• Produced and directed by Howard Winters
• Written by Anne Wolff
• Starring
  • David John
  • Brad Friedman
  • Ruth Collins
  • Jason Stein

Umm.

When a street thug gets his (admittedly juvenile) artwork laughed at in a sleazy employment agency, he and two cohorts with varying levels of sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies terrorize everyone on that floor of the office building, brutally raping and killing with subhuman abandon.

Is it truly a B-movie? I don’t know. It was definitely low-budget, and an independent production, and it was chock full of sex and violence… But it wasn’t “entertaining” in the common sense of the word. “Nauseating” and “cruel” are the words I would choose instead, not of the filmmaker per se, but of the dead-on characters about whom he chose to make a film.

Really, this was a character study, mostly of the leader of the thugs, “Goose,” with his intense issues with his mother and his twitchy, bipolar mannerisms. Plot wasn’t much of an issue, which kept it from really being hackneyed; even the Vietnam vet janitor, who ostensibly “saves the day,” doesn’t keep anyone from getting killed; he only makes it out alive.

Good performances all around (except for the police detectives)…

Hell, I’m dancing around the issue. This movie was damned disturbing, and it was meant to be. The sociopathic thugs are both monstrous and very recognizably human; there are people like Goose and his friends running around the world, people who seem to have been born without souls. The greed and lust for power which are the normal b-movie bad-guy motivations are clean and fun and easily understandable, but the raw need to inflict pain that these sociopaths exhibited was something alien and shocking. And yet they were written and performed so well that I couldn’t help but be captivated by them against my will — the “fascination of the abomination,” so to speak.

While I applaud the performance of “Goose,” I feel sorry for the poor actor who had to subsume himself in such a vile character for the entire production, and I stand in awe of the writer and the director who could immerse himself in such unvarnished brutality for an even longer length of time.

Very much worth seeing, so long as you know what to expect and don’t get clubbed out of the blue like I did.

Some Notable Totables:

(for the unrated director’s cut)

• body count: 17
• breasts: 6
• explosions: 5 (all in stock footage from Vietnam)
• Marilyn Monroe impressions: 1
• Marilyn Manson impression2: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Scott Thompson Baker, “Officer Adler”, appeared on an episode of DS9 in 1998