Halloween Havoc: THE BLACK FOREST (2018)

Back in the salad days of 2008, which you may remember as the time lax American banking regulations caused a global financial collapse, a poverty-row Brazillian zombie movie arrived fresh on the scene. I can't say that I was really blown away by BLACK MANGROVE (2008), so much as frustrated by it's potential combined with many unforced errors. Even so, having someone, in this case Rodrigo Aragão, from Brazil turn out a feature-length, monster-based, gory horror movie is something to talk about. Sort of like how back in the '80s, German schlockster Andreas Schnaas grabbed the eyeballs of horror fans around the world with the now legendary SOV splatterfest VIOLENT SHIT (1989). The tag line for VIOLENT SHIT was "Expect the Worst." It did not lie. At the time shot on video horror movies were in their infancy and VIOLENT SHIT was spectacularly shoddy. To be fair, CANNIBAL CAMPOUT (1988) is debatably worse, but I digress. As bad as it was, VIOLENT SHIT had enough going for it to make some folks want to see what else Schnaas would come up with next time, presumably with more money and more experience. After a couple of decades, we realized that, unfortunately, money and experience were not going to help Schnaas make better movies. I mean, did you see VIOLENT SHIT 4.0 (2010)? Expect the worstest. As disappointed as I was with BLACK MANGROVE's short comings, it was far better than VIOLENT SHIT 4.0 and that alone gave me that same sense of anticipation for what Aragão's future might hold. Yep, that's my standard; if your backyard gore flick is better than VIOLENT SHIT, you have my rapt attention.

Aragão, born in a small fishing village in Espirito Santo, is never far from his roots, which is one of the things that makes his movies interesting. His second film NIGHT OF THE CHUPACABRAS (2011), maintains the same swampy setting, most of the cast and some of the themes from his first outing and he would continue this in his third film, BLACK SEA (2013, aka DARK SEA, aka BLOODBATH). He is obsessed with the EVIL DEAD series (1981-1992) without copying them outright, more so than even BRAINDEAD (1992), which was the basis for BLACK MANGROVE. These inspirations started out as training wheels, but each successive movie was a step up in production values and ideas. That said, Aragão's penchant for lots of uninteresting dialogue scenes simultaneously dragged down the proceedings and yet made the bursts of creativity (such as a mutant zombie with a sting ray for a head) so much more exciting. Unlike so many gore-teurs, it actually seemed like Aragão was progressing, not only in his ability to frame a shot and create some stunning low-rent make-up effects, but actually tell a story. In the world of budget-starved, amateur horror flicks, this is a rare achievement. 

Still obsessed with tiny fishing villages, tiny bars, tiny whorehouses and big gore, Aragão has linked his movies together in a way some call sequels, but are really just his personal Venn diagrams. His recurring cast of actors are frequently recurring characters, but he doesn't let that get in the way of telling a new story with characters who may have died messy deaths in a previous film returning with the same name and appearance, without acknowledging their past. He also sometimes features the same sets and set dressing from other outings, mostly shot on his family land where he grew up. It's kind of a typical low-budget movie maker approach (Nick Millard instantly springs to mind), though usually there aren't recurring characters. It's honestly kind of fun, if a but confusing, to see the threads laid down in one film, picked up and woven into a different tapestry in another without being bound to forcing your new project to conform to what has happened in previous movies. At first glance it may seem a bit lazy, because it's hard work to make a good sequel, but it's also engaging in a way that only indy cinema can be.

I'm going to try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but there are going to be some. Fair warning.

A small village priest known as Papa Pedro (Markus Konká who played much the same character in Rodrigo's previous movies) finds an unconscious Clara (Carol Aragão), who escaped from the zombies and an undead whale in BLACK SEA. Also, she was Papa Pedro's daughter in BLACK SEA, even though Papa Pedro was turned into land-chum in that outing. Confused? You're just going to have to roll with it. Five years later Clara has to go to the market for Papa Pedro as he is suddenly stricken with some sort of seizure where he falls to the ground and starts screaming in his best death metal voice that Clara is cursed. Clara, slightly perturbed by this, heads off to the market where some laughing little girls throw shit on her and she has her money stolen by some bandits. A smooth talking guy, Jean (Elbert Merlin), tries to help her with the bandits, but comes back empty handed. Clara doesn't get out much, so she is instantly charmed by this goober and suspects absolutely nothing.

On the way back from the market Clara stumbles across Albino (Walderrama Dos Santos), who managed to escape the zombie hoard at the end of BLACK SEA, with the help of Rodrigo Aragão's version of The Necronomicon, The Lost Book of Cipriani. Here he tells Clara that he is about to die, but if she sets up a ritual circle and reads a "prayer" from The Book all night, he will give her a sack of gold. He also tells her to burn the book when she's done before promptly keeling over dead. Instead of just taking the gold and hoofing it back to the house to see whether Papa Pedro has recovered from his potentially fatal affliction, she buries Albino and conducts the ritual. Papa, who got better, stumbles across her ritual in the middle of the swamp, but zombies decide that they need a snack and jump out of the mud to (surprisingly) tamely kill him. Clara is upset for a few seconds, but quickly gets back to finishing the ritual causing the zombies to disappear with the rising sun. You have to admire her integrity. Dude gave her a job to do she didn't let him down, even though he was dead and buried. Just try to find someone to complete a ritual for your dead ass in America. Never happen.

Clara, by, uhhh, miracle of chance, then runs into Jean again. Since Papa is dead and she has a sackful of gold, they decide to head off to the city to find their fortune, or rather, spend it. What could go wrong? This intricate plan is suddenly ruined by the same damn bandits popping up again, shooting Clara and as Jean pretends to protest, they shoot him too. Fortunately for Clara, and the rest of the movie, since she is the lead, she returns to consciousness to find that The Book caught the bullet and she's actually fine. Clara, following ancient tradition, preserves Jean's corpse with lard and spices and buries his corpse in her dirt floor living room. Determined to bring Jean back from the dead, Clara does the only sensible thing and kidnaps one of the shit-throwing little brats to use as a sacrifice in one of The Book's rituals. It's a lot of work to bring her morally ambiguous, Tiger Beat coverboy back to life, but Clara decides that this guy is still the best catch in the village (girls, amirite?). After drawing the magic circle and preparing the incantation, she finds that she can't bring herself to complete the ritual by slitting the kid's throat and reluctantly sets her free.

