31 Days of Horror 2025 Day 27 Woodchipper Massacre

 

TITLE-Woodchipper Massacre

SOURCE-Vinger Syndrome Blu ray

I heard about this SOV horror/comedy for years. Never saw the VHS for rent anyplace. Then got a rip of that tape. A low res Mpeg file that was 400 megs maybe. Tried to watch it but the compression made that vhs rip look horrid.

Then earlier this year was gifted two of Terrorvisions 3 blu rays for X amount blind boxes. After watched two other films put this on.

Take Dont Tell Mom the Babysitter is dead and add a woodchipper. Then make the budget about what was spent on 2 days of catering on the DTMTBID set and you got Woodchipper Massacre.

If you have no affinity for Shot on Video films skip this. It is a major time capsule of a short period of time where stuff like this could get on many video store shelves. Plus build a big enough following to get not only a loaded dvd release and this LOADED with extras Blu ray  release. Lots of Commentaries and BTS features.

Woodchipper Massacre gets a C+

31 Days of Horror 2022 Day 14 Mail Order Murder the Story of WAVE Productions

 

TITLE-Mail Order Murder The Story of WAVE Productions

SOURCE-Saturns Core Blu Ray

Back in the late 90s I discovered all the great genre mags. Stuff like Cult Movies,Video Watchdog,Videoscope and Alternative Cinema. In AC I started seeing 1 and 2 page ads for WAVE Studios. This was a small low budget production company. Most of their films were custom order stuff. Like you would mail in your idea for a film. And WAVE would tell you how much it would cost to make. And once the film was made you got a copy and WAVE had the rights to sell the film.

Which this lead to lots of oddball fetish films being made. Lots of movies of women being strangled. Or women drowning in quicksand.

I would look at these ads and see 1 or 2 films that sounded worth seeing,I clearly remember there being 2 or 3 films WAVE made that starred 2 super heroines vs cannibals. But it was 25 bucks plus shipping for what was at most a 70 minute movie. Nah ain't gonna drop that kind of cash on a low budget SOV horror/fetish film.

After most of the genre mags I mentioned died off in the early 2000s I forgot about WAVE. Then one day I saw a press release for Mail Order Murder and rushed to order a copy.

The Blu Ray includes the documentary,that goes indepth on WAVE,their cast of regulars and all kinds of great back stories. Plus you get a WAVE anthology film.  And my favorite feature on the Blu ray is the commentary. So much info is in this commentary.

Ever since I was about 10 and learned about a group of pre-teen a few towns over filming their own recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark I have had a interest in low budget cinema. And this documentary helped me understand just what all goes into making a film,even if that film has a budget of 1k.

Mail Order Murder The Story of WAVE Productions gets a A.

31 Days of Horror 2020 Day 22 Blinded by the Blood

 

TITLE-Blinded by the Blood

SOURCE-Sub Rosa Studios double feature DVD

Near the beginning of this year I found out that a local pawn shop was trying to clear out a huge overstock of DVDs and Blu rays. Normally they were wanting 2 bucks a DVD or 13 for 20 bucks. Blu Rays were 4 bucks each or 5 for 20. But now that they had/have way way too many it is 1 for dvd,or 25 for 20 bucks. Blus are 3 bucks or 8 for 20. Armed with this knowledge I started browsing the 3 shelfs and two tables full of home media formats.

The above pictured DVD was almost skipped over.I saw the back cover first.

And as you can see,sorry for the reflections in the pic,the back cover makes this look like one of the hundreds of double feature horror dvds out there. You know the ones that have two battered VHS rips of Public Domain Horror movies. Movies that pretty much every hardcore horror fan already owns 4 or 6 times on DVD. So I just put the DVD back on the shelf. Then something in my head said "Wait Alone in a Haunted House isn't a PD title I have heard of" I grabbed the dvd read the back and after seeing that Blinded by the Blood was a documentary on the making of a low budget horror film I placed this double feature DVD into the ever growing "buy" pile.

Since I was young and got my first issue of Starlog and Fangoria on the same day,THANK YOU UNCLE MILTON!. I have loved learning about how movies are made. From the filming process to how the FX work is done. Which means I will watch/buy pretty much any documentary on the production of a horror film.

It wasn't until I got home and was dividing my media haul into piles,one pile is for me another is to be resold another is for friends etc,I saw the name Tim Ritter and figured out what I had found was a Sub Rosa Studios release.Sub Rosa Studios has been around for a long time now. They release lots of DTV horror and cult movies.And Killing Spree is by one of the best known directors Sub Rosa Studios has worked with,Tim Ritter.Blinded by the Blood is a making of Killing Spree that Sub Rosa Studios started selling after Killing Spree had become a cult classic of the Shot on Video sub genre. The above picture is the VHS release cover of Blinded by the Blood.

Sure the VHS cover says Hosted by Tim Ritter but we all see who has the biggest pic on the cover. The lovely and uber talented Debbie Rochon. By the time Blinded by the Blood was made Debbie was one of the best known B Movie stars and one of the few Scream Queens of the era who was a true Scream Queen. And not some lady who did one horror movie and then used the Scream Queen tag to bilk lonely geeks at cons out of money.

So the film opens with Debbie walking around in a rural area telling us how we are about to see footage shot during the filming of Killing Spree. And explaining that even with almost no money Tim Ritter managed to make a horror film that became a cult hit world wide.

Blinded by the Blood is a lot like the various making of "insert film title" documentaries Troma has made. Cause Blinded by the Blood doesn't cut out stuff that makes Tim look bad. They don't try to cover up that mistakes happened. Who ever was in charge of editing the final cut of Blinded by the Blood did a good job of just showing us what happened during the filming of Killing Spree. Really in the entire film the only part that is a bit biased is the introduction by Debbie Rochon. And hell she was getting paid by Tim to come talk about his film,and I have heard that Debbie and Tim are close friends. So of course her intro will be a bit biased.

Tim Ritter went on to make quite a few movies. Most of them low budget horror/gore movies. Some of the better known ones are from the Truth or Dare series. I have seen Truth or Dare 1 and 3. 

I was pretty impressed by how good the gore FX looked in Killing Spree. Seeing what little they had to work with,money and equipment wise,it is amazing how good the effects look.

Blinded by Blood gets a B.

31 Days of Horror 2016 Day 16 Splatter Farm(DVD edition)

Title-Splatter Farm
Source-Camp Motion Picutres DVD

After having heard about this movie for years I finally saw it a few years back. An Aunt got me the dvd for x-mas. Didn't realize until I watched it with the director's commentary that the DVD version is missing scenes that were in the hard to find VHS release. The Polinia Brothers claim the VHS release was a rough cut. Plus they didn't have permission of some of the people in the cut scenes.

Shot on VHS back in the late 80s,Splatter Farm was a film that I heard so much talk about when I doubt most of my friends had even seen it. Released by Donna Michelle video the vhs was hard to find back then and now if you do find a copy it cost close to 100 bucks for the vhs.

As far as the DVD it is easy to get cheap. And loaded down with more than enough extras to make up for getting a slightly different edit of the film. Not only is there the previously mentioned directors commentary. But also right at an hour of their short films,which have an optional director's commentary. And a featurette where the two brothers travel back to where they filmed Splatter Farm.

The movie...well it is OK for what it is. Which is a low budget shoot on video movie that was made by two brothers in their teens with an off the shelf VHS camcorder. Some of the gore effects are pretty good. And it is barely over an hour long.

Splatter Farm(DVD edition) gets an C+.