27: After Midnight (2005, Phil Herman/Laura Giglio/Tiffany Warren/Isabelle Stephen/Steven A. Grainger)

Owned version: A DVD-R produced by Phil Herman (I assume) - a two-pack with its sister feature Around Midnight. The (handcut, Xeroxed) sleeve bears a copyright of 2005, so I'll go with that as the production year.

Acquired: 2016, likely May, from Herman himself via eBay.

Seen before?: No.

The DVD-R I purchased doesn't come with much in the way of special features, unsurprisingly. What is included is a promotional photograph of Debbie D, erstwhile SOV starlet who worked with Herman on Burglar from Hell and Tales for the Midnight Hour. The photograph, stamped February 2001, features her nude and lying on her stomach. Across her butt is a prop storybook bearing the title Tales for the Midnight Hour II. I assume this is an indication that Around Midnight started production under that title; if so, that would make After Midnight the conclusion in an trilogy. Meanwhile, Herman appears to have resurrected the Tales for the Midnight Hour II title for a project currently in post-production, if the IMDb is correct. What does this mean in terms of continuity? Nothing, of course. It's just a bit of trivia I find interesting.

Besides, if you're looking for continuity, you're in the wrong neighborhood. After Midnight can barely be bothered to make its framing device relate to the rest of the film, let alone keeping some manner of continuity between films. Herman isn't exactly the most attentive of filmmakers - there's a cut in the middle of a simple shot of Nancy Feliciano waking up, implying he joined together two identical shots to capture said act, which makes me curious as to how the first shot got screwed up and why he didn't just discard it entirely - so it's to the film's advantage that he mostly holds to writing duties with this project, taking a directorial credit for only the frame. The first story sure could have fooled me in that regard, though - it has all the hallmarks of other Herman films like Jacker and Burglar from Hell. Filmmaking where the incompetence is bone-deep and compounded by an absent tripod, dopey dialogue delivered as snidely as possible ("Just show me what ya came to show me, you wacky bitch" is one of the highlights), an intense focus on the most banal aspects of a given exploitable scenario, a twist easily seen from miles away... that this was in fact directed by its leading lady Laura Giglio appears to have changed nothing. It's a Herman script and a Herman film all the way through, and it was at this point I sighed and settled in for a long 70 minutes.

Turns out I can still be surprised. The third short is a quick gag about a nude model who gets murdered by a photographer except oops, she's a vampire. Its Venn-diagram intersection of strangle fetish porn, vampire erotica and voyeuristic performance give it the whiff of a repurposed custom-porn W.A.V.E. short, but the star/director Isabelle Stephen had previously showed up in a couple things by strangle-fetish kings/anti-erotica weirdos Factory 2000, and while she doesn't port over the hostility or extreme scatology, there's a sneaky level of meta-commentary (starting from the cameraman in the opening bit masturbating and Stephen's subsequent disgust) that serves to cheekily deflate the wank-material nature of the enterprise. The fourth, directed by Steven A. Grainger, is a moody bummer about a depressed woman fighting off suicidal urges; the narrative tries to obscure the fact that she's the sole survivor of a humanity-wiping apocalypse, but that becomes apparent early on from the framing and the carefully-timed fades.

Then, the second story. It's the only one Herman didn't have a major hand in - it is, instead, written and directed by Tiffany Warren. It works with the same devotion to filler and banality as the films surrounding it, but to a perverse degree - the heroine dances at a club, she showers, she watches a movie on the couch, she changes out of her pajamas into her work clothes, she drives to work, so on and so forth. What seems dull becomes weirdly involving once you adjust to its wavelength and realize that Warren is dedicated to mundanity - basically, it shifts from a waste of time to a compelling photonegative of murderdrone. Then the protagonist, a death-obsessed young nurse, gets bitten by an aggrieved patient (played by the director) who turns out to be a vampire. Per the usual plot machinations, the two fall in bed together, and right as this happens, the score abruptly jumps from the percolating synths that had been dominant up to that point into a hard, driving rock song. It's a basic contrast effect, but I'm impressed it's set up and executed as well as it is here - Warren seems to actually understand the point of maintaining a slow, even pace and concentrating on a lack of incident in order to achieve a certain impact at the close of the narrative. It's not Jeanne Dielmann, but at this budget level I'll take what I can get, and it's a disappointment that Warren appears to have made nothing else of note.