Proving that no good deed (following an unconscionably evil deed) goes unpunished, the little shit rats Clara out to the travelling evangelist, Francisco Das Gracas (Jackson Antunes), who descends down on Clara's hovel with his hoard of rabid followers and shouts "these walls are anointed with the sperm of evil!" Damn man, how do you become an expert on the morality of sperm? But never mind, all of this is just the set up for the chaos to come with demonic hallucinations, a severed head that causes a slaughter in a whorehouse, more incantations, a live burial, more zombies, an evil evangelist (redundant?) and a giant minion of Big Lou himself! I swear, this girl buries and digs up so many corpses (and non-corpses) that she should be going around the swamps with some serious Schwarzenegger guns poking out of that little white dress.

In BLACK SEA, Rodrigo introduced The Lost Book of Cipriani, but only really hinted about what it was and what it can do. Here he lets his imagination run wild with the details of different arcane rituals, which most movies tend to glaze over. Usually, in movies with occult rituals, someone reads aloud from an evil book, raises their hands dramatically and a PA turns on the wind machines. Maybe throw in some animation or CGI swirling mist and you're done. Not here. In one scene a ritual is performed by painting a chicken egg with cryptic symbols and inserting an incantation in through a hole in the top. The only snag being that the soon-to-be-a-father farmer (Francisco Gaspar), who is helping her with this ritual, accidentally gets his blood on the incantation leading to the violent deaths of his chickens and his pregnant wife. Distraught and enraged, things actually get worse for him as the baby is still moving and he demands that Clara cut the baby out of his wife's corpse. She does the horrible deed, only to find out that the baby is a mutant chicken/human hybrid and the insanity doesn't stop there.

This may seem like a lot of random things being thrown at the viewer and that is definitely Rodrigo Aragão's MO. In previous movies, this chaotic jumble does little more than play out until the end of the movie, with the pay-off being a big splattery set-piece. Here he actually is focused enough to have Mr. Toad's Wild Ride lead somewhere in exponentially crazy scenes that culminate with a literally apocalyptic finale that feels like it was planned, rather than just a good stopping point.

THE BLACK FOREST sat next to my TV for seven years before I finally decided to watch it. I had been planning on reviewing it for one of our Halloween binges, but between changing themes and real life interruptions, it hasn't happened till now. To be fair, I really wasn't looking forward to more long scenes of padding that push the running time to unnecessary lengths. Little did I know what a *ahem* grave mistake I was making. This was the Rodrigo Aragão movie that I had been waiting for. Sure, it's still shot on mid-range video equipment and his new leading lady, Carol Aragão (Rodrigo's daughter), definitely struggles with the whole "acting" thing. After stealing some eggs from the afore mentioned henpecked farmer at the beginning of the aforementioned scene, Clara tries to cook the eggs only to find bloody chick fetuses inside. After convincing the farmer to help her with a spell from the book involving an egg, he asks her why she needs him to do this. She simply tells him "everything I touch dies," which you'd think would be at least slightly upsetting to her, but she says it with the same matter-of-factness of explaining why she bought a different brand of yogurt at the store. In spite of that, Rodrigo still manages to pull off his best movie yet, complete with lots of stylish camera set-ups that make the whole thing feel much more entertaining than anything he has done before.

From what I understand from reading Brazilian reviews on line, most of the crazy occult stuff in Aragão's movies are drawn from actual Brazilian folklore, which is pretty exciting for Brazilian viewers and is interesting and fresh from a jaded, international horror fan perspective as well. Aragão doesn't paint a very flattering picture of Brazil. It's a far cry from the sexy playground that is featured in North American and European film and television. This side of Brazil is mired in abject poverty and superstition. And just like poverty-ridden areas everywhere, everyone is trying to grab whatever they can for themselves and looking for escape through alcohol, sex and/or religion. There really aren't any "good guys" in Aragão's movies. Even the characters who are better intentioned than others are easy prey to the allure of a dark shortcut to happiness. I'm not sure how accurate this portrayal is, but I give Aragão a lot of credit for using this backdrop as a way to make his movies stand out and show an unvarnished side of Brazil without pulling out a soapbox and preaching about it.

Amusingly, folks on-line refer to this as a more "restrained" outing from Aragão and it's true. The interesting thing is that focus and restraint came after his collaboration with the godfather of Brazilian horror, José Mojica Marins. THE BLACK FABLES (2015) is an anthology effort that like most modern anthologies consists of generally mediocre short films from different directors. Aragão's entry in the anthology is actually the worst of the lot, with a minimal narrative about a guy who has raw sewage running in front of his house, due to corrupt Brazilian bureaucracy, which causes him to turn into a zombie-like dude and attack some city officials. In spite of this, it seems he learned quite a bit from this experience.

Aragão stated in an interview, that the collab with Marins was a great moment in his career and life, and it shows in THE BLACK FOREST. With oblique angles and a narrative structure that actually works it's way toward a goal, you have a significant improvement in Aragão's skill level as a filmmaker and as a make-up artist. Even the acting has improved, for the most part, with Francisco Gaspar and several others turning in an excellent performances. I will throw out a caveat though. If this is to be your first Aragão flick, you may wonder just what the hell I'm smoking. This is still a low-rent indy movie. The cinematography is much improved from previous efforts, though for some reason the image transfer from distributor Darkside Releasing (no relation to the UK magazine) is extremely low-contrast, which is a real shame. Also the lead, Carol, is so flat that wallpaper gets jealous. You just can't get away from nepotism, not even in the swamps of Brazil, I guess. Even so, if you have seen Aragão's earlier films or are looking for something new and fresh in the world of low-budget horror, perhaps you will enjoy this one as much as I did.

Note: The screenshots here have been adjusted for contrast due to the the images being so washed out that it was nearly impossible to see detail at the size needed for this website. Adjust your TV / monitor or rip the disc and adjust the contrast with the program of your choice for best results.

Note 2: I know that Aragão has a new movie, CEMETERY OF LOST SOULS, but it doesn't seem to be out on video with English subtitles, and to be honest, I really wanted to talk about BLACK FOREST anyway. 

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Halloween Havoc: TAETER BURGER (2023)

Naturally my quest to find out what some of my favorite gore-tuers are up to now, has inevitably brought me around to Giulio De Santi and his Italian micro-studio Necrostorm. Starting out with the jaw-dropping, head-bursting ADAM CHAPLIN (2010), a movie directed by and starring his brother Emanuele De Santi. Easily the biggest debut of any (very) low-budgeted horror indy in the DTV era, it's a wild, surreal ride through a post apocalyptic hellscape that features a genuinely impressive blending of practical and CGI effects. After the success of CHAPLIN, Emanuele struck off on his own, with his only other credit being his writer-director effort JUDY (2014). Sadly, JUDY, a story about a bunch of mime-ish street clowns (who, in retrospect, look a lot like Art the Clown) stalking and eventually invading a woman's home, utterly failed to do anything original or entertaining. Surprisingly, even the gore was rather muted by Necrostorm standards. Giulio continued on his own with TAETER CITY (2012), a clumsy, but hyper-gory, science fiction outing that borrowed heavily from DREDD (2012).

