Sperhauk NetFlix'd a copy of Chainsaw Sally. He was hopin' that the dvd company Shock-O-Rama Cinema might have picked another good movie to market. They carry many Brett Piper films; some of which we have watched on Friday Night Movie night and enjoyed. Piper's a better low budget film maker than Chainsaw Sally writer and director JimmyO and that's by a long shot. Not sure why the credit in CS is to JimmyO but it's really Jimmy Burril, who's also married to CS star April Monique Burril. She plays Sally, the bookish librarian by day, murderer by night. She's not much of an actress and her librarian clothes just don't seem to fit well. Jimmy has directed some other 'direct to video' releases but I can't imagine I am going to bother to look for them. Bad enough we stumble onto these movie messes from time to time and are fooled by the comments on websites and pretty good dvd cover art. There's nothing as cool in the movie as that picture on the dvd. I guess the lesson is to hire a good dvd designer to make your piece of shit movie seem better. The movie gets a 4.7 on the IMDb with 337 votes. What! That's got to be skewed. If 5 is an average movie in a scale from 1 to 10 then this is not an average movie. It is way below 4.7 If you look at the voting stats 22% or 74 of them were 10's. There's got to be some ringers there.
It's a pretty typical story, and that's not even a complaint, there aren't that many different plots, the story is all in the details. This is a crazy person murderin' people plot, if you had to think about such things, and I was. The main plot line is the crazy librarian murdering people, sometimes with a chainsaw, for minor offences. Pretty straight forward, huh. How are the details? There's a subplot about a developer who wants to built a big office, condo, and shopping complex. He'd like the piece of property that lies between the two bits he already owns. The owner of that property comes to town and deals with the developer's lawyer. She's kind of slutty. The piece of property contains the house that the crazy librarian grew up in. It was in that house, as a young girl, that she had the trouble, that addled her pate. Her dad, Gunnar "Leatherface" Hanson, is shot, in a flashback, when three crazies from the local nuthouse come calling. Gunnar lies dying, the crazies rape mom, the kids look on. Gunnar rallies and kills the three crazy guys with a chainsaw. You'd have to be crazy not to hear that chainsaw coming. Gunnar tells his daughter he's sorry to have killed those guys but they were bad men and they did deserve it. He tells her to look after her little brother and protect the family. He dies and the girl grows up. She's really fuckin' crazy, and a librarian.
The story is unclear on what happened between the murders and the current time but the girl and her brother aren't living in the house anymore. They live in a crappy house, The brother is crazier than his sister and that's saying something. She's changed her name and no one knows who she is. I which I didn't. Even though she's 'chainsaw' Sally there aren't many murders with a chainsaw. You notice that sort of stuff when you're bored. In the first murder our librarian sticks the sharp end of a pointy message holder in a guy's ear for talking too loud. Well, he was a prick of a guy. I wouldn't miss him. Neither do the stupid cops, poorly acted with crappy accents, who have insanely stupid dialog. The movie is supposed to be set in a small town in Texas but it was made in Maryland and the accents are terrible. That's ok, it goes along with the terrible acting. We started yakkin' and complainin' about the crappy movie pretty soon, there was even talk of shuttin' it off, but we stuck it out to the end. That 83 minutes seemed like a couple of hours at the 60 minute mark. We were like a group of people who have just seen some embarrassing thing. We're trying to look around and politely not say anything. Well, not so politely not saying anything. I don't mind having something to complain about, I have blog posts to fill up, and there was plenty. Bad lighting, bad photography, bad sound, bad editing, I could go on. One nice thing. Gore legend Hershell Gordon Lewis has a small part in the movie playing the happy hardware clerk who sells the librarian some tools. He was really one of the high points in the movie and it wasn't that great. Herschell has something to do with a Chainsaw Sally Show. There's a poster above. I can't recommend the movie to anyone really and I can't imagine I want to watch the tv show.
For our second feature we watched Vibes, the Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Lauper movie that I watched for Science Fiction Sunday, and blogged about, on Jan 9, 2011. The widescreen dvd sure looked nicer than the pan and scan vhs version I had. I enjoyed it again, even after 3 weeks and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes a nice light breezy romantic comedy with the occasional murder. The writers were Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. It's fun to say their names, isn't it? They make fun movies. I bet you've seen some of them. I know I have and I've liked several of them enough to want to get on dvd.
Comments