26: After Hours (1985, Martin Scorsese)

Owned version: The 2004 DVD released by Warner Brothers as part of the Martin Scorsese Collection box set.

Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Twice, to my recollection - once on VHS probably around 1997 or 1998 and once on HBO around 2000 or 2001. Never from this disc.

"I'll probably get blamed for that."

The thing about being at the center of a narrative is it makes everything about you, even if it really isn't. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is hiding on a fire escape from an angry mob when he peeps in a window and sees a man shot to death by an angry woman. His reaction is not one of shock but of rueful self-pity, which given the circumstances is semi-understandable - he's already been accused of at least one thing he assuredly did not do, a string of apartment burglaries, which is why there's a mob on his tail. He's having an impossibly bad evening... but the murdered man in the apartment is having a worse one.

That's a fascinating aspect of Paul's trials throughout After Hours, Martin Scorsese's hilarious and unnerving black-comic exercise in ratcheted urban paranoia: the insinuation that much of what he goes through is due to his self-absorption. His skills in reading other people and choosing who to trust are poor and only made worse by stress/exhaustion, as is his unerring ability to choose the wrong response in any situation; by the later stages of the film, he's compounding his troubles by throwing blind panicked trust at an obvious lunatic like Gail, Catherine O'Hara's bizarre and giggly ice-cream-van driver, then whining his way out of a temporary haven provided by a gay man who furtively picks him up as he's seeking refuge in a park. Before that, he'd scotched his evening with flighty raw-nerve Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) by trying to make sexual overtures on her rather than just be the conversationalist she repeatedly says she's looking for that night; further exacerbated the situation by getting snippy and cold towards her even as her emotional state visibly deteriorates; misunderstood a circular conversation with a bouncer and in doing so accidentally agreed to having his head shaved; and allowed his frustrations to boil over at Julie, a lonely, if slightly odd, waitress (Teri Garr, finding all the pathos she can in her short screen time) who was nice enough to take him in out of the rain. Paul may indeed be stuck in SoHo as a sort of purgatorial punishment, but he's had the keys to the gate within his grasp several times and not been able to see it.

Then again, maybe the universe really does just have it out for him. Both these things can be true - Paul is kind of an asshole, yet the misfortunes piled upon him seem out of proportion unless he's been fingered as karma's dumping ground for the night. Despite the connotations of my initial argument, it can only be argued that Paul is the object around which everything in After Hours orbits - especially the camera. As it zooms, drifts, roves and circles with a malevolent energy, the camera never detaches from Paul's proximity, even when he's immobile and encased in plaster. Furthermore, Scorsese throws in a number of sharp little details to signify that this isn't just stacked assholery, many of which I'd never before noticed. When Paul goes to visit Marcy, she's staying with Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), a conceptual artist who drafts him into helping with her latest sculpture while he waits for Marcy to return from the pharmacy. The act of doing so gets plaster on his white shirt, so Kiki lends him a black shirt with pinstripes; the swap from white to black, combined with the suggestion of prison stripes, is a clever indication of how the night will proceed. (A similar white/black contrast exists between the phone in Paul's apartment, which he uses to phone Marcy in hopes of a nice evening, and the phone in Kiki's apartment, which he uses to phone the police and report a death.) Later, in Julie's apartment, she attempts to cheer him up by dancing to the Monkees's "Last Train to Clarksville"; Paul breaks down crying just as Mickie Dolenz gets to, "...and I don't know if I'm ever coming home." Even later, he returns to Kiki's apartment in search of a $20 bill he noticed on the surface of her plaster sculpture, and right after he removes it, the flashlights of the nascent anti-burglary posse shine through onto him. The God Paul finds himself bellowing at in a moment of high dudgeon has a sick sense of humor, it seems.