Giulio also produced the first first-person shooter movie, HOTEL INFERNO (2013), which was followed by two sequels and a spin-off, borrowing heavily from the Doom video games, with exponentially less plot and diminishing ideas. He experimented with buying a finished, low-budget movie (2013's MOLD!) and adding new footage, altering the plot and re-releasing it as MILDEW FROM THE PLANET XONADER (2015), which actually worked pretty well. Giulio, now teamed up with his co-writer/director/producer Tiziana Machella, tried his hand at a fumbling, street-level gang story with INFIDUS (2015) and a surreal reworking of a classic fairytale with LITTLE NECRO RED (2019). They are nothing, if not ambitious, but unfortunately their mad race to crank out movies filled with non-actors (crowdfund backers) and disjointed, chaotic messes being passed off as scripts, their efforts seem to be going downhill with every passing year. With the HOTEL INFERNO series wearing thin, what's a guy to do to keep the money train rolling in? A sequel to TAETER CITY of course!

Just to refresh your memory, TAETER CITY was roughly about a totalitarian, futuristic city (taeter being a Latin word for "foul") that has helmeted motorcycle cops who act as judge, jury and executioner and are definitely not called "Judges". A pair of them are forced to climb up a massive apartment building, floor by floor, fighting through a bunch of mutating thugs who are trying to kill them. Sound familiar? Yeah, it's pretty much DREDD, but De Santi throws in a bunch of trimmings into the grind to make sure that it has it's own flavor. The city is ruled by a merciless dictator who has blocked all traffic in and out of the city and in order to keep the population fed, criminals are killed by the judges - err, I mean biker cops and handed over to Taeter Burger fast food restaurants to make into burgers for the masses.

Because De Santi and Machella's efforts keep getting smaller and smaller, we now have a movie that takes place entirely in a Taeter Burger restaurant. I say, restaurant, but there aren't even tables. Just an empty room with a few chairs and an automated ordering kiosk. Oh, but we get a restroom (just one for everyone) and a kitchen! Interestingly, even the establishing shots of the city in the beginning are not even as heavily digitally overlaid as they were in TAETER CITY and there really aren't any other external shots except for those of the back door of the restaurant at the end of the movie.

Remember the old Hollywood adage, "show, don't tell," that even Hollywood ignores these days? Well, De Santi and Machella are likewise not believers in that sage advice and dump the setup in a voice over. In the year 2161 we are told that "Taeter City is the only bastion of civilization in a world of chaos. Beyond the borderlands there is only death and despair." This is weird as everything we've seen in TAETER CITY indicates that there is only death and despair in the city too. But then again, this is the sort of thing a dictator would say, so I guess it's on brand. The authorities, who conveniently call themselves "The Authority," have decided that menu items at the state run restaurants are divided by income class and that in order to get, what they perceive to be useless and "evil" people, into productive employment, the restaurants are staffed entirely by the deaf. Apparently there are a shitload of deaf people in this city as this is supposed to be a big chain, no doubt due to government medical research funding cuts. I mean, that's what dictators do, right?

Inside the restaurant, we get a couple of unwashed masses who are sitting in seats and waiting for meat. There's a temporary outage and meat needs to be restocked. A man with glazed eyes continues to make selections on the menu screen of the ordering kiosk in spite of being told by the machine that it's not his turn. This is clearly a violation of the stickers on the machine that read "wait your turn." Accompanied by the screams of anger from the masses who are waiting for food, two cops bust in and shoot the offender so many times that the entire "waiting room" (this is what it's called) is awash in blood. I have no idea why, but for some reason the cops have to mop the blood off the floor, while the homeless people try to lick it up. Good news! We now have meat to make burgers with! And there was much rejoicing.

If you've seen the first movie, you'll be, uhhh, delighted to know that the state run TChannel is back with a new presenter (Peter Cosgrove) on a black set who holds a half-mask in front of his face and acts as something of a narrator. Not that one is needed, but I guess it helps stretch that running time. This is clearly trying to emulate the news breaks in ROBOCOP (1987), but misses that mark so badly that it really just feels like an aging hipster trying to do an impression of a gameshow host. After a lot of random scenes of things being explained to the audience, such as the fact that the city is being bombarded with warnings that criminals and terrorists are everywhere and "androids" are being repressed by the government because "they betrayed us" and that they are just brains in jars hooked up to computer systems, we stumble across a plot... or as much of a plot as we are going to get. 

One of the cops in the restaurant repairs the "android" (brain in a jar) that is supposed to take orders and monitor the restaurant for terrorists. A guy in a fascist-looking peaked cap (Vishal Rajput) is monitoring the restaurant while getting text updates from someone named Agent H. In between much ranting about how much he hates deaf people (yeah, I really don't know), the screen indicates that some people have been served tainted food and that "Trevor is ready". Apparently Trevor (Giulio De Santi), clad in a gas mask and hoodie with a terrorist logo pinned to the back, is not "responding" and Agent H says to use "the fan." At this point Trevor flips out and grabs one of the cop's guns, tries to shoot the fan and instead turns 90 degrees and shoots the crap out of one of the customers. We are never really told what the fuck the fan is all about, in spite of it being mentioned a couple of times later in the movie. Even odder, later in the movie one of the employees tries to use a cop's gun and it shoots her in the leg because it is coded specifically to only be used by the cop who it was assigned to (not at all like Judge Dredd). I guess Trevor is... special?

Trevor has a scream that he uses to drive the deaf (I say again, deaf) employees mad and make them start attacking each other and themselves in brutal, gory ways. Don't worry though, we don't have enough cast members to get through the rest of the movie, so some of them will be fine and just show up later with some wounds even though one rammed a kitchen knife through her jaw into her brain. This prompts the brain-in-a-jar to activate the terrorist defense system and splatter a random dude against the bathroom wall. And, yes, he'll be fine too and comeback to be killed again. While the bathroom employee (Ilaria Caloisi) is fending off a deranged customer with a mop, a fleshy, pointed organism pops out of his neck. Again, shit just happens in De Santi's movies. The best way to approach them is to assume that someone spiked your drink with some sort of hallucinogen and just let it happen. At one point, the surviving cop shoots a clamp onto the bathroom employee's wrist, securing it to the radiator (radiators are the future!). The employee tricks the anti-terrorist system into shooting off her hand, which we get to see twice. as I'm guessing De Santi was particularly proud of it. The employee then whips out a med-kid and reattaches her hand and it heals right up, working just like new. Blood loss, shock, whatever. So, if they have the technology to do that out of a self-service med-kid, how are people still deaf? 

