#6: shorts for sickos

On the sixth episode of To Obscurity and Beyond, we take a look at eight different short films from all over the world, with some being rougher than others.

#5: maggot farmers (2021)

In episode five, I check out a Belgian zombie short movie that was stuck in production hell for over a decade!

#4: catcall: omega violence (2022)

Episode four is my favorite that I've done so far! I decided to check out the latest from Canada's Goriest Productions, which is an absolutely blood-soaked gem with an empowering message.

#3: spirit animal (2020)

For episode three, I took a look at this innovative and very well-done shot-on-video horror comedy from Nekroshark Films!

#2: the degenerates (2021)

On the second episode of this series, I took a look at Jonathan Doe's faux-snuff opus, which is a fictionalized account of the infamous Robert Beckowitz murder case.

#1: my lovely burnt brother and his squashed brain (1988)

 

My first video review! On the first episode of the show, I covered this Italian underground classic!

an update!

For those of you who are unaware,

I am no longer doing written reviews on TO OBSCURITY AND BEYOND. The original intention of this website was to keep record of and review obscure low-budget movies. It is a super fun hobby, and it's a hobby that I have wanted to do for years prior to starting it. But, as of the date of this post, I've been running this blog for the better part of three years and haven't made as many posts as I wish I could have.

When I started working on this site I was starting college and, unsurprisingly, I was inundated with work and didn't have very much time to watch and write about movies. I am now in my junior year of college and, thanks to my flexible schedule, I have more time to write reviews. But sitting down and simply writing the reviews started becoming a chore, especially considering how very few people actually sit down to read these things. I am thankful for the people who have read them, and maybe I'm just biased due to my passion for video-making, but I feel like most people are generally more interested in video reviews. If done well, video reviews are an excellent way to properly invest the viewer, as I have the opportunity to use footage and photos for rhetorical and contextual purposes. If done especially well, video reviews can have high rewatchability, and this personally sounds more appealing in the grand scheme of things.

So instead of continuing to do written reviews, I have rebranded TO OBSCURITY AND BEYOND as a video review series on my personal YouTube page. But I won't be abandoning this blog, in fact I will continue to post each new video to the blog, as well as post updates and continuing to update things like the List of Films Reviewed (by country). After all, one personal goal in this project is to review at least one low-budget or underground movie from every country. Some countries may be extremely difficult or borderline impossible to get films from, but, of course, that won't stop me!

Anyone who happens to check out this website on their own terms can expect the next few posts to embed the YouTube videos, along with brief descriptions of each. But in any case, to anyone who is reading, I would like to thank you for supporting my little project over these past few years. I greatly appreciate you, and I look forward to continuing to entertain you all! <3

-Love, Mikaela Bellamy

The Degenerates (2021)

The Degenerates (2021) - United States
Directed by: Jonathan Doe

ABOUT THE FILM:

Special thanks to Jonathan Doe for providing me with a screener copy for review!

The date was July 14th, 1982. In his apartment in northern Detroit, 33 year-old Robert Beckowitz was relaxing with his girlfriend, then 21 year-old Jeannine Clark. It was like any other ordinary night, as Robert and his girlfriend relaxed and watched the Benny Hill Show on TV. From behind, Robert was approached by 37 year-old James Glover, who then shot Robert in the back of the head and proceeded to stab him over eighty times. Over the next three days, during a drug-fueled stupor, James and Jeannine kept the mutilated corpse and used it for their own sick sexual gratification and entertainment, all the while taking pictures posing with the various body parts. Once the high had worn off and they had their fun, James decided to turn himself in to the police, and the both of them were given prison sentences for the mutilation and desecration of a corpse. Nearly 40 years later, an independent filmmaker would find himself inspired by this bizarre case, and decided to make a movie based off of the case.

The Degenerates is a very straightforward film. There is no real story, and instead we are forced to witness the depraved honeymoon of a newlywed couple. The man enters the hotel room with his camcorder handy. On a large white tarp on the floor lies the naked, dismembered body of his wife's ex-lover. The wife wanders around naked cutting the hair off of the victim's head and picking up the various pieces of the body and putting them back together. The two end up doing all kinds of drugs and have fun as the wife poses for pictures with the corpse and masturbates with it, amongst many other perverse acts...

