• Directed by Daryl Carstensen
• Written by Ross Marshall and Daryl Christensen
• Starring
  • Ross Marshall
  • Stephanie Beaton
  • Mary Shelton
• Produced by Daryl Carstensen and Ross Marshall

I trust you enough to admit this to you (provided you won’t tell anyone else):

I was scared of this movie.

Why? Because the IMDb drew a line between some unnerving dots led to Bangers, a movie that shook my faith in the innate goodness of man and made me want to leave off movie reviewing in favor of a new hobby, like playing in traffic. Though the on-screen credits for Bangers blame that monstrosity on writer/director “Walter Webster,” the IMDb indicates that it was directed by Jeff Centauri and written by Daryl Carstensen… the latter of whom they also peg as the co-writer and director of Unnaturally Born Killer.

Once, a year ago, I watched the first ten minutes of this movie. That was all I could take. I pulled it from the VCR, tossed it on a shelf, and said, “There’s nothing mandating that I watch this dreck. I don’t have to. I have a list of over 11,000 movies I want to watch and review; I can let this one get lost in the shuffle. No one ever needs to know.”

But I would have known. There would always have been the memory of that movie, the one I couldn’t take, taunting me, casting doubt on my thick-skinned reviewer’s persona. Any time I condemned a movie as tripe, it would be there, saying, Sure, you’re tough when you’re working over some direct-to-video crank-’em-out… but you couldn’t deal with ME, could you, tough guy?

So finally I girded up my loins, fresh courage took, and sat down for over ninety minutes of pain.

Thus the reviewer’s Orphean descent begins.

But even going in, I despaired: Though I may yet make it through the experience, how could I tell about it? How could I write a review of something that drags the baseline definition of “feature film” down to the level of “videotape of stuff”? How could I describe what I saw, knowing the very act of composing a sentence would imply far more purpose and competence to the movie than was presented to me?

And finally I hit upon a workable solution: you will share the experience with me. I will not mediate it, except inasmuch as I don’t inflict the actual movie upon you. Read here the account of my watching, and know what I experienced.

9:13pm. The kids are in bed, the wife is watching the news and wishing me good luck from afar (she has absolutely no desire to watch this with me, nor would I allow someone I loved to lay eyeballs on it; this is a bullet I must catch alone). The tape is in the VCR. It’s rolling.

Footage of an atom bomb test. This is the last professionally shot film we will see for almost two hours; everything after this point was shot on video. I normally don’t have a problem with microbudgeters who use video instead of film, but there is a standard of bare adequacy in video quality which this movie lacks. People should not look green, nor blood look purple, thanks to your cheap camera, but we will be seeing plenty of both. Just to make the contrast immediate, we cut to footage of a bikini babe go-go dancing.

There is a man in a suit in a dimly lit studio; we eventually find out that his name is Walter (Ross Marshall, the co-writer and co-producer, and also — God help me — one of the stars of Bangers). He sits down to watch a projected film, in which a black woman with a machete comes toward the camera repeatedly. She chops at him. But then he’s chopping at her. Then he wakes up in bed, dressed in red bikini briefs, his hands covered in blood.

Then Walter is watching footage of himself waking up on a video monitor, while smoking a cigar and drinking heavily. Then he watches more footage of the bikini dancer. Her bikini changes several times as she dances. He falls asleep; she keeps on dancing. He wakes up. She’s still dancing.

Then we go to video footage which has been cheaply processed to look like an approximation of old silent film footage. In this footage, Walter gropes and humps a mannequin. Then there’s color footage of him throwing up, followed by him giving a half-hearted rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquiy and interrupting himself with drunken praise for Shakespeare, directed toward the mannequin, whose name is Pandora.

Even the mannequin looks disinterested.

9:25pm. For several seconds, Walter struggles to put on a blazer. Then he is Uncle Walt, with a mustache, telling a curly-headed brunette to tapdance. She does so, to music which doesn’t begin to match the rhythm of her steps. Walter becomes incensed that her bellybutton keeps showing, but the dancer gaily ignores his commands to cover it, until he grabs a machete and beheads her.