Not as sick as it could have been, though - the original ending was for Paul to be trapped in limbo inside another sculpture, this one built for him by barfly/basement-dwelling resident artist June (Vera Bloom) as a disguise against the angry mob. This haven soon becomes another trap, another cosmic joke on Paul perpetuated on him by a mysterious figure who knows his name without him ever mentioning it to her. His deliverance comes at the hands of the real thieves (played by Cheech and Chong), puckish figures of anarchy who slip through a manhole and into his basement prison - literally descending into the underworld to spirit him away - and in the light of this proposed ending, Cheech's line, "A stereo is a stereo, but art is forever," sounds damned ominous. But instead, he ends up falling out of their van right in front of his office. After Hours opens with Paul training a new hire (Bronson Pinchot!), who responds that the job is, "...temporary anyway. I don't wanna be stuck here doing this for the rest of my life." Paul's response to this unintentional slight is to gaze around at everyone in the office who IS here for good, reflect on his own station and recess into himself for the evening. It closes with Paul back at his desk, having traded one nerve-jangling personal Hell for another, far more anonymous and manageable one; as though to drive that home, the camera at last breaks free of Paul and slides around taking another look at his coworkers. Is that all there is to a bad evening?

25: Adventures of Zatoichi (1964, Kimiyoshi Yasuda)

Owned version: The box set of the complete Zatoichi series released by Criterion in 2013.

Acquired: July 19th, 2015 from a Barnes & Noble. (Criterion 50% off sale, baby!)

Seen before?: Once, from the old Home Vision Entertainment DVD (as received from Netflix) in 2004. Most likely early May. Never from the Criterion set. This is, in fact, the first time I've cracked the set. Which is exciting for me!

The joy of formula, pt. 3...

You make nine films about one character, you're bound to fall into some patterns. Especially when you're planning to make more. Adventures of Zatoichi, the ninth in what would eventually be a series of twenty-six about the wandering blind masseur/swordsman Zatoichi, slips comfortably into the dominant story beats that comprise most of the Ichi films - Ichi comes to a town under the thumb of oppression (a corrupt magistrate and a local crime boss in cahoots this time), befriends a couple locals including a young woman, outsmarts a rigged dice game in a gambling hall, drinks sake and fights anyone who attempts to make his life miserable. Then the climax has the swordsman cutting down a couple dozen anonymous foot soldiers before tackling a skilled warrior looking to prove his mettle. Every one of these films is telling the same basic story, and the series is far along enough at this point that this entry has a subtle bit of fun with that. The setting is a town that also serves as a mecca of sorts for those wishing, in the words of Ichi, "to worship the first light of the new year." Ichi remembers this place from his childhood and has returned to spend the last bits of the old year trying to find something - a brief sense of peace, maybe. Meanwhile, there's a man who has escaped from prison and returned to this town searching for his sister, and there's a cadre of vendors who have returned to this town as they do every year looking to capitalize on the celebratory occasion, knowing not that the magistrate has imposed stiff new taxes that will strip away their profits. In a series beholden to a cyclical repetition of expected formula, it's amusing to see the screenplay acknowledge that by putting most of the characters into cycles of repetition that don't go as expected.

So Ichi's trip doesn't go as he hopes. Instead of finding peace, he gets embroiled in events that reinforce his sense of isolation. Having gone through the series once before over a decade past, my memories of individual entries are not exactly crystal-clear. But as I found this worth comment back then, I feel it's safe to assume that Adventures of Zatoichi is at least unique to this point in the series in that it deals with Zatoichi's eternal isolation not as a tragedy but as a fact; indeed, part of Ichi's fury in the finale is fueled by his disappointment in coming to what he thought was a safe place and having to do the shit he always has to do. There's a thread where Ichi comes to think a local drunk might be his long-lost father, and when the drunk inevitably lets him down, the great Shintaro Katsu plays it with a rueful smile, as though he knew this moment of potential human connection was too good to be true ("For a moment, I thought I saw my father in you..."). Yasuda further accents Ichi's alienation by keeping him apart from others in group shots - if, say, the women with whom he's sharing a hotel room are in a shot with him, they'll be in the foreground while he'll be off in the background or vice versa. The effect is one of alienation - even as he walks among them, Ichi is marked as not belonging among the rest of the world.

Rather than bending to melancholy, though, Yasuda exploits this alienation in service of Ichi's ferocious fighting skills. We know his skills are superhuman - we've seen the previous films, assumedly - but Adventures of Zatoichi goes further and implies they might be literally inhuman. The great Matt Lynch criticizes this entry for making Ichi too saintly, but I think it's doing something different. The film leans into his apartness to paint him less as a skilled duelist and more as a force of nature whose whirling swordplay is an inevitable consequence of his existence. In other words, he cannot be one of us because he is not one of us. The opening scene has him chuckling in the midst of a fierce windstorm, musing on the dust blowing in his face and caught in a roil of red, oranges and browns (the cut from this bombast to kites in a placid blue sky is great). There are multiple fight sequences in which he erupts out of the pure blackness of shadows like an elemental phenomenon, an extension of the darkness sent to condemn his enemies to a different kind of darkness. And the final fight ends with him admonishing the dead, "You brought this on yourselves," then receding into the distance as snow begins to fall on the blood-soaked field of battle. He comes in with the wind and leaves with the snow, pausing for a moment only to get what he came for: the sun. One implacable fact of nature paying homage to another.