REVIEW:
A few months back I covered Barf Bunny, the first entry in Jonathan Doe's Erotic Grotesque Nonsense series. While I greatly enjoyed the movie's soundtrack and its special effects, ultimately I felt that the film was lacking anything substantial. It was a simple story about a bunny who loved to puke. This time, Jonathan Doe decided to pay tribute to the pseudo snuff and found-footage sub-genres with The Degenerates, and what results is a truly vile experience. I can say comfortably that this film is ugly in every sense of the word. The cameraman lets the shots linger on everything on display, never once shying away from the atrocities unfolding before our eyes. We hear the pleasure in the voices of this despicable couple as they masturbate with the body parts, and we really feel the sick sense of enjoyment the husband gets as his wife vomits all over the rotting cadaver. It's not very often that I'm actually moved to feeling disgusted by a movie, as I'm so desensitized by a lot of the stuff I've seen over the years. But The Degenerates had a couple of moments that seriously made me squirm in my seat, due in part to the acting, the incredible special effects and the sheer sickness of what these two characters do to this corpse.

The husband is played by Jonathan Doe himself, and fetish actress Felicia Fisher returns in this film, starring as the wife. Both do an amazing job with their roles, but Felicia's performance stands out in particular. She is obviously very comfortable in front of the camera and is not afraid to show skin or do very perverse things, and I have to applaud her for some of the things she does in this film to make her character seem so abhorrently disgusting. The other show-stealer here is the special effects. The corpse was beautifully crafted piece-by-piece by James Bell, an incredibly talented make-up artist whose work seems to be used in a lot of underground gore movies these days. Even through the hazy, degraded video quality, the amount of detail on each body part is impeccable. I feel that if anything in this movie was seen out of context, perhaps on a bootleg VHS tape, it would probably be mistaken for real snuff because of how top-notch the special effects are. On that note, I greatly appreciate the lengths the filmmakers went in order to make this look like legitimate found footage. The footage seems to have been ripped from a heavily damaged, high-generation VHS, and all of the editing seems to have been done with a VCR, which even further accentuates the DIY feeling.

All in all, The Degenerates is a truly disgusting slice of guerrilla filmmaking, and the lengths the filmmakers went to make this are commendable. The entire time I watched I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if hotel staff were to just wander into the room. I couldn't imagine the hotel ever approving of something like this being filmed on their property, which I'm sure made for a risky shoot. I went into the Degenerates not knowing what to expect after Barf Bunny, and I came out actually enjoying it a lot! If you're a fan of pseudo snuff, found footage or shocking cinema in general, I'm confident that you would absolutely adore The Degenerates.

RELEASES:
-The Degenerates was released on a 2-disc DVD set by Vile Video Productions and Putrid Productions in 2021. This DVD set comes with a making-of featurette, an interview with Felicia Fisher, a music video by the band Griphook and trailers for other Vile Video Productions releases.
-The 2-disc DVD release also comes signed by the cast and crew as part of the Degenerates Limited Edition Evidence Box. Also included is a Degenerates barf bag, a signed 11" by 17" poster, screen-used evidence-bagged hair clippings, and a certificate of authenticity! If you're interested in any of this, I highly recommend checking out the Putrid Productions website!

Deviant (2021)

Deviant (2021) - United States
Directed by: Brandon Terry

ABOUT THE FILM:
Special thanks to Brandon Terry for providing me with a screener copy for review!

Brandon Terry is an up-and-coming filmmaker who started off making very short and very grotesque films in early 2021. Who could forget classics such as From the Womb Into the Trash, and Sacrificial Gore Shed, wherein fetuses are torn apart, dicks are mutilated and heads roll? These were two conventional gore short films that, despite being riddled with technical errors, were driven by their truly nasty concepts, and made for rather gut-wrenching watches. With his new film Deviant, the director not only tries his hand at the pseudo snuff genre, but he ups the ante on the sick factor quite a bit. Deviant plays out like a twisted home movie, shot from the point of view of one guy's camera as him and his friend go about their everyday lives. But when they aren't busy skating, smoking weed or talking about their jobs, they're busy committing atrocities. They rape and disembowel a woman they have tied up in their basement, they take home fetuses from the Planned Parenthood and mutilate them; no one is safe from these two. Not even themselves...

