BeBe S. Bellamont promoting the film at Horrorfind. |
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For those of you who don't know, I have a special fondness for low-budget, out of the way horror films. Where most people see bad acting, cheesy special effects, and poor video quality, I see the heart, soul, and ball sweat of the cast and crew. Something that really galls me is the "Oh man, I could have done better than those guys" crowd. You know what? If you can: do it. It's easy to spout off nonsense, but these guys, the maverick filmmakers on the fringes of cinema, are putting their lack of money where their mouths are. The reason you think you can do better is that you've been nursed at the teat of Hollywood: films that have catering budgets larger than an entire Troma production. What about the films made by shoestring crews, starring actors and actresses who get paid very little, if at all? Productions that don't have the resources to shoot on film, who don't have full-time DPs (director of photography), best boys, gaffers, boom operators, and ADs (assistant directors), a big visual effects/make-up house on hire, and 2nd unit crews? How do they get product on the screen?
They wing it. They make it happen. They use stolen shots, free locations (a lot of times their own houses), call in favors, network like crazy for connections to take advantage of, basically chutzpah their way through. A film that to your naïve eye looks like it was done on a weekend might very well have taken several years to fully put together, including reshoots and post-production. So before you bang the gavel and seal your mind shut tighter than a clam's ass, let's take a look at one such film, Brendan Deininger's BETTER LIVING THROUGH KILLING, and why you should watch it and what you can take from it.
Now, this is a film that you will not find at your local video store, nor at Netflix (or on Wikipedia or IMDb.com – yet). No, if you want to see it, and if I do my job correctly you will by the end of this piece, you need to straight up buy it. Why on Earth should you part with a hard-earned sawbuck to watch a film you've never heard of? Allow me to lay it out for you:
So, first and foremost, it is one of the non-Hollywood films that I mentioned above. Shot on a shoestring over the course of three years in and around Deininger's West Virginia home, it tells the story of Otis and Welford, the two (slightly lazy) owners and operators of the Grass Monkey lawn service. Right at the outset of the film, the brothers get a very unhappy call from their father, played by Danny Boyd of INVASION OF THE SPACE PREACHERS (1990) fame, adding a little gravitas to the proceedings. Anyway, said call is to inform the boys that they should follow their true dreams, musician and infomercial emcee, respectively, because he's taking a powder. He's got a hooker on the clock and she might be pregnant. Oh, and they're going to need to vacate the family home soon as well.
Armed with this disastrous news, the boys head out to their next scheduled lawn gig: cutting the grass of an unnamed character played by the lovely and talented BeBe S. Bellamont. As if being keen on hooking the local population's children on heroin for profit wasn't bad enough, she makes the mistake of making fun of Otis's balls (the sight of which will haunt me forever). She pays for this mistake with her head. Literally. The boys abscond from the scene, taking a strange plastic owl with them for their troubles. Which will prove a catalytic event for their 
Could you destroy someone with boobies that spectacular? |
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eventual killing spree.
You see, it seems that this is no ordinary plastic owl. No, he can speak, his name is Professor Bonaparte, and he has a very bad attitude. After a night of drinking and carousing, Bonaparte has convinced the boys that they should just go ahead and kill any customers that break their, ahem, balls. When Otis points out that that doesn't seem like good business sense, Bonaparte replies, "It does if you rob them."
Solid logic. Owls are known to be wise, after all.
From there on, the movie is essentially a series of murder set pieces, interspersed with some *gasp* character development, and an ever-increasing sense of absurdity. To get a better understanding of the film, we need to take the look at some of the movies that inspired Deininger, seeing as he wrote, produced, directed, and handled most of the special effects on the film.
The best place to start would be THE GRUESOME TWOSOME (1967). Stuck somewhere between BLOOD FEAST and THE WIZARD OF GORE, this isn't really godfather of gore Herschell Gordon Lewis's most well known or best received film, but I agree with Deininger that it is a doozy. Arguably puffed up to the 70 minute mark with filler just as an excuse to have some gore set pieces, Lewis still manages to infuse the film with wit and charm. It seems that the local purveyor of wigs, the old and charmingly off her nut Mrs. Pringle, supplies her shop by having her developmentally disabled son Rodney hack the scalps off of young, unsuspecting college coeds (and in one case suggesting that she would love to have "some liver for dinner"). She also talks to and about her stuffed cat, Napoleon, as if it were alive and human. Napoleon is quite obviously the inspiration for Professor Bonaparte the owl, even if his bad attitude was more inspired by the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Next up we really need to talk about Nathan Schiff's THEY DON'T CUT THE GRASS ANYMORE (1985). Right off the bat, I should mention that the tagline for BETTER LIVING THROUGH KILLING is "They Don't Just Cut The Grass Anymore." So that can give you some idea of how much of an influence it was on Deininger. In the film, two jaded hillbillies decide to stop doing the lawns of affluent Northeast yuppies, and start ripping them to shreds in new and inventive ways instead. The film had to be shot in just five days, because John Smihula, the star of all four of Schiff's films, was shipping off for the Peace Corps (!). What we end up with are scenes of Billy Buck (Smihula), in makeup almost befitting a clown for some reason, waxing oratorical on the ills of consumerism and corporate greed, with his deformed brother Jacab limping along menacingly beside him. They kill all manner of people, and the gore pieces are extremely long and drawn out. The effect being that the longer you look at the gore, amateurish as it may be, the more effective it becomes. When Billy Buck shoots an unfortunate lady in a most private area with a shotgun, and a German shepherd happily begins licking up the resulting carnage, one is hard-pressed to suppress a shudder. I should also point out that the scene between Otis and Bellamont in the kitchen in the beginning of BLTK was purposefully recreated from a similar scene in GRASS...as well as a radio in both films broadcasting a station with the call letters WCAD.
