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.

Shorts for Sickos! - Volume 1

Today, on To Obscurity and Beyond, I'm going to be trying something different. As many of my readers know, the vast majority of what I review are short films. As much as I love films of all lengths, I find that short films are usually the most fun to review. However, a lot of the shorts I want to talk about are usually too short for me to review on their own. Granted, I have individually covered films in the past that are under 10-20 minutes, but these usually don't make for great reviews because often times, there is simply not enough content to digest. To compensate, and for the sake of variety, dear reader, I introduce you to.. Shorts for Sickos! The concept of Shorts for Sickos is extremely simple. In each volume, I will review four different short films, usually of the extreme or weird variety, that are under 10-20 minutes and thus wouldn't make for the best stand-alone reviews. So buckle up and prepare yourself, as volume one is going to be a very, very gory one.

Das Blutville Massaker (2021) - Canada / directed by Ben Gaudet

On the box, Das Blutville Massaker is touted as a lost German splatter film made in 2001 by an unknown filmmaker named Markus Heidman. What is held within, however, is a short and sweet tribute to underground German ultra-gore by teenage Canadian filmmaker Ben Gaudet. The "plot," if you can call it that, takes place in the German town of Blutville, as a psychotic killer goes on a rampage after he watches one too many splatter movies. What ensues is an unapologetic, uncontrolled gorefest of epic proportions.

What Blutville lacks in plot it more than makes up for in its explosive, insanely over-the-top gore effects. There are only a couple of kills, but the ones we get are blood-soaked and are beautifully shot. If I had never heard of or seen Ben's other work before, I would have been fooled. The short is intentionally shot to be as amateurish as possible, and thus nails the amateur-film vibe perfectly. Shot on 8mm video and then purposely copied from tape to tape to degrade the video quality, Das Blutville Massaker also perfectly nails the atmosphere of a lost gore movie. The short is also very well-edited, and the director's influence is made even more obvious as the soundtrack is recycled from the original Violent Shit. While the short is nothing too special when compared to Ben's other work, the gore effects and editing alone are nothing short of impressive, and they truly show the young director's potential to branch out and become even better.

Backyard Mutilations (2020) - United States / directed by Gage Black

Similar to the last film, Backyard Mutilations is another short about a deranged lunatic who goes on a murder spree, inspired by his love of violent cinema. Except this time, the killer brutally maims, stabs, decapitates, mutilates and tears apart his victims in his backyard and in his house. Not only is Backyard Mutilations a literal backyard production, but it's also made by an uprising teenage filmmaker!

Fellow Texan Gage Black began making short films around 2019, with shot-on-video inspired gore shorts such as Violent Murder and Feeders Revenge, both of which remain unreleased to this day. As he kept making films, in association with Ben Gaudet, he began working harder to improve his special effects and his filmmaking skills with projects such as Vibro, Verrückt and Fahrenheit. The results are often very rough yet thoroughly entertaining splatterfests, with great variety in kills and ambitious special effects. Backyard Mutilations may not have much of a plot and is hardly different from something like Verrückt, but it stands as a fun showcase of Gage's experiments with gore effects. Some of the effects are pretty rough as you can tell the props are made of styrofoam and plastic, but there are some well done kills such as the screwdriver and the shovel ones. Even in the short films made since this one, Gage has been steadily improving his skills overall, using better cameras and more elaborate effects and editing. Similar to Ben, I respect Gage's efforts and am curious to see how he will develop his works in the near future.

The Long Island Goregrind Massacre (2021) - United States / directed by Gore Filth

Gore Filth is back with yet another horrific shot-on-video short! This time we venture to Long Island, New York, to a venue where multiple goregrind bands put on a fun show for the crowd. But, after each show, one member of each band gets picked off by an unseen killer with a variety of different weapons.

The best part of this 18-minute short is seeing the bands play. We get live performances of at least one song each from Hit Run Drivers, Charcuterie, Bowel Erosion, Whore Abortion and Splattered Entrails. Each show is energetic and manic, and its fun seeing the banter between the bands and the crowd. That's all well and good, but now for the worst part: the gore effects! I understand the point of the short is to be z-grade schlock, but the effects are just laughably bad. They're undoubtedly some of the worst gore effects I've seen in a long time. Every gore scene is shot in Gore Filth's backyard, with the build-up to each murder being shot at the actual venue, and the scenery change is painfully obvious as the backgrounds never match. But by far, the funniest kill is where the killer randomly gets hit by a car. They roll over the hood of the car and then we see a single piece of intestine hit the fence. This short is bad, it's really bad, but that's the point, and it did get a really good laugh out of me. However, I can't recommend this unless you like goregrind and the cheapest of effects.