24: The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961, Herschell Gordon Lewis [as "Lewis H. Gordon"])

Owned version: A DVD-R manufactured by Something Weird Video.

Acquired: February 22nd, 2008 from Something Weird.

Seen before?: Twice - once on December 31st, 2008 and once on March 4th, 2010. (The latter viewing resulted in this review, which sums it up pretty well.)

The joy of formula, pt. 2...

Since I don't have much to improve upon or change the previous review linked up there, I'd like to touch on something I find interesting about sex, voyeurism and the nudie-cutie as expressed in this specific iteration. Nudie-cuties, for the unfamiliar, are films in which elaborate excuses are devised for lucky men to play Peeping Tom to a host of unclothed beauties. This is effected via means supernatural (Like Wow!, in which a hobo finds magic X-ray glasses), professional (The "Imp"probable Mr. Wee Gee, featuring the famed photographer applying his trade to something other than headline-chasing) or fantastic (International Smorgasbroad, in which a cook dreams of past meals and the ladies that came with them), but the end result remains naked boobs. It's all variations on a theme, a dozen ways to say the same thing - a series of Playboy joke books scribbled out onto celluloid.

They are among the stupidest films ever made.

The important part, though, is that The Man exists. He's the gatekeeper, the carnival barker shilling carnal promises. This one man has something special about him, something that allows him to frolic in a wondrous world of pleasantly bare female flesh, and for the low low price of one movie ticket you can spend an hour in this paradise of pulchritude. As such, there's generally a leering quality to the films, one leavened by the good-natured fluffy idiocy endemic to the genre but there nonetheless; given that these films often play as feature-length Tex Avery wolf whistles, this is hardly surprising. This is then what's odd about The Adventures of Lucky Pierre - Lewis's chosen tour guide displays a spectacular indifference to the naked ladies around him.

The film is divided into five segments, each of which finds a way to deny the inherent voyeurism. The first segment has Pierre sketching nude models, and the fourth has him photographing nude models who keep disappearing when the shutter snaps; in both, he's too focused on the artistic endeavor to leer. (In the latter, indeed, he's far more excited by the camera than by the subject.) The second segment has him fixing a plumbing problem in a man's house, unaware of the man's wife showering five feet away from him. In the third segment, he stumbles over a pair of nude sunbathers while birdwatching. In each of these, his obliviousness can be excused to his concentration on his job. But it's the last segment that pushes this into fascinating territory. The final bit in Pierre has our chapeau-clad hero attending a drive-in movie theater showing nudie shorts. At last, we have an acknowledgement of desire - Pierre, finally, is One Of Us. But alas! Pierre is so fixated on the films he's there to see that he ignores the fact that the ticket taker and the concession girl are both nude right in front of him. And then a bus parks in front of him for the duration of the film, causing him to miss that too. It's as if Lewis and producer David Friedman decided to punish poor Pierre for not shedding his blinders.

Then, the payoff: As Pierre goes to wander off, he tosses away the dice that have been the film's motif and have, at the end of every segment, landed on ones. The dice this time roll seven. Nude women emerge from the background and Pierre, having finally broken the curse of snake-eyes, opens his eyes, sees them and rejoices. This admonishment to wake up, get off your duff and engage with the world around you is likely unintentional, just an unexpected double entendre bouncing off Lewis's burlesque-broad punchline. But there it is anyway. Call it How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tits.

23: Adventure in Sahara (1938, D. Ross Lederman)

Owned version: The 2009 DVD released by Sony as part of The Samuel Fuller Collection. This set, it should be noted, contains exactly two Samuel Fuller films. This one is included on the strength of his story credit, which as I understand it boiled down to a quick verbal pitch that the studio bought then changed drastically.

Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

The joy of formula, pt. 1...

