one dream, a woman is slashed and knifed to death about 100 times, slashing and knifing, over and over and over.. She moans like she's having an orgasm. Speaking of orgasm, A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER probably has a budget much lower than your average porn. Technically speaking, THIS IS UNDOUBTEDLY the worst motion picture made. Point blank. But, I found enough enjoyment to watch it multiple times. It's funnier than most comedies, and makes not a lick of sense that it BEGS to be watched. A true spectacle.