Doris Wishman started filming this in 1978 to cash in on the slasher craze begun by Halloween, directing and producing the film from a screenplay by Judith J. Kushner. From there, things get weird. Wishman claimed that multiple reels were destroyed in the photo processing lab, resulting in her having to reshoot several scenes and use stock footage to make a releasable final film. After four years (!) of post-production, the film would remain unreleased until MPI Media Group put it out in 1989.
There's also an entirely different version of this film that was released in August 2018 on YouTube by the film's cinematographer, C. Davis Smith. This version features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role and an entirely different plot, as adult film actress Samantha Fox replaced Cummings after the destruction of Wishman's film.
According to Smith, Fox paid Wishman $2,000 to get the starring role of Vicki Kent. He said he doesn't know for sure, but he believes that Wishman faked the story that the original print was destroyed in a fire and reshot the film with Fox.
Whew! That's a lot of history to cover, but this is a film that has plenty of it. Let's get into what it's really all about!
The Kent family suffers from an ancestral curse that has caused nearly all of them to be murdered, often by one another. Bonnie was first, hacked to pieces by her sister Susan, who was upset that her father favored her sister. After the murder, she slipped on the blood and was killed by the very same axe.
Broderick Kent's wife Lola is next, murdered in the bathtub. While Kent tries to proclain his innocence, he eventually hangs himself.
That's when we get to Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox), who has just ben released from an insane asylum after killing two boys. Her brother and sister, Billy and Mary, want her to be committed again.
Despite wanting to rekindle her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, she struggles to make it in the real world, constantly hallucinating. Then again, with Frankie getting decapitated and his head burned in a fireplace, that relationship seems doomed.
Vicki tries to visit some relatives who turn her away before they're all killed by hatchet and by car. Even a trip to the lake is fraught with horror, as a zombie chases her around, only to be revealed to be her brother Billy who has been trying to frighten her back into the sanitarium.
This is the kind of movie that rewards your lack of attention with shifts in characters, hairstyles and clothing all within the same scene. It doesn't help that there is next to no voiced dialogue and only a narrorator's voice to carry us through every scene and change in tone. We go from Vicki performing a sexy dance and trying to seduce a detective to Vicki's sister Mary actually being the one behind all the killings.
The detective makes his way to the house where he finds a confused Vicki holding a hatchet. Despite hitting him several times with it, he manages to strangle her to death. That's when we get the voice over from the detective, telling us that Mary was the real guilty party, but she's escaped after killing a cab driver. And that's the movie, I guess.
To put it bluntly, A Night to Dismember is a mess. It's got songs that stop and start, horrible acting, bad gore and footage that appears to be the quality of a 1970's super 8 home movie. It's the kind of movie that if I watched it with a roomful of normal folks, they'd scoff and laugh. And that's why I woke up at 4 AM so that I could enjoy it all by myself, away from the insults of people not ready to cheerful enjoy a movie that combines the insane and the inane. There's also plenty of 1970's fashion and an unhinged voiceover to love, which continues over the credits, making me adore this piece of film even more.
There's also an entirely different version of this film that was released in August 2018 on YouTube by the film's cinematographer, C. Davis Smith. This version features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role and an entirely different plot, as adult film actress Samantha Fox replaced Cummings after the destruction of Wishman's film.
According to Smith, Fox paid Wishman $2,000 to get the starring role of Vicki Kent. He said he doesn't know for sure, but he believes that Wishman faked the story that the original print was destroyed in a fire and reshot the film with Fox.
Whew! That's a lot of history to cover, but this is a film that has plenty of it. Let's get into what it's really all about!
The Kent family suffers from an ancestral curse that has caused nearly all of them to be murdered, often by one another. Bonnie was first, hacked to pieces by her sister Susan, who was upset that her father favored her sister. After the murder, she slipped on the blood and was killed by the very same axe.
Broderick Kent's wife Lola is next, murdered in the bathtub. While Kent tries to proclain his innocence, he eventually hangs himself.
That's when we get to Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox), who has just ben released from an insane asylum after killing two boys. Her brother and sister, Billy and Mary, want her to be committed again.
Despite wanting to rekindle her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, she struggles to make it in the real world, constantly hallucinating. Then again, with Frankie getting decapitated and his head burned in a fireplace, that relationship seems doomed.
Vicki tries to visit some relatives who turn her away before they're all killed by hatchet and by car. Even a trip to the lake is fraught with horror, as a zombie chases her around, only to be revealed to be her brother Billy who has been trying to frighten her back into the sanitarium.
This is the kind of movie that rewards your lack of attention with shifts in characters, hairstyles and clothing all within the same scene. It doesn't help that there is next to no voiced dialogue and only a narrorator's voice to carry us through every scene and change in tone. We go from Vicki performing a sexy dance and trying to seduce a detective to Vicki's sister Mary actually being the one behind all the killings.
The detective makes his way to the house where he finds a confused Vicki holding a hatchet. Despite hitting him several times with it, he manages to strangle her to death. That's when we get the voice over from the detective, telling us that Mary was the real guilty party, but she's escaped after killing a cab driver. And that's the movie, I guess.
To put it bluntly, A Night to Dismember is a mess. It's got songs that stop and start, horrible acting, bad gore and footage that appears to be the quality of a 1970's super 8 home movie. It's the kind of movie that if I watched it with a roomful of normal folks, they'd scoff and laugh. And that's why I woke up at 4 AM so that I could enjoy it all by myself, away from the insults of people not ready to cheerful enjoy a movie that combines the insane and the inane. There's also plenty of 1970's fashion and an unhinged voiceover to love, which continues over the credits, making me adore this piece of film even more.