Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979)

I think it's ambitious when someone gets the idea that they want to make a film.

And I'm not talking like Michael Bay or Steven Spielberg or any big-deal high-falutin' director with lots of money and a whole studio at their disposal. Not every visionary has so much to work with. Sometimes all they have is an idea.

Period.

And even then, their idea is nothing more than a scribbled-down outline on a napkin or a bunch of Post-It notes.

An idea is an idea, however. And if it's one that's strong enough, then it has the will to be heard and to be made.

Then again, some people just hit it lucky.

Look at the strange case of Nathan Schiff: here is a man who started out making lower-than-low budget short films while just a youngster and really came into his own after reaching puberty, catapulting him to the level of huge underground success. With titles like The Long island Cannibal Massacre and They Don't Cut The Grass Anymore, none of them are what you'd call part of the Criterion Collection - these are blood-and guts efforts, plain and simple; maybe more Karo syrup and ketchup efforts, but still, you get the idea. Working on films like these for a budget usually under $1000, you have to get creative.

It's one film in particular though, that stands out from the pack. One that Schiff made when he was all of 16 years old. That's right, kids; this will be my first review of a teenager's filmed work. and as far as topicality goes, it's named after a Frank Zappa song! Kinda.

Which in and of itself does it for the topicality - unless you count being filmed in the Long Island area as topical. Yeah, me neither.

Weasels Rip My Flesh is actually one of those odd projects that looks for everything like one of those piecemeal efforts Edward D. Wood Jr. used to excel at. As a matter of fact, I'd go so far as to say if Ed Wood had a weasel fetish rather than an angora one, we might just have ourselves an interesting parallel here. Schiff, however, has parallels all his own to work with and does just fine juggling them, thanks anyway.

I know you won't get off my front stoop without a plot, so here it is: Returning from the planet Venus, an errant NASA spacecraft crashes into the ocean, its radioactive contents found by two young boys, who spill its radioactive cargo into the home of a nearby weasel. Enveloped by a radioactive mass, a rabid weasel is transformed into a gigantic killer mutant. Prowling the countryside, the huge weasel kills and devours victims. The creature is captured by a disturbed scientist (Fred Borges) who plans to use its regenerative blood to amass an army of similar monsters, enabling him to conquer the Earth and also granting him the power of immortality. A pair of police detectives (John Smihula, Steven Kriete) are on his trail and out to stop him...but it may already be too late.

As with most film-makers, Schiff's ideas are ambitious, and he makes no bones about wanting to bring it all to life at one time. Heck, he has a camera, he has a raft to put it on for a tracking shot down a river, he has school friends and family to cast, he has paper-mache to use - LOTS of paper-mache - and all the ingenuity and gumption of a non-dress-wearing Ed Wood when it comes to getting his project finished and ready to show. If only Schiff in fact wore angora sweaters and had Tor Johnson at his disposal, the comparisons would be complete.

Schiff was the whole show here, in spite of the weasels in question. Not only did he write and direct this, he also served as producer, cinematographer, editor, special effects, visual effects and actor (he was one of the boys who dumps irradiated lemon pudding into a weasel hole, setting off the chain of events). I guess when you're a teenager, you don't trust anyone else to work behind the scenes but yourself. Figures; at least he couldn't blame anybody else for Weasels Rip My Flesh but himself.

Of course, working on a budget of $400 has its own limitations - forget necessity being the mother of invention; Schiff found himself motherless quite a bit in this film. You want a rocket launching from NASA? Better settle for a model rocket on a paper-mache landscape against a black tablecloth. You want to see same-said rocket launching? Better settle for the camera backing away from a small table lamp; one of those single-bulb desk-top jobbies. You want to see a weasel? Better settle for a paper-mache....

Uh....

Well, I think it's a weasel.

Let me stop a moment and say that I seriously doubt that Schiff, at this point in his life, had ever seen a weasel. Even a picture of one. Or even knew someone who knew what one looked like. He probably never saw a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon with that googly-eyed slobbering "yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah" weasel, either.