(SPOILERS) We find out that the fascist dude is actually working for The Authority and the terrorist was just a test of an experiment as they need to turn people into criminals, so that the cops will have more people to kill and thus more meat to serve. Oh and they need weapons that will work on deaf people (again, I don't know). Seriously, I'm not drunk and making this up. After everyone continues to kill everyone else, the bathroom employee and Trevor, the fake terrorist, make it outside to freedom, except the police are on their way to contain the situation! Trevor then takes off his mask and does his super-scream and the fascist dude's face and body ruptures. Roll credits.(/SPOILERS)

As an example of the schizophrenic style of screenwriting, there is a bit early on in which one of the employees finds himself frozen in place. The manager yells at him through a cellphone-like device that allows deaf people to (follow me here) type in words that are spoken out loud through the phone to other deaf people who do the same to reply (deaf people!). The manager yells at him that the bottle in her hand is called "hyptic" and it will revive a corpse for 10 minutes. She then pours some of this stuff on a meaty skeleton that then quivers and shakes. The manager yells that if he gets scared of the sight of blood again (thus explaining why he froze), she will kill him, pour hyptic on him to bring him back to life, then butcher him for meat. This seems a bit harsh, but who knows what kind of write-ups are in his personnel file? Seriously though, this is exactly what to expect from nearly every scene. It's a handful of unrefined ideas that are just thrown against the wall and then never referred to again. Or maybe are referred to again, but don't make any more sense than they did the first time.

There are so many scenes like this I can't list them all. One scene early on in the movie has a worker cleaning the restroom. A guy comes in and then spits some blue liquid all over the windows of the restroom and laughs about it before entering a stall. The worker is rightly appalled and then accidentally cuts herself on the tap in a sink. This must be something that will be important later, right? Nope! It literally is just something that happens and has absolutely no bearing on anything that happens afterwards. And that thing that comes out of that guy's neck? Who knows? As a wise (and crazy) man once said, "buy the ticket, take the ride."

De Santi's movies have always been sort of ADD messes that are sort of a shotgun blast of ideas, scattered all over the place without much narrative structure. Here he has decided that to facilitate his episodic impulses, he will break the hour long movie (75 minutes with credits) into no less than ten "chapters." Some of these chapters are literally one scene and serve no purpose other than to stretch out the running time to feature length. I guess I should be thankful that he doesn't do that self-important thing where micro-budget videomakers seem to think that their work of genius should ramble on for two hours or more. I should mention that the electronic score by Razzaw, who has done the scores to all of Necrostorm's movies and only Necrostorm's movies, is surprisingly good. I suspect that this is just a pseudonym for Giulio De Santi, but credit where due. It ain't John Carpenter, but it definitely makes the movies sound bigger than they are.

If you are new to Necrostorm, this may be an eye-popping experience, if you are a veteran who has been watching since the start, this will probably feel like another step down. Even the gore gags are simpler and less creative than they have been in the past (which is really saying something). I really had high hopes that De Santi and Machella would learn on the job, refining their skills and write a script that isn't in desperate need of lithium. Don't get me wrong, I love ambiguity and surrealism, such as with ADAM CHAPLIN, but that is not this. This is much more grounded and I think just comes down to a lack of interest in the scripting and planning phase of movie making. Over 10 years ago, Necrostorm announced a PC game project that was being crowdfunded. It was to be a gory fighting game titled "Death Cargo" before news dried up. Then it got revived as "Gorebreaker" with another crowdfunding campaign before news dried up on it again. Now it has been revived as "CAED Death's Cargo" (with a new crowdfunding campaign) and the name "Gorebreaker" has been given to a different PC game project, a medieval action-adventure game, which will have a crowdfunding campaign as well, as well as a platformer called TAETER EXPERIMENT. There is a lot of talent and imagination here, but De Santi really needs to set down the crack pipe and learn how to focus on a project, build a foundation and then put up the fucking house. Once again, my fingers are crossed for next time... which, if you couldn't guess, is ADAM CHAPLIN 2, and in spite of the ad, is supposedly coming out at the end of November. My loins are girded.

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Halloween Havoc: Tim Ritter's TRUTH OR DARE Series (1986-2017) Part 2

DEADLY DARES (2011): In the fourth installment, just like Tim Ritter himself, the story moves from Sunnyvale, FL to Lexington, KY. Here the schlubbiest of schlubs is named "Tuner" (Casey Miracle). After he loses his loser job and loses his loser girlfriend, Rose (Heather Price) - who he refers to as "doc" for no apparent reason. She dumps him because he refused a dare to run around around in the street naked on video in the middle of the night. If we know anything from watching three other TRUTH OR DARE movies, we know that you cannot decline a dare. You just can't.

This onslaught of losering causes him to... wait for it... get addicted to an internet site called DareTube.com! Didn't see that coming did you? I can't believe Ritter didn't register that URL to promote his movies. Apparently, Tim discovered the internet in 2010 and is all in with characters dialoguing grandfatherish explanations of how these things work and liberal use of the word "cyberworld". Would you believe he actually has a semi-updated MySpace page? Truth! Or was it a dare? Hard to say.

The DareTube website allows "players" to connect to other people who "love to play" Truth or Dare. This is supposed to be a country-wide internet phenomenon. I'm tempted to make a "sure Jan" snarky remark, but this was five years before TikTok, the ultimate "dare" video app. A video upload site where idiots be damn near killing themselves and others by doing dangerous shit that defies rational explanation. Why would you think eating Tide Pods would be a not bad thing? Anyway, Tuner connects to a loser hottie named Dara (Jessica Cameron) and with the relentless "encouragement" of his loser friend Axel (Billy W. Blackwell), Tuner and Dara take turns escalating their dares. Tuner dares her to do things like, show him a hidden tattoo... that turns out to be on her side. Phew, it's getting hot up in here! C'mon baby, let's see some ankle! This escalates with Dara doing more teasing and Tuner painting his face red with what looks like a black handlebar mustache, but is actually supposed to look like the original copper mask from part 1. With this make-up and a hoody, he runs around with Axel holding the camera, doing things like beating a homeless guy to death with a baseball bat.

