Review of A Night to Dismember

This movie is a special kind of bad. There are bad movies and then there are Doris Wishman bad movies. Wishman had a uniquely off-kilter style and sensibility which gave her remarkably rotten celluloid abominations a distinctive identity that was wholly her own. Wishman's trademark singular ineptitude permeates every last fabulously fumbled frame of this faltering attempt at a slasher horror picture: plodding all-thumbs (mis)direction, a meandering ramshackle narrative, badly post-synced and recorded dialogue, bizarre lingering close-ups of people's feet, ridiculous sub-Jack Webbian "Dragnet"-style hard-boiled narration, chintzy cut-rate gore (the severed head that gets tossed in a fireplace is hilariously hokey!), a decent smidgen of gratuitous female nudity and soft-core sex, dreadful acting from a lame no-name cast (porn actress Samantha Fox in particular totally hams it up as the fragile and troubled Vicki), grating, redundant, and often inappropriate music, rough, grainy, shaky cinematography by frequent collaborator C. Davis Smith, choppy editing, tacky psychedelic visual flourishes, the ubiquitous false cat scare cliché, labored use of slow motion, clumsily executed murder set pieces, an absurd impromptu dance number, and a completely ludicrous "what the hell?" surprise twist ending all ensure that this exceptionally atrocious bilge is a gloriously ghastly marvel to behold from start to finish. Wonderfully rancid'n'wretched bottom-of-the-barrel schlock.