The title promises nothing new and delivers exactly that. There's not a bit about Adventure in Sahara that plays unfamiliar - this is the platonic ideal of the sort of film Abbott and Costello were joshing in ...in the Foreign Legion. There's square-jawed hero Jim Wilson (Paul Kelly), the cartoonishly cruel commandant Captain Savatt (C. Henry Gordon), a supporting crew of mug-faced legionnaires itching for mutiny, a sympathetic higher-up who understands the plight of the soldiers but is bound by duty to maintain order, a love interest for Wilson who literally crash-lands in the middle of the plot, war-mongering tribal Arabs just outside the fort walls and miles of hostile burning sand. A machine could have written this screenplay, lockstep and bound to its chosen path like a soldier on patrol. But I am not a man of refined or elegant tastes, and I'll fall for a chunk of formula every time if it's burnished to the right shine. So it went for Adventure in Sahara - its swiftness and economy, stripped to a fearful leanness reflecting its increasingly-aggrieved legionnaires, won me over even as I recognized that nothing new was under this particular scorching sun.

It's often as simple as finding the right people for the job - Gordon makes for a daunting villain, a hissable martinet for whom this kind of cruelty has become so commonplace that he can whip out a line like, "I shall make legionnaires out of you or crush you in the attempt," and make it sting without ruffling his aplomb, and he's constrasted nicely by Kelly's stiff-backed resolve, a determined man of action whose personal axe to grind off-handledy blooms into full heroism. Lederman's direction is robust and unfussy, burning through a full load of story in under an hour as it does. In the absence of nuance, he goes big when warranted (a desert-march montage makes especially effective use of double exposures) and moment to moment uses simple, direct images of sweating faces and torn photographs blowing away in the wind to get the impact across. There's a snappy pulp flavor to a lot of the dialogue, and I'm a pretty easy touch for that sort of thing. (My favorite: "You've made Agadez an inferno on Earth, and now you're going to boil in it.") Stir all these ingredients into the cauldron and the finished dish is one that, in retrospect, was always going to appeal to my palate. Admittedly, Fuller's original idea for the ending would have likely made a film that would been a better, more powerful and unshakable experience. But a steak-and-potato stew will still stick to the ribs.

22: Addicted to Murder: Blood Lust (2000, Kevin J. Lindenmuth & Tom Vollman)

Owned version: The DVD released in 2002 by Delta Entertainment. I don't foresee any further releases of this movie in its future.

Acquired: November 29, 2014 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

See that title card up there? Here's a dirty little secret - that's from the closing credits, not the opening credits. The opening credits bear this:

And the cover of the DVD smooshes both titles together atop an ugly-ass Photoshop nightmare:

What's the import, why start with all this minutia regarding the actual title to this film? As I see it, an inability to even agree on what to call the infernal thing speaks to a deep discord in terms of the production. I suspect what I have in front of me is a salvage job, and a damned graceless one at that. But what's the nature of the salvage?

Addicted to Murder 3 Bloodlust Vampire Killer starts by picking up where Addicted to Murder had left off, with vampirized serial killer Joel Winter (Mick McCleery, letting a pair of dark sunglasses and a goatee do all the acting work) embracing his newfound calling as a vampire slayer. Then the opening credits roll and Joel is forgotten about for the next twenty-plus minutes; instead, we get more documentary-style framing device nonsense (this time for an ostensible show about vampires) and a series of supernatural domestic squabbles, as Tricia (the neophyte vamp from Tainted Blood) deals with a paramour who demands to be turned and doesn't take kindly to being denied. Joel pops back in just in time for the framing device to resolve in a double twist... at which point the film then jumps to a completely different cast and begins telling a story about a man sent to prison for murder whose cellmate is a vampire. Once that story is over, Joel gets to trot back on screen for a little longer, another random vampire shows up to kill some random lady and then the movie is over.