It feels like at least half of the running time is intentionally badly shot home video clips of random people self mutilating, committing suicide, or murdering other people while mugging for the camera. These are supposed to be dares that have been uploaded to the website and while occasionally gory, wear out their welcome very quickly, particularly since the jiggly home camera shots are more nausea inducing than the killings. This finally culminates with the ultimate dare: Break Mike out of the sanitarium, which is... now in Kentucky? I guess if you are being goaded into murdering people and uploading videos of said crimes to the internet, fact-checking may not be in your repertoire. (SPOILER) In spite of the institution appearing to be abandoned, Tuner finds a skinny Mike in a room tied to a gurney and sets him free, only to find out that the entire movie has been a set-up by Rose, who is dressed up in Mike's black outfit (he must have raided The Shape's closet) and mask! She reveals that it was all orchestrated by her and Axel to get Tuner to prove that he loves her, and he failed that by getting infatuated with Dara! As punishment Tuner gets a knife in the guts. Ritter decides to actually put some real effort into this double twist and we find out that really, the whole thing was all in Tuner's imagination as an incredibly elaborate way to commit suicide. (/SPOILER)

This would have made a pretty decent short film, in spite of the cringe-inducing c.1998 obsession with the internet, and that may have been how it started, given how much Tim enjoys doing shorts and how much padding is responsible for stretching this thing out to 95 minutes. It makes sense, because if the home video sequences weren't bad enough, Ritter decides to re-make scenes from part 1 with a new cast for use as flashback material, and nothing says "filler" like flashbacks. These scenes are quickly and cheaply made in household rooms with bedsheets covering the walls, and with an even lower-quality video camera. this makes the rest of the very low-rent production look significantly better. That's literally the nicest thing I can say about them. I'm sure the next one will be better... right?

I DARED YOU! TRUTH OR DARE 5 (2017): Oh good lord, Tim! WTF? First let me say that I love the way Tim Ritter actually works out sequels that follow plot points from earlier films. Many people, both pro and indy, like to make sequels that are more or less stand-alone experiences, so that you don't have to see the previous movies to understand what is going on in the sequel. While Ritter uses flashbacks so that newbies aren't completely lost, there are so many things carried over from earlier movies that it's pretty much mandatory to have seen what came before or you will miss out on the best things that the series offer. Unfortunately, that also means that in 2017 we got a sequel to 2011's DEADLY DARES. Even more unfortunately, Ritter made this film with a guy named Scott Tepperman. Fucking Scott Tepperman. A micro-budget SOV "actor" who has also directed some extremely cheap VOD fodder that is the kind of movie where the cast and crew go on to movie sites, like IMDb, to anonymously post glowing reviews to bump up the score. His big claim to fame is being in SyFy's GHOST HUNTERS INTERNATIONAL. Oddly, he is not credited in it in the IMDb, though Wikipedia lists him as being one of the investigators from the final years of the show's run. I've never seen the show, but I've seen an episode of the original where a cheap nightvision video camera records a couple of dufuses in the dark saying things like "this is creepy" and "oh [bleep] did you hear that!?" and run around like idiots. Tepperman teamed up with a stuntman Jim O'Rear to make no-budget horror movies under the name Los Bastardz Productions and managed to get Tim Ritter to help them make some money at the expense of the audience.

Did I say Tuner from part 4 was "the schlubbiest of schlubs"? Holy shit, I was so wrong. Meet Dax Hakman (Tepperman). Dax is introduced to the audience being released from a clearly abandoned, graffiti-covered, mental facility that bears a stone plaque on the front that reads: "Building Committee." His doctor, Dr. Hall (Jim O'Rear), is releasing him due to... anybody, anybody? Yes, you in the back, that's right: Budget cuts... and hands him his business card with the website www.mikeystruthordare.com written on the back. Yeah, I don't know what happened to daretube.com either. Squatters maybe? Apparently before Dax was institutionalized, he was also the baseball kid who gets his face chainsawed in part 1. Because of this, he wears a copper half mask to hide what must be hideous scars. And because it would cost money for the make-up appliance to show his messed up mug, at no point in the movie is the mask ever removed, so we never find out. This is going to be a long 88 minutes, isn't it?

Freshly released, Dax strangles a prostitute (M. Catherine Wynkoop, Joel's wife) in a hotel room, as we learn in a flashback that he was institutionalized for strangling a young girl who wanted to play truth or dare. We also learn that Dax got in trouble for obsessing over horror movies and scream queen magazines. Yep, watching horror movies makes you a murderer... the conservative horror trope that will never just fuck off and die. In the flashback of him as a nine year old, he tells the girl that he dares her to let him strangle her. She screams "that's crazy!" at which point Dax strangles her, which pretty much proves her point. Unfortunately for Dax, his prostitute doesn't die as easily, so Dax uses a chainsaw on her in the bathtub while she's still alive. Sounds wild, right? Yeah, don't get excited, that shit costs money, so all we see is Dax's back and the sounds of a chainsaw and a blood spattered wall. At one point he turns his head sideways, so that the camera can see him eating something with overacted gusto and kissing a severed head - I wouldn't be surprised if the head was a prop left over from a previous movie, because that's one of the few make up effects in this movie.

We then see an unidentified person in a suit and tie ranting that the Truth or Dare website got his daughter killed (cue footage from DEADLY DARES). This person then gives old Dr. Hess (Joel Wynkoop) a suitcase full of cash to "make it stop". I'm not sure what that means, or whether Hess even would still have a license to practice any sort of medicine at this point, but he's just crazy enough to do it! Whatever it actually is. This segues into "Chainsaw" Dax doing the ol' Daretube - sorry Mikeystruthordare thing with "Stillborn" Sara (Trish Erickson-Martin) - both of whom appeared in a DEADLY DARES Daretube video. Dax does stuff like going into someone's bedroom while they are having cowgirl sex, going through their drawers with a flashlight on his head and the couple never even noticing that there is a 400 pound mouth breather in a half mask and a frickin' head lamp standing inches away from them! C'mon man, wtf? Maybe if they were doing it missionary? I don't know. Better still when our badass serial killer is finally noticed, he is terrified and waddles as fast as he can out of the house. He uploads a video of this for Sara who thinks it's great and in return, Sara tells Dax about how she was raped as a virgin by her boyfriend, who threw her unconscious, naked body in a bathtub and drew on her with a marker and took pictures. "I'll PM some of them to you." This tugs at Dax's heartstrings (no, really) and he decides to help her out, even though the pictures clearly show that she is wearing a big ass t-shirt that was written on. As Cheech Marin once said, "hey, that's false advertising, man!" Though, to be fair, I'm totally fine with that.

