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.

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.