This isn't the first time Lindenmuth has pulled a fast one like this - his Alien Agenda: Endangered Species uses its status as an omnibus film to justify using at least one unrelated short shot five years before. But at least in that film, he tries to make the piece fit - there's something muttered in the narration that attempts, however unsuccessfully, to provide a way to tie this pre-existing object into the rest of the film built around it and independently of it. Bloodlust Addicted to Murder 3 Vampire Killer doesn't feign such concern - the prison segment was shot by Dead Meat director Tom Vollman, who was blithely unconcerned with whatever the hell kind of world Lindenmuth had been building with the Addicted to Murder series. I can say this because the big, bald menacing crime-kingpin vampire in this segment only goes out at night, sleeps on a mattress stuffed with dirt and at one point hisses, "Holy water, crucifixes, wooden stakes, the whole ball of wax... I don't like any of that fuckin' shit." You know, basic vampire-lore stuff... and absolutely the kind of stuff Lindenmuth had made such a point of flouting. Lindenmuth's vampires wander around in the sun all the time (there's a throwaway line in one of the two previous films about how while they're stronger at night, the sun doesn't bother them), they sleep anywhere and on anything they please and they show no particular aversion to Christian iconography - Tainted Blood even makes a joke out of that when Tricia's friend tries to ward her off with a large plastic cross and she retorts, "Eat of my flesh, drink of my blood... what do you think HE was?" So either Addicted to Bloodlust Killer Vampire Murder 3 is a duology where neither side consulted with the other about the world in which this was taking place, or it's... something else.

Here's my theory: Vollman shot the prison film, intending it to be either a longer stand-alone piece or (more likely, given the tidy narrative arc and Tom's previous involvement with Lindenmuth on Alien Agenda: Under the Skin) a segment in another in-the-works omnibus, something akin to the Creaturealm films where there's no linking device and everyone just makes what they want. But Lindenmuth has about thirty minutes of footage shot in 1998 and intended for another Addicted to Murder film but no film to show for it. Why not? Maybe he couldn't make his idea for the film work without the involvement of Sasha Graham (who only appears in flashback footage), or maybe he just lost interest. At any rate, Vollman's featurette is just what he needs to puff up this orphaned work to saleable length. So in it goes, an abrasive overacted stretch of idiocy stuffed in the middle of a pile of aimless crud like an old, overhard egg inside a stale challah. 3 Killer Vampire Lust Blood Murder to Addicted is one shitty, unfinished film wrapped around another shitty, unfinished film and presented like we won't notice, like the seams aren't snapping and the glue isn't failing to hold. What a terrible way to piss away any remaining promise held by the original work.

21: Addicted to Murder: Tainted Blood (1998, Kevin J. Lindenmuth)

Owned version: The same Navarre DVD from 2002 that I pulled the previous film from.

Acquired: June 11, 2014. Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

Notice that the title card forgoes the 2 in the title of this followup to Lindenmuth's 1995 video. This is less a sequel and more a quasi-prequel/parallel narrative, chiefly concentrating on filling in the backstory of Sasha Graham's vampire Angie and, in doing so, providing context for her curious fixation on sullen serial killer Joel. At least, that's my assumption on the intent. Tainted Blood plays mostly like a supplementary work, a series of scholarly notes and asides meant to illuminate a main text rather than its own thing.

A lot of this can be laid at the feet of the sprawling, halting script. While I get what the base story is - a simple tale of sibling rivalry set among a unique subculture - there's a lot of chaff and noise to cut through to get to that. Either Lindenmuth never quite got a handle on the story he wanted to tell or he was so enamored with the world he'd built, a subcult world burbling under the surface of regular civilization, that he tried to illuminate as many aspects of it as he could given his time and budget. Either way, what's meant to be a generation-spanning epic comes off as diffuse and confused; the time-hopping structure primarily toggles between three plotlines with flashback detours into unexpected areas, including 1950s Ohio and 13th-century France, and as the various threads drift across each other it feels less expansive and more lacking in focus. Tainted Blood desperately needs an anchor, a center from which all the other stuff can bloom, and though Angie is clearly intended as this we don't spend enough time with her for that to take hold. She, like everything else, is given equal weight in the tapestry, popping in and out whenever Lindenmuth needs her to. Ideas are continually introduced then dropped - the jump to France leads nowhere, for instance, and tetchy vampire Jonathan's insistence that newly-vamped Tricia not enter his bedroom is given enough weight that I was surprised when it ended up being just a character curlicue. I feel like there was a significantly longer version of this material that, whether during the script stage or in the editing process, got shaved down past the point of coherence.

