Runtime:
82 minutes
Directed
by: Mark Pirro
Starring:
John McCafferty, Robyn Blythe, Darwyn Carson, Beano
From:
Pirromount Productions
Here
is something incredibly obscure I found out earlier in the month from
a messageboard post. Someone had gotten the film from Netflix via
disc and it came with another unrelated film. That person said that
this was definitely low-budget but is good if you love tasteless
humor. All of this is true. I then looked for any clips of it on
YouTube and there was one in incredibly bad video quality but I still
saw something that literally made me laugh out loud. More on that
later.
On
a whim I decided to check out the online version of Epix, which is a
series of premium cable channels that some providers offer, but not
the one I have. They have some interesting things on there, and they
have a Drive-In channel which shows the type of films you'd expect on
a channel with the name and I would LOVE to have that. Anyhow, they
had this film so I decided to watch it. I'll have to talk about this
in a few days in a post where I don't review a film, but their online
streaming service (which I signed up for a free 14 day trial) is
God-awful and pitiful compared to Netflix and Hulu. Several times for
no reason when I tried to watch this, the stream would stop for no
reason and I'd have to go back and load it up again... it was
incredibly aggravating and I highly doubt I'll try to watch anything
else during my free trial.
As
for a description of this, let me “borrow” from IMDb: “Chuck
Toedan's the host of a gameshow featuring death row convicts
competeing in life-or-death contests in hopes of cheating the
executioner or, at the very least, winning some nice prizes for their
next of kin. Not surprisingly, Chuck has made more than a few
enemies, from outraged viewers trying to ban his show, to families of
losing contestants looking for revenge. A hitman hired by one such
family has shown up at Chuck's office, and he'll need to enlist the
help of his most outspoken critic to keep from ending up like most of
his contestants.”
As
I said already, the movie is filled with bad taste, as you can guess
from the plot description. It's real low-budget, so there isn't much
gore to speak of at all. To give you a taste of the type of humor
involved, the TV station is named KSIK, his female enemy (and obvious
Gloria Steinem parody) is named Gloria Sternvirgin, and the hostess
of the show is named Shanna Shallow.
But,
this scene (the one on YouTube) is darkly hilarious. An old man is
hooked up to an electric chair and there are sensors on his “wang
dang doodle.” If he gets excited while watching the hostess do a
dance known as THE DANCE OF THE SEVEN BONERS. She's in lingerie and
dances seductively around him, and she ends up taking off her bra.
There are several girls who go topless. This does not arouse the guy,
so he wins. But, the male host (who really does look like a gameshow
host) puts his hand on his shoulder while talking to him, and that
immediately produces a boner and he gets electrocuted! Yep, that's a
shining example of what to expect here.
Overall,
while I say that the first half of the movie is better than the
second (some really dumb things are done in the latter half which
brings things down), overall it is still worth a look, especially if
you enjoy that sort of humor. I understand Code Red is putting it out
on DVD in about 2 months time. And really, I think that most TV these
days is complete garbage, especially “reality” television, and
with the bottom-feeder crap on, is it so hard of a stretch to believe
that there really would be a program on which deals with death row
contestants competing to get pardoned? I say it's not as far-fetched
as it was 25 years ago. And this may have the potential to be a brutally on-point gory satire if remade by someone.
I'll
be back Saturday afternoon.
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