Meanwhile, Dr. Hess is barging in on Mikeystruthordare... uhh, influencers(?). One guy (Michael Baker) says that he is Crazy Joel, to which Hess, with a gun to the guy's head, yells "You're not Crazy Joel! I know Crazy Joel!" This is pretty damn funny by itself, but it's odd since Crazy Joel is another video uploader from DEADLY DARES, a movie that Dr. Hess isn't even in. Also meanwhile, Dax goes to visit his girlfriend (didn't he just get released from years in an asylum?) and... What happens? Anyone? Anyone? Yes, of course ...he finds her with another man! I know you all are shocked right now. Hilariously, he brought her plastic flowers at which the alleged girlfriend sneers at and says that they are fake "like you." To which Dax replies "At least they won't die, like you and loverboy here!" Loverboy says "Huh?" and Dax is forced to give back his key and run out of the house with his tail between his legs. Seriously, are we supposed to take this fucking guy seriously? He's "Chainsaw Dax," a serial killer, and yet he is constantly the biggest fucking pussy ever.

Even funnier, Dax is hanging out in his now ex-girlfriend's back yard, sipping a bottled water out of the side of his mouth, while she and her new guy giggle and pretend to be doing pinup photos and not noticing the 400 pound loser in a hoodie and half mask standing there watching them! Even funnier than that, Dr. Hall idly meanders up next to Dax and tells him that he's "just checking in" on him (how did he know he was there?). Dax then tells him everything is fine and that he met his soulmate on "that website", at which point Hall tells him that Hess is back in the headlines and then leaves his psychopathic patient to murder his ex. Seems like a responsible thing for a psychologist of homicidal patients to do. Dax, in spite of no longer having a key, goes back in the house and strangles his ex in the bathtub with some VHS tape, which we all know is incredibly durable. He also kills her new dude by stabbing him with a CD. I mean, I guess. Hey man, it's not physical media's fault that people died, the problem is mental illness... thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers.

While Hess has arguments with a plastic-surgery addict, Linda (Ashley Lynn Caputo), who is half his age, supposed to be his wife and can barely move her mouth when she talks, Dax and Sara take care of Sara's ex-boyfriend Josh (Todd Martin) with a string of Christmas lights (don't ask, I don't know), a baseball bat and suddenly we get to the meat of the plot. No really, Tim is all in on the heavy plot twists and turns this time and it breaks my heart that this script was ruined by Tepperman's involvement on nearly every level. With even a low budget, allegedly $5k (the crowdfund only brought in $3,376), this could have been highly entertaining. *deep breath* Ready? Spoilers are marked for those of you who still care.

(SPOILERS) Sara is actually also a patient of Dr. Hall and was directed by Hall to get Dax to kill Dr. Hess. Dr. Hess was hired by a guy working for Dr. Hall, so that he would get himself back in the headlines and be easy for Dax to find. Dax is so mad at being manipulated by Hall that he throws a pad of paper and a pen on the floor of his office and accuses him of the set-up. The doc admits it, but says he did it because he was dumped by Linda who went and married Dr. Hess! This, once again, tugs at Dax's dumbass heart-strings and he decides to help Hall by shooting a video of a naked Linda and a clothed (thank god) Hess having sex literally inches away without them noticing - again! How is this big goombah also a ninja?

(SPOILERS) Dax then kidnaps Linda and Hess calls up Axel (from part 4, who was supposed to be a figment of Tuner's imagination!). Hess needs Axel's help... in padding out the movie. Axel talks a lot, says nothing. Hess is then dared by Dax to inject himself with heroin, while he shows Hess a video of Linda having gas poured on her. Hess has to pick up a massive needle from two campy gay dudes who are supposed to be gang members (I think this is supposed to be comic relief). He is then directed to inject himself and stumbles around like he's an extremely articulate drunk, proving nobody involved with any aspect of this production has any idea what heroin is or does. Hess then must go to a bar and cut off his finger (the only real gore effect in the movie). Meanwhile we get lots of "news" clips of random people decrying this crazy ass, middle aged, out of shape doctor going around committing crimes in broad daylight, uploading them to the web and leaving the police utterly baffled as to how to catch him.

(SPOILERS) This all culminates in a showdown between two overweight, out of shape dudes running from each other in the now officially abandoned asylum (that still looks exactly the same as before). But before they clash, we discover that... hoo boy... Dr. Hall is a crossdresser with an axe who wants to kill Dr. Hess, take all of the money that Dr. Hess got paid and take Dax with him to Switzerland where he can get a sex change and be the woman he always wanted to be with Dax by his side... So yeah, there's that. We then get Dax running around with a non-working chainsaw shouting "I dare you... to die!" Of course, both Dax and Dr. Hess live to take on another sequel. Yay? (/SPOILERS)

Starting out life as an Indy a Go Go crowdfunder, headed up by Tepperman, the campaign promised a sequel to the original TRUTH OR DARE with Asbestos Felt, "many skilled, veteran special effects artists" and walk-on roles for every person who ponies up $20 or more. Asbestos Felt wasn't in it, there were really only two special effects scenes and with 64 total backers, I don't think they squeezed even half of those people in the movie, but it sure explains the incredibly low bar for acting this time out. Granted, DEADLY DARES appeared to be a lot of Tim's random friends and fans instead of the trained aspiring actors that previous movies had, but this time out it's actually worse. Fortunately, we have Wynkoop's enthusiastic performance keeping this from being a total loss. The campaign also warned that Tepperman would really just be riding Ritter's cult status for his own ambitions by admitting that he is co-everything. Director, producer, editor, art department, etc. Everything except writer, thankfully. At least Ritter could write his sequel and we'd have that going for it. In the end, the campaign ended with $3,376 pledged out of a goal of $8,500. I don't know if Tim Ritter heading up the campaign and not partnering with a notorious hackster would have got more backers, but it couldn't have hurt.

Damn, how the mighty have fallen. I guess Tim Ritter is getting old (he was 50 when this was made) and not really feeling up to doing all that hard work that indy films require and seemingly more interested on his writing career. Even so, maybe at least be a bit selective about who you are going to partner up with (I'm having flashbacks to Don Dohler and Joe Ripple). Everyone has their flaws, but Tepperman has all the flaws. Apparently, Tepperman phoned and emailed Ritter until he agreed and, let's be honest, a movie based on the best script ever is only going to be as good as the people putting it on the screen. This is not the way the fabled franchise should end, but it seems like that may well be the final nail. As sad as that is, we still have the excellent first film and it's proper sequel SCREAMING FOR SANITY (1998). Plus, we also have the sorta-remake KILLING SPREE (1987) in which the lead is not totally a schlub! Tepperman can't take those away, not even with a prop chainsaw.