The last film in this discussion (though not the only other film to influence BLTK) is REDNECK 
Brendan Deininger: So lovable, so innocent: what went wrong? |
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ZOMBIES (1987). It seems that one day a city bus pulled up in front of NYC's Troma Headquarters, and shat out two young men with a film they badly wanted Lloyd Kaufman to watch. It seems that the two men, director Pericles Lewnes and his longtime friend and producer Edward Bishop had been so inspired by a viewing of Troma's own THE TOXIC AVENGER that they decided to shoot their own low-budget horror film. Shot in rural Virginia, not too far from West Virginia I might add, the film is a masterwork of do-it-yourself gore. It also manages to be quite funny and surprisingly well-acted, if not slightly over the top. I especially like the scene where Pre-Vet student Bob has to perform an "autopsy" on a redneck zombie who they have just dispatched...by spraying it in the face with deodorant. REDNECK ZOMBIES also had a fabulous soundtrack, full of mostly country-influenced songs concerning redneck zombies as themes, in much the same way that Caleb Emerson's wonderful DIE YOU ZOMBIE BASTARDS! did with it's own soundtrack, except with punk and rockabilly bands.
I should also note that REDNECK ZOMBIES is widely believed to be the first movie shot entirely on video (Entrail-Vision), or at least the first entirely shot on video movie to be distributed.
Speaking of soundtracks, BETTER LIVING THROUGH KILLING has a rather impressive one. When Deininger met Jim Stramel at a party, the two hit it off and became fast friends. Stramel, writer and director of THE THRILLBILLYS (A moonshine fueled rampage of revenge!) hooked Deininger up with most of the bands he would use on his soundtrack, including Angry Johnny and the Killbillies, The Octane Saints, and Johnnyman. Stramel also has a gruesome death scene in BLTK ("come back here you fucking monkeys!").
So there you have it. BETTER LIVING THROUGH KILLING is every bit as obsessive and fanboyish and a valentine to its precursors as SHAUN OF THE DEAD, except without nearly the budget. You've got a combined cast and crew of around ten people all doing every little bit they can to make the most bizarre, fringe, true to their hearts movie possible. The gore is cast from Jell-O molds, the props were bought at K-Mart and Big Lots, and the whole thing was steered into port by one man with a vision. See it for Randy Boyer getting his head smashed to pieces with a golf club ("Happy Golfoween, everybody!"), see it for BeBe S. Bellamont dancing around half-naked, see it for the acidic wise-cracking of a talking plastic owl, see it for its outlandish and incongruous nods to both Benny Hill and Bugs Bunny, see it for the jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring scene featuring the buxom-beyond-belief Pink Lisa, see it for the circle jerk (okay, maybe not the circle jerk), but mostly, just see it.
Okay?
*NOTES*
1. More information, as well as details on purchasing the film, can be found at www.cafedeath.com or http://www.myspace.com/cafedeathproductions
2. Brendan Deininger has also done some work with Darkstone Entertainment (http://www.myspace.com/darkstone_ent) and is currently doing some shooting for Nudist Camp Zombie Massacre for MMJ Video Productions.
2. THE THRILLBILLYS does not have an IMDb page, but it can be gotten from Netflix.
3. Netflix claims to not have INVASION OF THE SPACE PREACHERS, but in fact they do: it is a double feature along with John Wesley Norton's SPACE DAZE.
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| Agent Provocateur |
Every other Sunday
Eating the flesh of lesser film geeks since '72.
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| Zombie Boy |
Zombie Boy is not a Hollywood insider, just a movie
geek with a big mouth and a strong desire to spew
opinions. His column will concentrate on the things he
feels you need to know about less mainstream cinematic
issues, but probably don't. He strongly encourages
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