Malefic (2003) from Tuna and Cremains (2000) from Mr Dark

Tuna's comments on Malefic:

Malefic (2003) is half of a two disk self-proclaimed B Movie Theater Drive-In Double Feature. Where do I begin? Hmmm, how about at the beginning. A young couple is parked, hears noises, and decides to go into a cabin. She gets very naked, then he goes outside to check on some noise and is eaten, she naturally goes outside to feed herself to whatever ate him.

Oops, this wasn't a good way to start, as this has nothing to do with the story.

I'll try again. Our narrator (a female dominatrix) and three of her friends are driving down a country road. Seems they are on their way to a country cabin to perpetrate the rest of a crime. Part one was exhuming the body of a recently deceased baby. Part two will be holding the casket for ransom. When they make the call to the bereaved father, who actually killed the baby but had friends in the coroners office, Dawn Duburger is in his bed. She takes off her top to get dressed and leave after hearing the phone call, so he strangles her before his wife gets home.

Damn, that really doesn't have much to do with the film either.

OK, these four people are hanging out in a cabin working on this really bizarre blackmail thing, and use an Ouija board to summon up a paper mache catfish head (left) that devours them all. Yup, that's what the plot is.


The entire thing is grainy black and white, lit with flashlights and hand held 100 Watt lightbulbs in aluminum utility reflectors. Voice-over portions of the sound are OK, but I found the bad human imitations of bird calls a little distracting. In case you hadn't already figured it out, this is a clear F. I will say, that if the filmmaker can build up a large body of work this bad, he might achieve an Ed Wood  type of fame.

Mr Dark's comments on Cremains:

Enjoyed the commentary on Malefic. I caught the name of the shapely Miss DuVerger as familiar, sure enough it was the exceptionally hot vampire chick from a little slice of cinematic excrement called Cremains. As I suspected, Cremains comes from the same talentless schmuck as Malefic, a fellow named Steve Sessions.

I rented Cremains from Netflix awhile back because I'd read some site that actually recommended it as a smart, low-budget anthology with lots of gore and violence. It's an anthology. That's about the only accurate statement in that description.

In a nutshell, you have a crooked funeral home director being interviews in a '3rd degree' type situation by an offscreen male and female, bright light shining in his face. Apparently he's been burning folks in the crematory two at a time to save costs.  During this questioning he tells some tales he's heard. This is the anthology part. The problem is, this chucklehead couldn't even come up with 15 decent minutes of story  at a time, nevertheless four or five different tales. The acting is atrocious, the film making is bizarre in just how perfectly awful it
is...it's just an MST3K wet dream. I can only imagine how bad Malefic is, considering it's over an hour of one story. At least with Cremains, the boring stretches of DVD hell only last for 10-15 minutes at a time.

I've said all that to say this: ONE segment of Cremains was passable. It featured a woman whose friend had recently been having dreams of being visited by a lesbian vampire, as written in a novel the woman enjoyed.  Eventually, she's found dead, blood drained. The woman starts having similar dreams, but with her dead friend being the lesbian vampire. She investigates the author, coming up empty, but in her hotel  that night the dead lesbian vampire friend visits again and this time our heroine doesn't survive the encounter.

The lesbian vampire friend is played by the curvy Dawn DuVerger from Malefic. She shows up in a completely see-through nighty thing, but that's quickly doffed.  Before long, she's snogging away at the neck of her friend, naked as a jaybird.  The scene actually manages to generate a little heat before the friend snaps out of it and tries to escape. Then there's lots more naked Dawn, this time covered in her friend's blood, as they have a little tussle ending in our heroine's demise.

The interesting thing here isn't so much this sequence, even though the nudity is fairly hot.  There's a 'making of' this scene on the DVD and it's every square inch of footage shot with the naked Dawn DuVerger.  Well, every square inch they can put on DVD.  You see, the scene is filmed in a hotel room. The heroine is played by the director's wife/girlfriend/whatever.  There are several interesting cuts in this  'making of' section, where clothes suddenly disappear, bedsheets are suddenly tussled...I get the sneaking suspicion that this scene went places that didn't wind up on the cutting room floor, but rather in the director's private collection.
 

Anyway, just wanted to say that Cremains is just as terrible as Malefic sounds, or worse, but damn...there is a LOT of yummy naked lesbo vamping going on in the film and especially that 'making of' feature.  I'd rather have my balls sheared off by a weed whacker than watch Cremains ever, ever again, but it might make for an interesting project if one of you gents is  up for some Steve Sessions pain.  (One also wonders if his other three or four films feature the same formula of nudity and terrible film making?)