To celebrate spooky season, “From the Vault” will be featuring horror films throughout October, from slashers to ghost stories and other spooky fright stories.
I love movies that take place in movie theaters. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked in two theaters, but there’s something about movies set in movie theaters that evokes a sense of not so much nostalgia, but more like stepping into a baseball stadium. There is. It feels like coming home.
Rick Sloan’s 1984 blood theater It’s a tribute to the underpaid and overworked labor of working in the theater. It’s also a low-budget, horrifyingly bad horror movie. Sloan is a director known for: mystery science theater 3000 Fans as Directors of Notorious Movies hobgoblin. But beyond that, he is known for: vice academy The series is a series of softcore comedies starring adult film actresses.
he did too Babe Watch: Forbidden Parody. As you might have guessed, this is a movie about a low-budget softcore parody that tried to poke fun at ’90s TV hits. However, as in 2017, Sloan beiuMan, I never understood how difficult it is to make fun of a show like this. baywatch Because it has never taken itself that seriously. The only no-no in a Thrawn parody is runtime.
But anyway, blood theaterSloane’s debut film has been labeled by many as “incompetent” and “one of the worst movies ever made.” blood theateralso known as movie theater massacren.Very good. It’s not Sloan’s most incompetent film. That honor is Babe Watch: Forbidden Parody If the patient is wondering. It’s not even the worst movie I’ve ever seen.
However, I’ll be the first to admit that my journey through the flimsy trash available on Tubi may have left my cinematic compass slightly skewed. Still, it must be said that blood theaterDirected, written, edited, produced and scored by Sloan, this is one of his better works. That’s not good. Good, don’t get that idea. But there’s a kind of spark of inspiration that isn’t present in his other works.
The plot, as it is, is that Spotlight Theater owner Dean Murdock (Rob Roy Fletcher) buys an abandoned theater and a group of teenagers (I think they’re teenagers…I’m not sure) ) The story revolves around getting the place cleaned. It opened by the weekend. This is a difficult task considering that it is not originally a movie theater. Not to mention the fact that the theater was closed because the last owner grabbed his girlfriend with another guy and started a fire, leaving everyone in the theater trapped and dead. But it wasn’t until the crazy manager, played by David Milburn, murdered the poor girl who worked at the ticket office.
Three employees, Adrian (Andrew Coffin), Jennifer (Jenny Cunningham), and Malcolm (Daniel Schaefer), begin to handle the strange happenings at the theater with shocking disrespect. There’s also a subplot involving two girls (Selena Joanna Fox) and Darcy (Stephanie Dillard), who exist to fill up the runtime, cause drama between the characters, and increase the body count. The ages of the characters are a puzzling mystery, and although they appear to be young adults, shots of them at local schools could be either a college campus or a high school campus. The actions of the characters are debatable.
Credit where credit is due. Teenagers, young adults, whatever, they’re not just some horny teenagers waiting to be killed. They are lazy, belligerent, and indifferent to the horrors around them. But they’re not just walking horndogs waiting to become the cornerstone of a genre mill.
One of the many mysteries, blood theaterin addition to the age of the characters, is exactly why this is happening. Sloan’s screenplay rides on a rail of absurdity, befitting the slasher genre, but fails to keep it from falling into an imperceptible pit of narrative miasma.
For example, we see a pale-faced older version of the murderous manager played by Jonathan Blakely. But as the story begins to unfold, like a VHS tape stuck in a VCR player, you wonder if the owner of the old nameless version is real, a ghost, a zombie, or a paranormal avatar? becomes difficult to distinguish. Something that the theater itself sends out.
In many ways, blood theater Reminds me of Renato Porcelli monster of the opera (alias of vampire at the opera). monster of the opera is a low-budget Italian film about a haunted theater that is more dreamlike and erotic than Sloan had imagined. But still, beneath Sloan’s work is layered the same kind of dreamlike horror that recalls Porcelli’s more successful endeavors.
the only thing blood theater The legendary Mary Woronoff’s “Miss Blackwell” has been attracting attention around Porcelli’s film. She’s Murdoch’s long-suffering, sometimes accomplice-slash-Greek chorus. Woronov is a Dick Miller-type actor, and when you see him in the movie he smiles as if he’s meeting an old friend. Even if the movie isn’t all that rich, no movie is as poor in terms of her appearance. Here, Sloan and his cameraman, legendary independent filmmaker Bill Fishman, have fun capturing her legs as she walks around in heels while grinning wickedly and slyly and mugging for the camera. It looks like it is.
If it seems like I haven’t talked much about this movie, it’s because what happens has little to no importance. attractive aspects of blood theater It’s not a story, it’s not even a horror, but neither works on any level. But what really works is the community theater appeal that Sloan has managed to create.
his debut feature, blood theater This film shows the potential of a director with a broad sense of slapstick humor, without worrying about taste or political correctness. Movies shown at Spotlight Theaters have the following names: hollywood clown whore, chainsaw chick, amputee prostitute,others. These titles are not parodies, but rather short films that Sloan made during film school.
At one point, Sloan even found a way to show the movie’s trailer. Hollywood clown whore. The trailer shows sex workers wearing clown makeup and big funny hats slamming banana cream pies into the faces of passersby. I can’t lie, I laughed. I have always been, and always will be, a big fan of pie in the face.
Beneath the drawn-out storytelling, drawn-out production, and miscalculated pacing, there’s a beating heart. blood theater This is an honest love letter to the movie theaters that existed before multiplexes, those that seemed to operate on a wing and a prayer and exploitation, but whose dark rooms held magic.
The way Fishman and Sloan capture the hectic atmosphere of operating a reel-to-reel projector and working the concession stand on opening night stems from real, familiar places. Although Sloane cannot effectively dramatize this to save her own life, she does have a firm grasp of the emotions of this moment.
still, blood theater That’s also laughably bad. blood theater It ends in slow motion and transitions to a freeze frame. However, the process was so clumsy that I thought my computer would freeze. I rewound it several times before I realized it was intentional. I know I may sound like a broken person, but it’s the kind of eternal mess that makes me want to press play immediately.
But sometimes inspiration can strike in the strangest of places. Jennifer has nightmares about a haunted theater and imagines herself trapped in a popcorn machine. Sloan and Fishman project Crabgum inside a popcorn machine surrounded by pitch black, giving the image a surreal, nightmarish quality. Little moments like this, or when the office door opens to reveal a bright white light, and the door seems to connect to another dimension. blood theater Crackling with possibility. None of these have been confiscated, but that’s part of the charm.
blood theater, For all its faults, it feels like I’ve been shot in the heart. Despite its many technical flaws, I can’t help but love this poorly written love letter to local movie theaters.
Image courtesy of Moore Video, Retromedia Entertainment, Active Home Video
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