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 authority, 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 say 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 learning how to 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 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.