Death by Dialogue is easily one of the oddest horror/slasher films I have had the honor of seeing. I promise everything in this review is completely true.

A group of friends goes to visit one of their eccentric uncles, whose house is a veritable museum of items collected in his world travels. Before the guests arrive, the estate's handyman sneaks into a basement, extracts a script from a locked chest, and starts to read it. When he gets to the part of the script about his being fired, he loses his temper, and walks outside, where he is burned to death on the spot. Our group of friends discovers his remains. Meanwhile, the housekeeper is upset that the script is missing.

When the group settles in a bit, Laura Albert is having hot sex in the part, with her panties on, when she is suddenly blown through the front door of the hay loft and falls to her death. Her boyfriend is untouched, but not real happy, and runs outside to find a really bad 1980s big-hair metal band playing in the woods. Somehow, that kills him as well.

We then learn the history of the magical script. During his travels, the uncle was elected to the hall of fame of some reclusive Pre-Columbian tribe. When a reporter was overly persistent about taking their picture to accompany a story, they killed him, but his spirit caused them a whole bunch of grief, so they trapped his ashes in a magic urn, and sent him home with the unsuspecting uncle. One day the housekeeper was overzealous in her dusting, and let the spirit out of the urn. The spirit of the reporter immediately possessed the script of the movie being shot at the movie studio next door, and the cast started really dying. That is when the uncle trapped the script, originally called Victim, in the urn with the ashes. Now that the spirit and script are again free, the script is calling itself Victim 70, representing a total body count which includes the most recent three deaths.

That is nearly as far as I want to go in the plot description, other to say that the demon suddenly turns into a bald-headed guy with a big sword, and then two freaks on motorcycles. This prompts the best line of dialogue in the file, "Ya-Fuckin'-Hoo." The living then try to find some way to trap the evil spirit, but every time they try something, the spirit rewrites the script.

We have breasts from Laura Albert early in the film in the sex scene that precedes her death scene, and then again near the end when the other woman of the group of friends has a nightmare about her in which she is standing by a pool of water in a flowing white dress when her boyfriend drives up in a race car. She bares her breasts, then takes off his racing scarf, and calmly takes off his head with it. Ms. Albert has 55 credits at IMDb, the most recent being last year. It would not be surprising if you do not recognize her, since 40 of the credits are for stunt work. That isn't as odd as the fact that writer/director Tom DeWeir also earned 113 of his 125 film credits for stunt work. He directed only one other movie, something called Contra Conspiracy, which was also made in 1988.

I have no idea what, if anything, Tom and his crew were thinking when they made this one, and would love to hear their thoughts.  If ever a film cried out for a commentary, this is the one, but the DVD is bare bones. A small number of IMDb voters assign it a 2.6. That is either way too high, or a little low, depending on whether you feel it is appropriate to laugh at the work of the handicapped.