A blonde in a moose costume performs a magic trick, while Walter speaks like Boris Badenov and another brunette speaks like Natasha. Then Walter kills both the moose and Natasha.

9:30pm. Walter conducts an orchestral piece in an empty room. For several minutes. This is actually a welcome respite from the active idiocy up to now; this is only passive idiocy.

9:34pm. Back to the active idiocy. Walter argues on the phone with his distributor (only ever seen from the back, not that I blame him). The distributor complains about the footage Walter has sent him, which I think means that everything up this point has been a movie Walter was making. The distributor doesn’t care for Walter’s attempts at slapstick and vaudeville, or his pretensions to “art” — what the audience wants is “blood, gore and tits.” Walter half-heartedly agrees to deliver.

More footage of the black girl with the machete chopping at him; he wakes up in bed, next to the mannequin.

The next day: Stephanie Beaton walks into his hole-in-the-wall production studio; good golly, it’s a Bangers cast reunion! (If Kat Natividad walks through that door, I don’t care about my reputation as an iron-plated reviewer; I’m turning it off). Beaton is playing an airheaded actress who is never given a name; she’s apparently there in response to an audition call. He talks at length about how he likes to see imperfections in head shots instead of airbrushed sanitization, then he takes her in the back room for a photo shoot. She models at length in a variety of outfits, all shot in an annoying series of successive freezeframes.

9:42pm. I need a break; time to look for a snack. As longtime readers will recognize, I often go spelunking in the kitchen not when I’m hungry, but when I need an excuse to get away from what I’m watching for a while. I’m surprised I lasted this long.

9:46pm. Boy, there is nothing to snack on around here. Eventually I found a stack of graham crackers. Back to the movie.

The photo shoot in freezeframe is still going on. Occasionally, Walter stops snapping pictures long enough to slap Beaton around a little, but I guess since he doesn’t go overboard with it (there’s nothing like an immoderate abuser), she brushes it off and continues posing. Among the outfits are a couple of bikinis and a black mesh catsuit, and she has a nasty habit of wrapping herself in the Star-Spangled Banner. Desecration of the flag! Somebody call Orrin Hatch!

9:52pm. The world’s longest photo shoot is now over, and for some reason we’re now watching with Walter some footage of another woman stripping out of her underwear.

“Must… have… navel!”

Walter talks to his distributor again over the phone. “I have to say, I like the naked women,” says the distrib, but it’s still missing gore and suspense, and audiences really want to see naked women being butchered. “I’m tired of these boring conversations with you!” the distrib exclaims. Man, tell me about it.

9:56m. Beaton comes back for another photo shoot, and Walter gives her some drugged champagne. Next thing she knows, she’s chained from the ceiling in front of a movie camera. Walter snips her dress off with scissors, then hesitantly gropes her for minutes on end, while she whimpers at his every touch. Eventually he switches to bodypainting, and finally he stabs her through the heart. He lowers her corpse, carves her up with a switchblade, and then starts chewing on her entrails.

10:08pm.Walter drives Beaton’s body (or a really unconvincing facsimile thereof, wrapped up in a bedsheet) to a dumpster and dumps her.

Then, back at his place, he goes down to the basement… where he’s been keeping his wife in a cell, tormenting her. He brings her a mason jar of Beaton’s blood to drink, which she rejects, so he douses her with it, giggling and barking at her.

10:11pm. Time for another futile snack run.

10:16pm. After much searching, I managed to come up with the last slice of sandwich ham and a glass of milk with strawberry Nesquik in it. Back to the show.

Oh, goodie — a fat woman in a shower. That’s exactly what I wanted to come back to see. Walter enters and starts firing a rifle at her. Shooting and shooting and shooting, as she screams and screams and screams and spatters blood all over her shower. Oddly enough, being punctured by a dozen high-velocity projectiles doesn’t even cause her to stutter in her full-throated screams. Until she eventually dies.