I'm not angry, just frustrated. There's enough that Tainted Blood does right that I wish the story wasn't such a mess. Elevating Angie to the ostensible fore was a smart move, if for no other reason than it means more screen time for the spectacular magnetism of Sasha Graham in one of the few lead roles she was allotted in her too-brief career; changing the focus also solves the main issue of the first film in that it sidelines the charisma-free Joel to the point where it's easy to forget he's in this at all. At its best, this is essentially a dry comedy about the mechanics of maintaining a vampire life in a world that would want you destroyed if they knew about you - discussions about what to do with a corpse, a freshly-bitten Tricia shrugging and slapping a Band-Aid on her neck wound, a friend of Tricia listening to her going on about having found her true self and assuming she's in a sex cult, things like that. It's the sort of film where one scene will have two vampires hissing at each other over "unworthy" mortals being turned, and the next scene will be about Tricia trying to explain away biting a blind date she's brought home, and then Scooter McCrae will show up for a scene holding a baby in a Hefty bag asking if anyone wants a snack. Lindenmuth's bemused wit is as in evidence as ever, and he's got a crew of solid performers (especially Graham and the appealing Sarah K. Lippman as Tricia) to sell it. There's a lot of pleasures stacked up in the sidecar, but I just wish someone had taken proper control of the handlebars.

20: Addicted to Murder (1995, Kevin J. Lindenmuth)

Owned version: The 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment that also contains the sequel to this film.

Acquired: June 11th, 2014, from a seller on the Amazon Marketplace.

Seen before?: Twice - once on December 9th, 2014 and once on November 28th, 2016. The latter viewing led to this review.

...and upon third viewing, I feel like the above was sufficient. So, yeah. Definitely read that, because Addicted to Murder is not the sort of thing that reveals endless treasure upon repeated prodding. This revisit has me convinced I pretty much cracked it last time, and now I'm standing here looking at an open safe, pushing the door back and forth to see if maybe I missed a dollar stuck in one of the hinges. I imagine this will happen more than once as I go through the collection and glance off films I've seen and have written about previously (lord, am I not looking forward to a third jaunt through Arang). It's okay. Not everything can be a puzzle box. Some things just are what they plainly are.

Well. Except maybe there's one thing I can use to squeeze a touch more juice out of this pulped blood orange. This time around, the parallels to Deranged struck me as absolutely intentional and resonant in more than just the true-crime-story frame; as such, the frame becomes less a mere homage and more a covert manual on how to read the lead. Both films are about maladjusted men, abused in their youth, whose resultant stunted emotional growth leads them to express their sexual desires in increasingly violent ways after the deaths of their mothers. The abuse visited upon young Joel in Addicted to Murder is sexual in nature, at the hands his mother and a babysitter and a childhood friend. The complicating part is that the childhood friend is Rachel, an older female who also happens to be a vampire with a fetish for being "killed." We and Joel meet her in the opening scene, shot from the POV of an adolescent Joel as he stumbles upon her feeding on a victim in the woods; rather than attack him, she recognizes the recessive, weird Joel as a victim she can mold into her plaything, building off his natural curiosity about death and his already-extant emotional scarring. ("You're a curious little one, aren't you?" is her introduction, which led me to write in my notes, "He's bite-curious.")

Joel's life, then, and the film that contains it becomes a back-and-forth between a series of domineering women-monsters from whom he can't break away and less forceful, friendlier women to whom he can't relate and thus pushes towards bad ends - usually by his psychotic hand, but in at least one case an innocent is slain by one of the monstrous women in his life to get to him. That two of the monstrous-feminine forces in his life are actual monsters is icing and the grand joke of the film. On the one side you have his mother, the babysitter, Rachel the vampire whose repeated demands of violence inextricably joined Joel's sex and death impulses together, and Angie, another vampire who lures him to a bloodsucker's club and tries to harness the pathetic nature of his murderous impulses for her own ends; on the other side, you have a series of hitch-hikers, coworkers, neighbors and random NYC citizens who end up on the wrong side of his frustrated lashings-out, victims of the boiling rage of a beaten-down piece of damaged goods who aims everywhere except the sources of his pain (plus an ex-wife who narrowly escapes such a fate). To break the cycle, Joel has to go back to the source of his pain and find an acceptable outlet for the cruelty and violence bred within him. Which, as a ten-years-later flash-forward reveals at the end, he does. Lindenmuth is mostly a klutz as a filmmaker, and he lets this go on too long, but he's put thought into this.

If only it had a more charismatic lead than Mick McCleery, or at least one who could make the enormous appeal Joel has to women both predatory and otherwise explicable. But no-budget takes what no-budget can get.