Forest of Death (2021) - United States / directed by Damian Bishop

For our final short we'll take a look at Forest of Death, one of the latest offerings from Dungeon Entertainment. Dungeon is a film team, led by Damian Bishop, that mostly makes lo-fi shot-on-video horror-comedy shorts. I have seen a couple of their works in the past such as Valley of Carnage and Date Nite, both of which which I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend. They are very funny and entertaining shorts that are well-made in the spirit of campy shot-on-video cinema. On the other hand, Forest of Death is one of the more serious, more straightforward horror offerings from Dungeon. Being entirely shot, edited and produced by Damian himself, Forest follows a man in a yellow Hazmat suit and gas mask who wades through a sinister forest. The deeper he goes, the worse things get as he finds mutilated body parts and bloodied human bones. To his horror, it's not long until he finds himself being stalked and chased by green mutants in Hazmat suits, and he must fight for his life.

For a short made entirely by one guy, it's very well done and very effectively made. The special effects are the obvious standout, with some really good gore and some creepy masks and mutant makeup. But the short also knows how to build a hell of an atmosphere. The low and droning ambient music and the terrible video quality make the short very creepy and grimy, and the editing and pacing is perfect. It's definitely one of the best-made shorts I've covered in this review.

CONCLUSION:

While there may not have been much in today's reviews in terms of variety, I can not deny that these shorts, despite being rough around the edges overall, clearly had a lot of heart and passion put behind them. And yes, that goes for Long Island Goregrind Massacre as well. Just because these shorts may have rough effects or dodgy technical aspects, it doesn't mean that there wasn't any care or effort put into them. It's great to see how these filmmakers continue to branch out with each work and keep working to build their audience and to improve their craft.

I'm hoping the readers will enjoy this new format of reviewing short films. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below or to email me! In the meantime, for the next volume of Shorts for Sickos, we will be traveling over to Europe and taking a look at four shorts from four different countries. Trust me, it only gets weirder and more fucked up from here...

RELEASES:
-Das Blutville Massaker has yet to be released in any form. I was given access to the film thanks to Ben Gaudet himself (thanks dude!).

-Backyard Mutilations was included on an anthology called I Was a Teenage Gorehound, released on DVD by SOV Horror. This anthology also features Gore Collector by Ben Gaudet, The Cross by Stephen Bloodworth, and my own shot-on-video short The Tape of Karma, plus a ton of fun extras. If interested, you can order your copy here.

-The Long Island Goregrind Massacre was released on a very limited edition DVD by SOV Horror, and is currently out of print. However, it is possible that more copies will be reprinted soon.

-As far as I'm aware, Forest of Death has yet to be released on physical media, but it can be watched on the Dungeon Entertainment YouTube channel, along with their many other works. You can watch the short here.

Maggot Farmers (2021)

Maggot Farmers (2021) - Belgium
Directed by: Wesley Remory

ABOUT THE FILM:
Midsplatternight Pictures began back in 2003 as a local horror film festival in Belgium, and was the brainchild of one Wesley Remory. Wesley and others initially aimed to promote independent filmmakers and their work within Belgium, but many years later, Wesley and crew decided to try their hand at making a horror film of their own. But Wesley didn't want to make just any by-the-numbers horror film. In fact, he turned hellbent on making a love-letter to the weird and gory shot-on-video movies of the 80's, as well as paying tribute to the late, great Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci. And ultimately, Wesley decided to do so with a project called Maggot Farmers. The story of Maggot Farmers is very simple, but is also very effectively told across its runtime. There is an old woman in a cloak performing a sinister ritual as she casts spells and then buries five voodoo dolls into a pot of soil and then cuts her hand, spilling her blood into the soil. Meanwhile, a group of men are kidnapping and butchering women for their meals, and using their organs to feed the maggots. But little do they know that the dead are being resurrected and that the men are merely fodder for these undead beasts...

The original Maggot Farmers poster.