10:19pm. Walter gets into a bathtub — not the fat woman’s shower, though — full of blood, with lumps of tissue floating in it. (I’ve got very little respect for the editing skills on display here, but I do have to express thanks that Walter’s doughy white butt was not paraded across my TV screen.) He then proceeds to scrub himself with a chunk of raw meat.

Then he makes another visit to the wife in the cage, tossing bits of flesh and blood at her.

Then there’s footage of him beating the crap out of — is that Stephanie Beaton again? Ah, who the hell cares? Whoever it is, he beats her with a crowbar until the room is spackled in her blood. Then he knifes open her gut (“The part of Stephanie Beaton’s midsection in tonight’s performance will be played, bizarrely, by some kind of large gourd or squash”), starts playing with her entrails, then sticks his face right into her torso and starts chewing. Then he rears back and vomits it all out again. Then he sticks his face back in and chews it all up a second time.

Missed a spot.

10:27pm. Walter showers up, dresses in women’s clothing, and puts on a blonde wig and blackface. Then it’s back downstairs to tell the wife that Walter doesn’t need her any more. He douses her in gasoline, strikes a match, and…

And then he’s watching footage of his wife burn.

10:30pm. The distributor loves it. “I wish I had your talent!” He can barely keep up with demand. He especially praises the special effects because, you know, it almost looks as if those girls are really getting chopped up. Walter takes the praise all in stride, then treats himself to a lengthy candlelight dinner of an oven-roasted human hand, with a mason jar of blood to wash it all down.

10:36pm. Look, I know it’s way too late to hold forth even a glimmer of hope for consideration for the audience, but any marginally sane person would have ended the movie right there. But no. Walter goes out on the town and ends up in a strip club, where a fat stripper (is that the same girl as was killed in the shower?) shakes her groove thang to polka and merengue. Aside from Walter and the sequin-jacketed MC, there are three other patrons, two of whom look to be about twelve years old.

10:41pm. With the fat chick’s shtick done, the MC announces that their next act is an audience member who wants to lipsync to an Al Jolson song. That would be Walter — but before he gets up on stage, he kills the MC! Then he kills the other adult audience member! And the two twelve-year-olds! Then he ties up the fat stripper, and then he starts his lipsync. Halfway through the song, he pulls out a big ol’ machete and chops her up. Then he keeps lipsyncing.

END, DAMN YOU! END!! END!!! But no. Next, he pulls out an old Annette Funicello LP and listens to a track while he sits in the club, drinking heavily and then puking all over himself for minutes on end.

10:49pm. Aaaaand we’re back to footage of the black chick with the machete. Walter’s directing her in a scene, and while she advances toward the camera, he blasts her with a shotgun loaded with blanks. Except it isn’t, and she falls dead.

Wait! Is this meant to be a flashback, a rudimentary attempt at an explanation of why Walter’s such a psychopath? I don’t know if I can trust my brain with that conclusion; that might just be the same mental faculty that allows us to see bunny rabbits in cumulus clouds, desperately trying to find some kind of pattern in otherwise incomprehensible crap.

10:52pm. Roll credits! Ding, dong, the witch is dead! I have my life back! I want to go shower with a Brillo pad, but at least the thrice-damned movie is done!

Now, I know that there is one question which this review simply has to try to answer, otherwise I’ll keep fielding it from readers, to wit:

Is this movie worse than Bangers?

Well, that’s put ME off beef for a week…

Well, at no point does this movie fill the screen with Kit Natividad’s doughy, pendulous mammaries. Nor does it feature Stephanie Beaton being raped repeatedly and at length. But on the other hand… I mean, Judas! You just read what I wrote, right? I feel like I need a four-hour hot shower with a Brillo pad.

Daryl Carstensen apparently has made a living in big-budget movies — as a xerox checker, often uncredited. Aside from Bangers and Unnaturally Born Killer, the only other flick on which he has a creative credit is as writer-director of 2003’s Attack of the Virgin Mummies.

Somehow, that title might find itself lost in the shuffle on the 11,000-title list.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 13
• breasts: 5 (or 7 if the fat stripper isn’t the same girl who got killed in the shower)
• explosions: 1 (the stock-footage atom bomb test)
• dream sequences: at least 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0