REVIEW:

Over the years I have found that films in the pseudo snuff sub-genre are usually hit or miss. The concept of watching someone's home movie of them butchering people, or even discovering snuff tapes intended to be distributed to benefactors, is interesting. However, the many pseudo snuff movies we have can widely vary in quality. On one hand we have movies such as Devil's Experiment and Cannibal Holocaust, two classics which are revered for their innovations in this harrowing sub-genre. And then we have things like August Underground's Mordum, a movie that is definitely effective in selling itself as real snuff, but is also riddled with so many flaws. My biggest complaint with Mordum is that it was too long and the characters were insufferably annoying, as they just screamed and swore every five seconds. It also felt like at points, it was trying too hard to be shocking and grotesque. I know, we're talking about Deviant here, but I find it important to draw a comparison between these two works.

In Deviant I see a lot of things similar to what I saw in Mordum. Even though Deviant is still slightly flawed, in my opinion, it is ten times more watchable and is just as effective in its 20-minute runtime. While Deviant definitely has some shocking and grotesque scenes, it also leaves a few things to the viewer's imagination. When the camera man sticks razor blades into a slide at a playground, we never get to see the aftermath or even hear of anything regarding the incident again. Just the sheer implication of what may have happened after left me even more uneasy. One problem though is that the film opens up as the camera man walks in on the other perp raping their victim. It felt like they were showing their hand a little too early. But to be fair, they don't linger on that sight too long. Instead the camera man leaves the guy with his "play buddy", and decides to get some water as we hear the victim screaming and whimpering. It's disturbing for sure, I just wish they built up to it a little bit more.

The acting here is decent. Really the only person who had to do any kind of acting was the female victim. She is tied to a chair with duct tape over her mouth, and she screams and whimpers non-stop as she is brutally desecrated by these two sickos, and she does a good job. I felt legitimately uncomfortable watching her scenes. Whenever I see rape scenes in movies I can't help but think about how the actors had to get themselves in such a mindset, and it makes me sympathize with their characters more. On the other hand, our two sickos are very nonchalant and relaxed the whole time, showing zero remorse or compassion, just like actual serial killers. We get a strong sense that these two kill and maim people as if it's just another one of their regular daily activities. It's as second-nature to them as gaming and skating, and they enjoy it greatly.

To criticize technical aspects like the camera work and the editing would be kind of pointless, as those are intentionally lacking. The camera work is very shaky and a lot of the scenes are intercut with static, giving off the illusion of a home video, and it works fairly well. There's not much in the way of editing, as most of the shots run uninterrupted. There's not even a title card or any credits, which even further aids the idea that this is not your average film; it's just a home video that was never meant to be seen. I do like the lighting in most scenes though, especially during the torture scene, where the scene is lit by a faulty lightbulb in a corner of the basement. All of the light in our victim's world slowly shorts out until nothing is left, and she is just a lifeless rag doll.

Deviant may not be a perfect short, much less an original one, and I'll admit that I went into it expecting it to be rather bland and forgettable. But instead I got a surprisingly decent short with some good ideas that were well-executed, rather than just senseless brutality with little to no artistic merit. I respect Brandon Terry's approach to the pseudo snuff sub-genre. It's probably not a film I would go back to regularly, but I'm glad that I got the opportunity to watch it, and I would be more than willing to check out any future films from this director.

RELEASES:
-Deviant was released on DVD by Dead Vision Productions in 2021 in a limited run of 50 numbered copies, all signed by director Brandon Terry. Extras include the short films From the Womb Into the Trash and Sacrificial Gore Shed.

-Deviant was also released on VHS and DVD in Canada by Goriest Production, with the two aforementioned shorts as extras. The VHS was limited to 10 copies and the DVD was limited to 25.