Director’s Cut (2003)

September 8, 2004

by Nathan Shumate

Produced and directed by Eric Stacey
Written by Brennon Jones and Eric Stacey
Starring
- Kathleen Taylor
- Molly Michelle
- David Hunter
- Cradeaux Alexander
- Joe Jeffrey

In the tradition of the broad, sweeping generalizations that you’ve come to expect from me, here’s a pontification on the state of the slasher movie: It’s dead. Not in the normal sense of the genre having burned out the audience, like the western or the musical did; no, slashers have managed to eat themselves. Thanks to the self-referential approach of Scream and every damned slasher movie thereafter, every new entry in the genre is not only supposed to touch all of the requisite bases, but to make a knowing nod to its forebearers at every turn. Not only does this sap most of the creativity possible in the genre, but it also leads to an oddly uneven tone, as respectful homage and willful cliche rub shoulders with honest attempts to engage and shock the audience.

Boy, I’ve seen movies that make me feel like that.

Director’s Cut has many things going for it, from a talented cast to a level of technical proficiency that belies its low budget. And there’s really the seed of a terrific idea in here. But for most of its running time, the movie can’t decide whether or not its tongue is in its cheek, and too often familiar cliches sit uncomfortably beside stabs at originality. The result is an uneven tone that eventually wears out the viewer’s patience and goodwill.

The opening scene is the most mean-spirited of the entire feature: A psychotic killer, hiding at the edges of the camera’s lens, holds the family of his psychiatrist captive around their immaculately-set dinner table, then forces the children to watch, with eyelids taped open, as he slaughters their parents in front of them. Granted, I don’t know if I could watch a movie which used this cruelty as its getting-to-know-you scene for more of the same, but it’s not an issue here; the movie that follows isn’t the movie that the opening scene promises.

Spam in an SUV.

We next meet our protagonists, in scenes which seem designed to display their petulant Gen-X selfishness as their defining character trait. Brittany (Kathleen Taylor) is off to Hollywood to be an actress, even if that means burning bridges with her mother (while appropriating Mom’s car). Her boyfriend, Mark (David Hunter), is a rocker with an attitude; his first lines are complaints that Brittany is late to pick him up for the roadtrip. And rounding out our quartet are Courtney (Molly Michelle) and Twiggy (Cradeaux Alexander), girlfriend/boyfriend who spend their time sniping at each other until Brittany shows up; then they can start bitching to a larger audience. I’ve rarely seen a movie which so quickly negates any sympathy the audience might feel for the slasher fodder.

The tone of their roadtrip (which is only from Bakersfield — can you imagine being stuck in a cross-country excursion with these people?) is set by radio bulletins of a murderous psycho on the loose. Which, really, is the biggest contribution that the opening scene makes to the movie: As the basis for the radio bulletins. Divided between rare compassion and the radio-fostered paranoia, they offer a ride to a dirty, bedraggled hitchhiker (Evan McNamara, whose character is credited as “Meth”), also on his way to Hollywood. Meth announces himself as a screenwriter, with a movie already in the works about a bunch of teens getting killed; but when the foursome catches a whiff of whatever he keeps in his knapsack, and sees how much he likes gouging holes in his arm with a screwdriver, they kick him out on his keister, in a sequence very proudly copied from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (And once you realize that the slayings in the first scene are standing in structurally for the graverobbings that started TCM, you can start watching for all of the other tips of the hat to TCM. They really aren’t hard to spot, nor were they intended to be.)

Yeah, sure, he looks safe.

Anyway. Brittany’s director, who pulled her audition tape out of the stack, is Cole Wilder (Joe Jeffrey), a horror auteur who’s something of a whackjob. The kids know this to a degree, as they bandy about the story that Wilder was forced to watch his parents be murdered in front of him when he was a kid (wait, that sounds vaguely familiar…). We, the audience, get an even greater introduction to him on the set of his latest slasher movie, and at the house which he is setting up for the”party” tonight, which is also a reality-style shoot, with cameras positioned in every room and a control room on the upper floor. Wilder’s producer Morris (Mark Hawkins) is leery about the setup, but hey — if you can’t trust a nutcase suffering from extreme childhood trauma, who can you trust?

Brittany and crew have to stop to ask directions to Wilder’s place when they get to Hollywood, and normall that’s the kind of detail I gloss over, except if your Chainsaw Homage-o-Meter is still running, you should see them talk to the bartender (Ike Gingrich, last seen around here in Aquanoids) and scream, “No! Don’t trust him! He’s the updated version of the storekeeper in TCM!” Once you do that, though, you’d feel pretty silly, because they’re characters in a movie; do you really think they can hear you?

“Is Fox the ONLY channel I can get?”

The party is where the foremost stabs at originality, at least for a slasher movie, come into play. Brittany and her friends try to blend in with the Hollywood crowd, giving much occasion for snipes at the contrivances of showbiz. Above it all (literally), Wilder watches the monitors and subtly manipulates his “players” for the benefit of the movie via his girl Friday, Katrina (Marian Zapico). He is, after all, the only one who really knows the plot, and he keeps nudging the “story” forward to create the reality-TV version of a slasher movie.

Unfortunately, it looks like he’s content to rely on the reality angle to be his main novelty, as everything else moves according to genre conventions. Courtney and David, each ignored by their hobnobbing significant other, decides to sneak upstairs and make whoopie; is there any better way to signal the beginning of the corpse pileup? Each is soon dispatched by Wilder wearing the metal mask of his movie killer, using various power tools. In contrast to the raw cruelty of the family murder that opens the movie, these killings are insulated from the audience’s emotions by their status as genre prerequisites; they’re exactly what you expect to happen in a drive-in slasher flick, after all. Like I said earlier, the opening murder scene doesn’t accurately describe the movie that follows it.

“But will you still respect me as an actress in the morning?”

Naturally, Brittany is “final girl,” and her attempts at escape lead her back to the bar, where the barkeep is revealed to be “Uncle Ed” to the gruesome little clan (along with the hitchhiker, who arrives thanks to hitching a ride and ditching most of the driver). However, Director’s Cut doesn’t go nearly as far in terrorizing its final girl as its inspiration does; it takes Brittany far too long to figure out that the gruesomeness around her isn’t just props and special FX, and then once she’s caught again by the barkeep, he loads her up with morphine, leaving her giggly and unconcerned. By the time the final chase arrives, this movie hasn’t built up near the head of steam that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had in tension and terror.

As I said, there are good ideas in here; I especially like the conceit of a Hollywood crowd so used to publicity stunts and outrageous facades that they don’t realize the very real danger they’re in. And Kathleen Taylor as Brittany brings enough of her native girl-next-door charm to an initially-unsympathetic character that, at the very least, we’re not pleading for Wilder to off her and be done with it. But on the whole, the movie never gels; it can’t decide if it’s a black comedy, a spoof, or an honest-to-goodness horror film.