Creep Creepersin's Frankenstein + Horno
(2009/MVD DVDs)
Picture:
D Sound: D
Extras: D Features: D
Here we
have Creep Creepersin's Frankenstein,
a movie that uses Mary Shelly's story as more of a springboard, rather than
adapting it in a straightforward fashion. It stars James Porter as the seemingly
mentally disabled Victor, a man haunted by images of his dead, but still
scolding mother. His few sources of
comfort come from late night airings of classic horror films, and his sole
friend - a pet rat named Frankenstein. Victor never really manages to bring a dead
body back to life in this story, only doing so in his mind... but even his
“creation” begins to taunt him; eventually taking turns with his mother in
berating him for his shortcomings.
This was
shot hurriedly over the course of a couple days, and believe me, it shows. There is a ton of stock footage from the
public domain featured prominently, and almost all of the setups in the movie
are framed as long shots so no repositioning of the camera would be necessary. Other telling signs are title sequence being
stretched out to a whole five minutes in order to pad the runtime to “feature”
length. A better decision would have
been to cut it down to be a short film of decent length, which it actually is. (With the beginning and end credits removed,
the movie only lasts about 45 minutes.)
Whatever
issues I may have with Creep
Creepersin's Frankenstein, it is a movie with at least a kernel of an idea
hidden away within it. The same cannot
be said of Horno, which is a truly
abysmal picture. Despite being
advertised as something shocking, as well as implying that there will be a fair
amount of nudity contained within (the title is a not so clever combination of
horror and porno, if that was not already obvious), it is simply boring and a
chore to sit through.
While it
starts off with a rather short and unpleasant soft core sex scene, that's about
it for nudity in this picture. From
there we follow a porn director bent on making his opus – a movie that would
bring together the separate worlds of sex and zombies. He pursues this it as though it is an original
concept, but other backyard movie-makers have been capitalizing on this idea
for a while now, though to no better results. This feature also runs no more than an hour in
length, and it would seem that in both instances the filmmakers struggled to
fill out their stories for even that long.
Picture
and sound shouldn't even be mentioned out of kindness. The image on both movies looks to have been
shot on a home camcorder, which is also the likely source of the audio as well.
Both are presented in 1.33:1 full frame, and in vaguely stereo sound. The only extra feature included is on Frankenstein, where the filmmakers
provide a behind the scenes featurette that looks even less professional than
the feature does.
Filmmaking
ventures as ill-conceived as these shouldn't even be raking in enough suckers
to bother screening in somebody's basement - let alone actually getting
distribution. That they were actually
produced on anything more than a DVD-R is baffling. Skip these discs, and don't look back.
- David Milchick
