46: Alien Agenda: Under the Skin (1997, Kevin J. Lindenmuth/Tom Vollman/Ron Ford/Michael Legge)

Owned version: Same 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment that its sister anthology Endangered Species was on.

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

I took less than half a page of notes for Alien Agenda: Under the Skin. By contrast, I nearly filled a whole page for Endangered Species, a film which I reviewed by basically saying, "This all kinda sucks except for the Tim Ritter segment, which has SO MANY GOOFY THINGS IN IT, YOU GUYS." One of my notes reads, "theme song is some Toad the Wet Sprocket-sounding stuff with the refrain, 'Close your eyes and remember the good times / We'll all be dead soon.'" Another reads simply, "mmm, brain salad."

I mention this as a way to say, what the hell is there to say about this movie other than this is barely a movie? If it isn't as bad as the last time I saw Lindenmuth and Vollman team up (Addicted to Murder: Blood Lust), it's not for lack of trying. Vollman's piece is a half-assed crime thriller that burns its first ten minutes on a stubbly, sunglasses-wearing alien supersoldier pursuing, catching and ultimately de-limbing some putz who was late on his gambling debt. This has no bearing on anything - the supersoldier gets pushed to the periphery after this and the newly one-armed schmo disappears entirely - as Vollman instead reveals that his main plot is actually about some other guy, a low-level functionary in a crime family and how he gets caught between the cops, his higher-ups and a new syndicate that is, y'know, aliens in disguise. I cannot fathom the paucity of imagination it takes to be told to write a featurette about an alien invasion and your big idea is, "What if I tried to remake King of New York but in thirty minutes?" If you don't want to make an alien-invasion film, don't sign up for the alien-invasion anthology, chief.

Lindemnuth's, meanwhile, starts with the abduction of a biologist and then turns into... something. There's aliens in disguise and doubles and a chupacabra? As often happens with his films, it feels like Lindenmuth had an idea and didn't develop it very well. Or, maybe it's a case of him having a few ideas - this segment plays in halts and hiccups, like it might actually be several scraps of unfinished shorts precariously pasted together into an inexplicable shape. The sole highlight in this section is a series of abductee interviews, similar to the interviews that opened Endangered Species, but where Ford's broad caricatures (glimpsed briefly here as well, somewhere within the crazy-quilt second half) serve only to grate, these interviews play surprisingly well. The actors declaiming the dialogue are credible, and the way the stories slowly develop is satisfying. These bits were directed by Legge, an under-the radar mainstay of cheapo cinema with a corny yet ingratiatingly morbid sense of humor, and the modest, off-kilter sensibilities these stories display (one involving a man with one arm, another involving an alien with a yen for fast food) make them a refreshing oasis in a desert of inspiration. It doesn't provide the relief that Tim Ritter's segment of Endangered Species does, but we take whatever we can get around here.

45: Alien Agenda: Endangered Species (1998, Ron Ford/Kevin J. Lindenmuth/Gabriel Campisi/Tim Ritter)

Owned version: The 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment featuring both this and 1997's Alien Agenda: Under the Skin. (There's a third film, 1996's Alien Agenda: Out of the Darkness that for whatever reason has been abandoned as VHS-exclusive.)

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Once on October 3rd, 2016 from a VHS I'd picked up previously. (My response was this Letterboxd capsule.) Never from this disc.

Upon a second look, this dismissiveness of that capsule seems, for the most part, appropriate. Ford's contribution, a series of interviews with various folks about the possibility of alien abductions, is negligible, mostly an excuse to open the film with some light shtick (e.g. the skeptical buffoon who pronounces "marijuana" like Mr. Mackey). Lindenmuth's first segment builds a deep conspiracy centered around two warring factions of aliens (the Shape Shifters, who want to coexist with humanity, and the Greys, who want to destroy humanity) and yet somehow comes out the other end as a banal relationship drama, with newscaster Debbie Rochon convinced her boyfriend Joe Zaso is cheating on her. (Zaso is, of course, actually an alien, which should be obvious just by looking at the dude. A unique look, that one.) Campisi's film is an endless series of scenes where its protagonist runs, drives or walks places, occasionally eluding two lumpy guys in black suits, though it does end with some pretty nifty stop-motion animation - essentially a pair of pint-sized ED-209s, but with laser guns that look like dicks. (It also looks significantly cheaper than the rest of the film, having been shot in 1992.) And Lindenmuth pops in to give us a closing segment that doubles, triples and quadruples down on the conspiracy angle to the point where no sense can be made out of the remains (though it has one great joke about the origin of the Greys). So, yeah, all in all, minimum effort. I was right.

........except for the part where I was completely wrong about Ritter's segment. Accrding to the closing credits, it's titled "Ransom," but fuck that - this is Florida Man: The Movie. See doughy Man of Action (and FL zero-budget legend) Joel Wynkoop shank a masked man holding a bazooka! See Wynkoop wander around the abandoned ruins of South Florida (played by some really shabby, run-down part of South Florida, so props to the location manager there) and have morose flashbacks to happier days! See the grafitti that screams WANNA PLAY TRUTH OR DARE? See the cannibal children chowing down on their own dad! See the bit that leads to the actual credit "SPECIAL APPEARANCE by: NATASHA the snake!" (The exclamation point is part of the credit, natch.) See Wynkoop almost drink worms! See the masked man return for a kung-fu battle! See Wynkoop get abducted by a Man in Black who fondles a silver mannequin, eats mystery meat from the neck of a severed head and threatens Wynkoop with the Meltdown Chamber! See the Man in Black tell Wynkoop, "I could have plucked your eyeballs out," right before chomping down on an eyeball! See Wynkoop sneer and snarl and kickbox and just generally do his thing! See the incredible bit where he's attacked by an alligator!

No, really, check this shit out, I can't do it justice:

What else is there to say? Amid the self-seriousness and poorly-mapped conspiracy nonsense, Ritter's overblown macho silliness is so, so welcome. The rest of the film can shrivel and blow away - "Ransom" justifies the myriad other sins this thing has. Sometimes, all you need is a little fun.

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.