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.

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.