Tim Ritter's TRUTH OR DARE Series (1986-2017) Part 1

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Halloween Havoc: Tim Ritter's TRUTH OR DARE Series (1986-2017) Part 1

One of the common attitudes toward filmmakers in Hollywood over the years is "what have you done for me lately?" Sure, there are filmmakers who make such a big blockbuster that they get handed blank check after blank check no matter how many bombs fall afterwards (see: "Wachowski"), but due to the vibes and politics nature of who's in and who's out, aspiring filmfolk can find themselves quickly sinking beneath the waves of indifference. But what of the amateur/underground videomakers? More specifically, what about those cult (in the stricter sense of the term) movie makers who get written up in zines and websites that are getting rarer and rarer as the years tick by. It's the "gore-tuers" who I'm interested in this Halloween.

The '80s were notorious for harsh cinematic censorship, even in countries like the US, where censorship is unconstitutional and our film rating / censor board, the MPAA, had to do some sweaty gymnastics to dance around that fact. Because of the inevitable march of movies going direct to video, low-budget movie makers suddenly didn't need to worry about appealing to cinema owners or being advertised in newspapers. Cinemas and papers had strict rules about what could be shown and advertised in this pre-internet age, and now these movies could just flip the bird at the ratings board and do whatever they wanted to. Since graphic violence in independent horror movies was something the MPAA loved to come down with all of their self-righteous fury, young video makers wanted to do violent shit. Such as the infamous VIOLENT SHIT (1989), from Germany's own Andreas Schnaas.

BLOOD CULT (1985) was the first shot on video horror movie sold directly to video stores during that boom time in which mom & pop shops were ravenous for product. Horror was big business in the '80s and on video it was a killing field. BLOOD CULT was hugely successful and even spawned a less successful sequel, REVENGE (1986). It also made a lot of people realize they could do that too. One of those people was Florida man Tim Ritter, who had already made a Super 8 movie DAY OF THE REAPER (1984), that he self distributed on VHS (some of you remember the days of the back page ads for self-published VHS horrors in Fangoria). He followed this up with a Super 8 anthology, co-directed with frequent collaborator Joel Wynkoop, TWISTED ILLUSIONS (1985). This was also self-distributed, so I feel like BLOOD CULT still retains the crown for micro-budget indy horror breaking that plastic ceiling. Particularly since it was so broadly released that every single video store (except for Blockbuster, which wasn't a real threat until about 1989) had a copy on their shelves. They wouldn't hang on to that crown long.

Ritter's biggest success came with a shot on 16mm, massively distributed on VHS, movie called TRUTH OR DARE? (1986). If you rented horror movies from your local video stores back then, you know exactly what the box looks like, you probably rented it and very probably told all of your friends about it, and they told their friends. It was kind of a big deal in certain circles at the time. With those two Super 8 films under his belt, a then 18 year old Tim Ritter, wrote and directed the story of an average shlub, Mike Strauber, who snaps and embarks on a murder spree after he finds his girlfriend cheating on him. If you have seen any of Tim Ritter's outings, this may sound very familiar, as this is literally the set-up for a many of his movies. They say "write what you know" and yeah, some girl traumatized the shit out of this guy.

Following TRUTH OR DARE?, Ritter made an excellent quasi-remake titled KILLING SPREE (1989), shot on 16mm and starring the greatest name in horror, the late Asbestos Felt. Ritter then made a variety of sequels (see below) and a few other odd projects, including an unexpected turn with a Christian SOV horror movie titled RECONCILLED THROUGH THE CHRIST (2005). And finally his last proper movie I DARED YOU! TRUTH OR DARE 5 (2017). When I say "proper", I mean that I'm excluding movies where he just directed segments in anthologies or a movie with four other credited writers. (As you may have guessed, this is really just an excuse to get me out of talking about 2021's SHARKS OF THE CORN).

To Ritter's credit, the TRUTH OR DARE series has never done the obvious thing of simply rehashing what worked in the first movie ad nauseum. Well, except for the whole "cheating women driving dudes crazy" thing. Anything you'd like to share with the group, Tim?

So what has Tim Ritter done for us lately? Before we dive into 5, let's recap the series for those folks who aren't David Zuzelo.

TRUTH OR DARE? A CRITICAL MADNESS (1986): In this first entry, we are introduced to a schlub named Mike Struber (John Brace), a suit and tie guy in a copper '70 Firebird Trans Am. Yeah, it's not the finest car ever built, but damn it sure looks cool. Mike comes home to his hot wife Sharon (Mary Fanaro) banging his buddy Jerry (Bruce Gold). After being told that their marriage is toast, which seems obvious, Mike tears away in his bitchin' TA to go have flashbacks on all of the red flags that have gone up recently. And also some memories of self-mutilation as a child, for some reason. 

While driving aimlessly, Mike picks up a very friendly hitchhiker with big... hair and takes his hot date to a campsite. Jesus dude, really? I'm beginning to understand why Mike got dumped. As they sit on logs, the hitchhiker suggests that they play Truth or Dare. Things start simply enough and quickly spiral out of control with Mike being dared to slash his chest with a knife, cut off a finger and rip his tongue out. Mike, the schlub that he is, figures he can dare her to lift up her blouse, to which she merely untucks her top, without exposing a centimeter of flesh. Seems fair.

Finally, Mike is found alone, by the park ranger, covered in blood and screaming "Truth or dare! Truth or dare!" Thirteen months later in the Sunnyvale Mental Institution, Mike's doctors talk about how well he has healed (apparently he had his finger and tongue reattached...?) and how budget cuts make him a great candidate to release back into the wild! Just an FYI for those unaware, this is a commentary on the popular and pervasive GOP desire to cut state spending on mental health services in the '80s, resulting in mass closures of mental institutions and the dumping of their patients out on to the streets to become the homeless people that the same politicians and voters then complained about. But I digress.

Of course, the first thing Mike does after getting his walking papers is stalk his wife. This leads to a great little HALLOWEEN-inspired sequence in which Mike is in her house with a large carving knife, trying to kill her and Jerry without being seen. He kills Jerry, but is surprised by Sharon who slices open his stomach in spite of her terrible culinary knife skills. This leads to Mike being patched up and thrown back into the looney bin. Mike plays Truth or Dare with some imaginary inmates (one being the late, great Asbestos Felt) before carving up half of his face, creating a copper mask in the asylum's metal shop (is that really a thing that asylums had?) before managing to escape past an angry, racist guard (Joel Wynkoop, Tim's buddy and the original choice for the lead). Once Mike busts out, he goes on a wild killing spree while the bumbling local detectives try to chase him down without destroying the town. They are mostly successful.

