WEASELS RIP MY FLESH

My fascination with shiny objects is well documented - if nothing else, all the time I spend with DVDs will attest to that and many look to me when a job requires watching a truly mind-numbing piece of cinema. But Image Entertainment has once again managed to push the envelope with the latest additions to their Cult Cinema Collection, a trio of backyard, zero-budget messterpieces from the oeuvre Long Island auteur Nathan Schiff. It's easy to poke fun at the work of an ambitious, misty-eyed young dreamer like Schiff must surely have been those many moons ago... so let's get started!

Schiff gives a cold opening with plenty of punch. Or some stabbing. I'm not sure, but in among the off-focus close-ups someone may have gotten their throat cut, but it's hard to tell. After the minimal credits, we get more confusion shots of a model rocket and chemistry sets. Eventually, the brain does some heavy lifting and pieces it all together: eureka! It's a mission to another planet, where specimens are collected and brought back to Earth! The rocket crashes, and before you know it some radioactive wreckage is discovered by two foulmouthed boys. While they're fishing junk out of a pond, the more foulmouthed one is bitten by something off screen. Already the weasels are ripping flesh, and we missed it!

The boys retaliate by pouring some radioactive pancake batter down a hole. The glop covers what has to be a weasel (it's in the title!), transforming it through the miracle of pretend science into a poorly constructed monster weasel puppet about the size of a bear, which promptly bites the head off one of the youngsters. Welcome to show biz, kid! Fred (Fred Dabby), a passing motorist, accidentally runs into the beast with his car, knocking off a souvenir monster weasel leg, which Fred takes home to show his buddy Jake (Jody Kadish). Fred and Jake have bushy mustaches, and even though they talk like they're trying out for ON THE WATERFRONT, they kind of look like the Hussein Brothers. In fact, everyone talks with thick New Yawk accents, which despite the fact that Schiff hasn't established a location, narrows down the setting of the story to the tri-state area. Even the British newscaster that soon shows up to report on the carnage sounds like she might be from New Jersey.

While Fred is bumming smokes off of Jake and forgetting to call him by his character name, the mutant "arm" springs to life and scratches Jake on the foot. This causes Jake to immediately begin foaming at the mouth and unconvincingly hacking Fred apart with a butcher knife. Before you can say I DRINK YOUR BLOOD, the radioactive rabies is spreading all around the area, turning folks into psychopathic maniacs.

Halfway through the movie, Schiff introduces the hero, slick Inspector Cameron (John Smihula). He and his partner Anderson (Steve Kriete) are sent out to investigate the bloodshed and are promptly captured by the mad Dr. Sendam (Fred Borges) who, like most of the cast, sports a bad mustache. But hey, even I had a bad mustache in 1979. Sendam takes his captives down into his underground hideout. "This place looks like some sort of a laboratory," observes Cameron, looking around at the faux wood paneling of what's obviously a suburban basement.

Somewhere along the way, eight months have passed and Sendam is breeding the monster weasels to take over the world. Will our heroes be able to stop his evil plan before things "get out of proportion"? Can the weasel virus from space destroy the world? Who cares? Perhaps the film's lone real quality is that you never know what's coming next. And as long as that next thing is amusingly gross or bewilderingly stupid, it's got you hooked. I refuse to give away the shocking ending, but I guarantee it'll be a complete surprise.

The DVD Age has led to some remarkable film restorations, with producers turning up elements once thought lost, or giving worn footage painstaking digital restoration for DVD release. This isn't one of those DVDs. Despite what is surely some heroic reconstruction of the original Super-8 elements, scratches and splices remain throughout, but that only seems right for this particular feature. As a director, Schiff gives the impression that the camera isn't pointing quite where it is supposed to for every shot. His youth and inexperience are obvious in every frame, and he's so down to earth and genuine in his commentrak explanations that I almost feel bad about all the mean things I've written in this review. I'm tempted to say that WEASELS RIP MY FLESH is a step above a home movie production level, but that wouldn't be true. In fact, it's right at home movie level, with all the virtues and weaknesses that description implies. Schiff began production on this first feature when he was a senior in high school after receiving a Super-8 camera as a birthday present, and the rest is history. Outside of a few small screenings, Schiff's films went unseen until they somehow turned up at underground screenings in the mid-1980s, after which they gained quite a reputation and made the rounds via video trading. In 1989, Michiganite Al Bogdan's short film spoof THE WEASEL THAT DRIPPED BLOOD is evidence of his underground fame.

Aside from the director commentrak, Image compensates for the shortness of the main feature (62 minutes) with several extras. There's a half-hour video interview with Schiff in which he discusses childhood experiences and how they influenced his work. This interview is continued on DVDs of two subsequent Schiff films, LONG ISLAND CANNIBAL MASSACRE and THEY DON'T CUT THE GRASS ANYMORE, and trailers for all three films are included on each disc. There are also brief recent interviews with two of Schiff's stable of stars, Smihula and Borges, in which they add some behind-the-scenes secrets of movie magic, such as how they used cranberry sauce for stage blood, how Schiff stole meat from his mom's freezer to use as props, and the dangers of homemade squibs.

The disc is rounded out with a collection of six of Schiff's early 8-mm films, with titles like "The Day the Dog Went Insane" and "Mission: Destroy", thrilling tales of long-haired teens, evangelists, claymation and blood, propelled by plenty of pounding stock library music.