THE HISTORY OF MAGGOT FARMERS:

The original version of Maggot Farmers was written and began to materialize as early as 2009, with Wesley writing the script and setting up effects, but as it turns out, the production and culmination of Maggot Farmers as a whole was cursed from the very beginning. With the cast and crew's availability constantly changing, on top of bad weather, very little filmmaking experience and very little footage, the production of the original Maggot Farmers was cancelled in 2011. But Midsplatternight's foray into film didn't end there. Over the next decade, they stirred up a considerable buzz in the underground horror scene with atmospheric short works such as Prognosticum, Verbintenis, and their second most-recent work, the infamous Walging. Despite the success that the shorts of Midsplatternight Pictures saw, Wesley could not forget about Maggot Farmers. It just kept haunting him; he had to tell this story, he had to realize his true visions.

In 2019, Maggot Farmers was re-written, and with more experience under their belt, the Midsplatternight crew went back into production on the film. But just like its original incarnation, this production was plagued from the very beginning. Aside from audio recordings being lost or ruined, issues with crew vehicles, shooting delays and special effects malfunctioning, the biggest curse of the production was the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Because of the scare, once more, the production of Maggot Farmers was delayed indefinitely. But, through patience, stubbornness and perseverance, Wesley and crew pulled through and finished Maggot Farmers in late 2021, and now this twisted vision of ritualistic, undead mayhem can be unleashed onto the populace. But can they swallow it?

REVIEW:

Maggot Farmers wears its influence on its sleeve but it also stands head and shoulders above other homages to old-school horror. Whereas many different homages and tributes to 80's horror often fail to recapture what made old horror so special by overusing genre tropes, Maggot Farmers is much more reserved and well-structured. The story, while simple and very short, is told well and with very little dialogue. There's maybe two scenes in the entire short that have any dialogue, and it boils down to simple exchanges. But Maggot Farmers doesn't need much dialogue to tell its story, and the filmmakers prove this by working wonders with visual storytelling. The camera work and the lighting both play a huge role in setting the tone for the film. The entire time, the camera work is extremely smooth and fluid, and is only ever jerky to accentuate shifts in tone. For example, when a character is being approached by a zombie, we suddenly switch to a shaky POV to demonstrate a shift in tone. The lighting isn't overly dull or overly colorful. There's heavy use of soft yellow and orange tints, and when the zombies are onscreen, they are aided by soft blue glows that effectively build an uneasy atmosphere. The ambient droning music only further lulls in the viewer, as well as a few 80's horror-inspired synth tunes that are well composed. Additionally, the film is aided with sound design that will both chill the viewer, and disgust the viewer during the grisly scenes of cannibalism and dismemberment.

The actors do a pretty good job, considering the rather simple characters they have to work with. There's an especially impressive effects sequence where a character is lit on fire and writhes around in agony, à la Olaf Ittenbach's The Burning Moon. My hat goes off to the person brave enough to actually let themselves be set ablaze, especially on a production with such a low budget. But despite the low budget, the film is well made overall, including its special effects. While not a total gorefest, Maggot Farmers has some especially impressive gore and zombie makeup. The zombies look creepy as hell and are truly reminiscent of Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2. All things considered, the only complaints I have are minor sound mix issues that are only noticeable if the viewer is wearing headphones. But those are so trivial they may as well not be mentioned at all. Overall, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect going into Maggot Farmers, considering I've never seen anything from Midsplatternight Pictures before. I do, however, remember when Walging was first released and it was receiving a lot of praise from indie horror fans. I was intrigued, but at the time I was a broke 17 year-old kid with no money, and alas, I never had a chance to see anything from this studio. But now that I've seen Maggot Farmers, I'm curious to see what else they have, because this was a very well done short! At the time of writing this review, Maggot Farmers has not been released physically or digitally, but I suggest jumping at it once it's released. This is an 80's horror throwback worth watching and revisiting.

On a side note, one thing I love is that during the end credits, we also get to see what survives of the original 2011 Maggot Farmers, along with its respective credits. It's interesting to see how the film has evolved over the decade it took to complete, and it's even better to see that despite all of the hardships, Wesley Remory never gave up on his vision. Why should anyone else give up on theirs?

RELEASES:
-Maggot Farmers will be seeing a DVD release in the near future, either at the end of 2021 or in early 2022, and is purported to have all of Midsplatternight Pictures' previous short films as bonus features. To keep updated, I'd recommend checking out their Facebook page here.