At one point Mike steals a '79 Bonneville land yacht and runs down a baby in a stroller and its mother (the shot of the mother being run over was deleted from the finished film). He also gets into a chase with some punks and blows up their car, shoots a group of people waiting for a bus with an M16, smacks an old lady with a morning star, because she berates him for running into her trash cans (a direct reference to 1984's REPO MAN), chainsaws the face of a little leaguer (where did he get all this stuff?) all on his way to get to his wife's house so he can finally kill her for dumping him. Seems a bit excessive, but everybody has their own ways of coping. Unlike the other entries, I can't in good conscience post spoilers because if you haven't seen it, you should. There are lots of great little moments written into the script that you would never see in your average low-budget DTV horror movie, particularly these days. Additionally, some of the actors are surprisingly good and Brace does a nice job straddling the line between serious and campy as Mike.

The film was written by a 17 year old Ritter, who had made two self-distributed Super 8 movies prior. The second was TWISTED ILLUSIONS (1985), an anthology co-directed with Joel Wynkoop. One of the stories was the original short, titled A CRITICAL MADNESS, that would go on to be expanded into TRUTH OR DARE? Ritter, driven to get this film produced for any amount of money, managed to hype the project in the local press and even Variety. Eventually he secured funding of $350,000 ($1.1 million in 2025 dollars) through a local video distributor looking for new product to sell direct to video stores across the nation. Ritter had been planning on shooting on a budget of $60,000 ($6,000 if things didn't go well), so this was a huge amount of money that allowed Ritter to shoot on 16mm with a full crew, including veteran special effects master Bob Shelly. Shelly had worked on classics like CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE (1980) and GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) before signing on with Tim. This allowed Ritter to do things like a car explosion with a no-suit burn gag, adding significant production value to his little movie.

Like so many stories we hear about indy filmmaking, not everything went well. The make-up effects team that were brought in for the copious gore effects were not able to do all of the things that they promised at the outset. Shelly offered to take over some of the work and, according to Tim, completely saved the production, in spite of having to scale back some of the more ambitions effects. The troubles didn't stop there as the producer (Yale Wilson) who was hired by the backer was constantly at odds with the gory horror aspects of the script. One of the things he fought against was the scene in which Mike runs down a mother and child. Originally the scene was supposed to show Mike targeting them and deliberately running them down in his stolen car. Wilson took issue with this and forced Ritter to change it to look like hitting the baby carriage was an accident and running over the mother was a crime of opportunity. After more conflicts over 12 days of a 14 day shoot, Ritter was banned from the set and locked out of the editing room. This resulted in the film being toned down with the shot of the mother being run over omitted completely. Wilson even went so far as to strip Ritter's name from the credits, replacing it with his own name. Forced to take legal action, Ritter received a judgment in his favor, but not before the film master was completed and the retail tapes had already been manufactured with Wilson's name on them. Even with all of the issues, this is a pretty amazing accomplishment for an untrained, 18 year old kid. It also explains why he has spent most of his decades-long career shooting on video with non-professionals.

WICKED GAMES (1994): In this second entry, a schlub named Gary (Kevin Scott Crawford) discovers his wife cheating on him. His cop friend (Joel Wynkoop) helpfully tells him that he might take after his cousin, the mass murderer Mike Strauber, who is still locked up in the Sunnyvale sanitarium. Uhhh, thanks? Folks start getting killed by a man in a new copper mask (not Mike's old one) until (SPOILER) we find out that it's not one, but three killers using Mike's MO. In a patented Tim Ritter double twist, we discover that it's all just crazy Mike's fantasy, with him imagining his doctors (including Wynkoop) having followed in his footsteps, randomly killing folks. (/SPOILER) Sadly, it feels like it was just done as a fun weekend project with minimal script and production values, even by micro-budget SOV standards. The best bit, aside from the fun double twist, is a scene in which a victim is stabbed with a machete and then falls on top of a lawn sprinkler which goes right through the cut and starts spraying blood. Sometimes you have to just take what you can get.

SCREAMING FOR SANITY (1998): In the third in the series, Ritter gets much more ambitious than part 2, and makes the main character a schlub named Clive (Ken Blanck), the husband of the woman and father of the child that Mike runs over with his car in part 1. Honestly, I think this is a brilliant premise for a sequel that would directly follow TRUTH OR DARE? The rather offhand murder of Clive's wife and child didn't mean much to Mike, but it had a massive impact on the mental health of husband and father, Clive, just as you expect it would. That fateful event caused him to lose his shit and be confined to the very same Sunnyvale nuthouse that Mike currently resides in. Coincidentally, he is released on his own recognizance at the very same time that Mike's doctor, Dr. Hess (Joel Wynkoop) decides to beat up Mike because he bears some very deep resentment after Mike got past him when he was just an orderly in the first film. As a psychologist, you'd think Dr. Hess would recognize his festering guilt complex. Not only is Dr. Hess fired, but he gets excoriated in the press with all too close-to-the-bone accusations of being the weak link that allowed Mike to go on his killing spree.

Clive is tortured by hallucinations, bouts of self-mutilation and suddenly people start getting killed by a man in a copper mask. Unlike part 1, it just seems to be random idiots who are either profiting off of the true crime story of the Sunnyvale killer, or some loser goth chick who desperately wants to marry Mike Strauber, sending him repeated fan mail, in spite of the fact that he never bothered to write back to her. Additionally, the disgraced Dr. Hess seems to be a target too, and is being stalked by the killer. At one point, Hess' semi-estranged, much-too-young to be into pudgy, balding middle age dudes, wife is kidnapped and nailed to a wall in a warehouse restroom. Damn, that's just cruelly unhygienic. In a nice twist (SPOILER) Dr. Hess kills Clive, who actually is the killer, and he was driven to murder by his own doctor and his sister in the hopes that Clive would kill Dr. Hess, for "letting" Mike escape the asylum! The double twist is limited here to simply having Clive's sister being haunted by Clive's ghost holding the copper mask. (/SPOILER)

While part 2 was rather lackluster, except for the ending, this outing had a lot more effort put into it. Though, I should mention that in spite of the warning at the beginning of the movie that what you are about to see contains graphic sex and violence (man, if that doesn't take you back to the '90s!), there is no nudity and not much blood. In spite of this, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The plot is surprisingly complex, mercifully free of padding and sports better than average acting for a '90s SOV outing. While watching it, I kept thinking "this is the real sequel to TRUTH OR DARE!" As it turns out, in fact it was the original concept that Ritter had for a sequel that he pitched to the producers of part 1. Apparently, they passed on it, possibly due to the contentious power struggles and litigation during part 1. Even so, I find this somewhat amazing considering how ubiquitous the original was on VHS. I'm pretty sure some folks put their kids through college on that movie and usually sacks of cash will bandage all wounds in any business.

Next Up: Tim Ritter's TRUTH OR DARE Series (1986-2017) Part 2

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