What we get instead are brown paper-mache mock-ups that are supposed to be weasels but instead are - oh, I don't even know what these things are supposed to be! They look like giant logs with teeth and bright red tempra-paint mouths! And when one of these I-don't-know-what-they-ares gets hit by a car and has its arm knocked off (that's Long Island drivers for you, I guess), this thing's arm turns out to be as long as a human arm, albeit a brown and lumpy human arm.

Then...OH! And then we get to see a captured weasel in a glass cage, and what do we get? A real weasel this time? Please. Are you kidding - Nathan hasn't gone to great lengths to celebrate realism here yet. We get a rat. A black rat in a habitat. A black rat in a habitat that looks nothing like a weasel and nothing like this movie's interpretations of weasels that we've seen so far. I mean jeezy cow; even when these two foul-mouthed teen punks pour yellow pudding from a Thermos (this flick's representation of radioactive stuff) down into a weasel's burrow, we only see a human eye surrounded by pudding. Which then becomes paper-mache logs with human arms.

And don't give me any nonsense like "oh, but these are mutated weasels infected with space goop and irradiated rabies and stuff - they're not supposed to look normal". That is a fan fiction cop-out even a fan fiction geek would demand a rewrite on! Schiff had to work with what he had, I understand that, but there are so many points throughout Weasels Rip My Flesh that Schiff seems to have tossed up his hands at, said "to Hell with it" and dealt with lumpy paper-mache and model rockets. If that's all you have, that's all you get.

The acting here is...oh no. No no no; I'm not falling into that trap again. I've learned my lesson from Night Of Horror and refuse to delve into that mind-numbing midnight of the soul again. We have not one bona-fide actor in this thing, let alone a convincing line-read from beginning to end. Even the narrator at the beginning who bemoans the fates of the movie's victims sounds as if he's doing a cold read as Criswell. Suffice it to say, no one was ready for their close-up.

I will give Schiff this much; he's at least enthusiastic with the gore effects. Using a combination of Karo Syrup, cranberry sauce and ketchup, with what looks like actual cuts of meat standing in for flesh here and there, the chopped limbs and stabbings all look as authentic as they possibly can with the shaky camera work making it seem at times like a snuff film. A snuff film featuring killer paper-mache logs.

In the end, when the rabid mutant weasel attacks one of the evil Joisey-accented scientist's man-made rabid mutant weasel men, it doesn't really matter who wins. We all lose because that isn't the end of the movie. That comes when one of the surviving detectives chases after the evil doc - who, by the way, is missing an arm after a weasel attack and a shootout has also failed to kill him off because, don'tcha see, he is now immortal because of weasel blood injections and some other half-explained nonsense. Evil doc is standing in the middle of a lake or river or maybe even out in the reservoir for all we know. Either way, I was not expecting him to be in shark territory - seeing as how the film ends with the evil one-armed doc getting his other arm bitten off by a random shark out of nowhere. The doc screams, sinks down in the water, and there you have it. Roll credits.

Complaining about a movie as sloppy and disorderly as Weasels Rip My Flesh doesn't do much good. It's a bad movie, and there certainly isn't anything good enough to recommend it, but this is something as transparent and ridiculous as one of those stress squeezer things whose eyes and tongue pop out when you squeeze it. It's dumb but you find yourself drawn to it and wanting to experience it again and again, even if it is a one-trick weasel in this case.

Schiff got his money's worth for his $400, though, seeing as this was one of his most successful films and gets shown at bad movie conventions quite often. He even was the guest of honor at a film festival a few years back. Of course, he also gets compared to one Chester Novell Turner...which is grounds for a good beating, if you ask me, but hey - maybe he feels it's a compliment.

He got a career out of it at any rate. And that's more than anyone else involved with Weasels Rip My Flesh can say. This isn't something one looks to for future generations of actors-to-be or special achievements in film work. What you get out of Weasels Rip My Flesh is what you bring into it. If you bring in optimism for the future of competent film-making, though, you will be disappointed.

It's not like you expect that much out of model rockets, cranberry sauce and paper-mache. At least not as much as Nathan Schiff did.

Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979) 2011-04-13T18:11:00-07:00 Rating: 4.5 Diposkan Oleh: admin