A Night to Dismember (1983)

Review by schizombie

A Night to Dismember
Written by: Judith J. Kushner
Directed by: Doris Wishman
Featuring: Samantha Fox, Diane Cummins, William Szarka, Saul & Miriam Meth, and others
1983
USA
Juri Productions, Inc.

The late Doris Wishman is famous for having been an exploitation director, of such movies as Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965) and Double Agent 73 (1974), starring Chesty Morgan - the title comes from her measurements, 73FF-32-36 according to the Internet Movie Database. She directed a few horror movies, and until she started directing again a few years before her death in 2002, her last film for many years was A Night to Dismember (1983)..."

A Night to Dismember is narrated by a detective, Tim O'Malley. He first tells us of Phineas Kent, a widower whose daughter Susan killed her sister Bonnie in a bathtub, then accidently fell on her axe, dying herself. The detective gets a call from Phineas' brother Broderick Kent, who find his wife Lola dead, but then confesses to hiring an ex-con to have killed her, and then Broderick hangs himself.

Adam Kent, the eldest of the three brothers, had his daughter Vicki (porn star Samantha Fox, not the 1980s singer) committed to a hospital for the criminally insane after she killed two young men in August 1981 with an axe. Five years later, she's released, to the dismay of her brother Billy and sister Mary.

In the promotional trailer for the movie, narrated by a man in a cemetery, he tells us that in the movie Mary Kent, the Kent's only daughter kills a bunch of people. Later, Vicki Monroe and her family movie into the Kent's home. Wishman said she usually created trailers before she shot her movie. Some of the footage in the trailer is in the movie, but it seemed to me some of it was not.

To step outside the events of the film for a moment, evidently, a disgruntled employee at the film lab destroyed about 40% of Wishman's footage (and other people's negatives as well, but what films those might have been, I don't know). Thus she was left with no more than 60% of the original film plus outtakes, with no money for reshoots. The film was done on a rather low budget, with some scenes shot in and around Wishman's own home.

She took about eight months to try to create a new script that would make sense of what she had left. She also stuck in some brief outtakes from some of her other movies. I don't know if Vicki Monroe became Vicki Kent before she had started shooting the film, or if that happened as a result of the sabotage. Or maybe Vicki Monroe became Vicki Todd, a character named in the end credits, but I'm not sure who that was in the movie.

Why, if Wishman was in need of footage, there would be footage in the trailer that's not in the film, I'm not sure. Perhaps she couldn't find a way to have it fit the new script. On the commentary track, she also mentions that she has lots of other outtakes, which she thought she could use for another movie (she never made it) she'd call
Axe of Violence. Evidently she'd been talking about doing Axe of Violence since 1988; I'm not sure when the commentary track was recorded.

To get back to the movie, Billy and Mary want their sister back in the asylum. They try to "gaslight" her, secretly spooking her by various means, and she's already in a pretty unstable state. She does catch on to some extent to what they're trying to do... and then there are a bunch more murders.

Now, that plot may sound vaguely coherent, but watching the movie, I found it quite hard to follow. The constant narration by the detective, and the almost total lack of any dialogue spoken by the characters makes it pretty odd. If I understood the commentary track correctly, they did shoot without sound. They probably meant to add the sound later, but whether they originally intended the movie to be narrated by the detective, I'm not sure. One is reminded of the movie The Creeping Terror (1964) which ended up being narrated in post-production, because the sound equipment was accidentally dropped in a lake. Other cheap movies like The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979) relied upon narration, and I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998) did so probably in imitation of films like these.

Other films, coherent in themselves, had narration after they were completed for various reasons (sometimes years or decades later), such as Häxan (1922), Dementia (1955), and Blade Runner (1982). A Night to Dismember is different from all of these in that it would be completely unintelligible without the narration!

The DVD's commentary track features Wishman and her frequent cinematographer C. Davis "Chuck" Smith. It is quite funny, as they often rib each other, and is arguably more enjoyable than the movie. The movie, incoherent as it is, is still fairly entertaining. As a disaster, it is better than many of those bad films which came out the way they were supposed to, which are merely incompetent and often boring.