DOPER (1994)

  Director Jim Van bebber has made some great stuff over the years including an awesome short about Long Island killer Ricky Kasso. This short though is not quite up to the quality of that and is a pretty dull look at some stoned fellows in the 90s. Perhaps more entertaining if you're very high. 

THE MANSON FAMILY (2003)

 While this doesn't compare to the classic HELTER SKELTER TV movie in terms of clear storytelling and amazing performance by Steve Railsback as Charlie it does excel in it's sheer brutality and stream of consciousness narrative.  A film that took 15 years to complete and shows the famous deaths of some celebrity types in their most brutal and realistic fashion ever.  Of course the rest of the "reality" presented here is debatable but that seems besides the point as this works more as a collage of anarchic thoughts thrown together into a blender of artistic excess.  The "truth" of these events lost in an acid-trip to hell.  The death of the hippie ideals of the 60's and it's disgusting goth/industrial 90's descendants are all tied together in what is an awesome underground mind-fuck of a film experience. A film that holds no appeal for the masses of cattle that blissfully chew on their mass-produced garbage "entertainment" and is about as anti-Hollywood as you can find in this boredom-apocalypse known as the zeroes.  A zillion stab wounds, a dog gets it's throat slashed, hippies roll around in mud and have LSD-fueled orgies and this is interspersed with some weirdo kids in the 90's who are into sexual torture, bondage and watching Richard Kern films(good choice there!).  They end up gleefully assassinating a Geraldo Rivera-type and stomping a guy's head in who wears a Manson T-shirt.  Overall a fine film for the whole family and Jim Van Bebber remains one of the only directors worth paying attention to in the last 20 years.       

DEADBEAT AT DAWN (1988)

 Jim Van Bebber is probably one of my favorite American directors.  The man hasn't made a ton of movies but everything he has done is true underground transgressive cinema at it's best.  It also helps that his movies are almost all full of blood and gore which appeals to the horror ghouls out there.  Even this film, which is basically an action movie, features a finger bitten off, a throat ripped out, a woman beaten to bloody death with golf clubs and various other unsavory horrific elements.  It also appears to have been filmed in some post-holocaust garbage strewn hellhole.  If Dayton, Ohio is anything like it's depicted here I don't think I ever want to go there.  Almost all of the characters here, just like in real life, are all morally offensive.  Even our hero, played by Van Bebber, is a drug-dealing, gang-leader lowlife but compared to guys named Bonecrusher who spouts lines like "I hate people and I just don't fucking care!" he seems like a sweet guy.   In my book this is a great gritty masterpiece that will appeal to fans of classic exploitation.  The director/star does all his own stunts putting his body on the line for his art unlike most anyone making films today.  The only thing I can think of that tops it in that department is Hong Kong action cinema where those guys just about kill themselves for a stunt.  It's too bad Van Bebber wasn't making films 10 years earlier in this style when there were still plenty of places to show this stuff and he could have actually made some money and gone on to bigger budgets and more epic action and/or horror flicks.

 

MY SWEET SATAN (1994)

1980's Long Island was all about Amy Fisher and Ricky Kasso.  As a kid growing up in this boring suburban wasteland in the 80's Ricky Kasso was a big deal to me.  I can remember me and my best friend walking for miles just to go see the area where Ricky performed his Satanic murderous deed.  Of course we got tired, turned around halfway and never made it but I feel our hearts were in the right place.  This short film by one of my favorite directors, Jim Van Bebber, takes the story of Ricky adds a few 90's elements (white guys with weird braided/shaved hair, piercings and industrial music) and amps up the violence to make it more disturbing.  Eyes are popped out, piercings are pulled and much blood is spilled for Satan.  One of my all-time favorite short gore films although maybe that's just my Long Island nostalgia talking.