This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Tales from the Quadead Zone. It was made by Chester Novell Turner, who may well be one of the first black independent filmmakers to specialise in . This would probably be laudable if not for the fact that his two films are dogshit.
- JESUS GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT NOISE? Oh, it's just the logo. And the intro, which seems to be referencing Black Devil Doll From Hell in a bizarrely shrill voice. And the score is absolute dogshit. Also, why the fuck is Fat Albert rapping?
- I'm sorry, I can't hear you, your dishes are too loud.
- That's a mug, not a glass.
- Well, it's nice to know the soundtrack (that's actually the woman's dead/invisible son) has the same opinion of itself that I do.
- There was a point where I seriously wondered whether if this could be worse than A Certain Sacrifice. Fortunately, at least he knows how to create the illusion of an invisible person affecting their surroundings well enough. At least that's something.
- I think she's supposed to be telling a story, but everybody's talking over everybody else.
- So, I think the first tale of this quad involves a family of 8. They only have enough food for four of them, in the form of four sandwiches. And since they evidently can't afford to cut the damn things, they have this weird ritual where they re-enact the Ecstasy of the Gold scene from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, then they each try to grab one.
- And, somehow, it's the fat one with no shirt who never gets the sandwiches, so he shoots three of his family members. And then, in the "Where are they now" epilogue,two more of them are killed a few days later, he gets sent to the "Gas Chair" which I can only assume is supposed to be the electric chair or the gas chamber, and his parents are "Living high off the hog in witness protection."
- Yeah, it's a strange tale in that it's barely even much of a tale.
- And the second story in this quad is called "The Brothers." It involves a man who sneaks into the morgue where his brother's being prepared for his wake. I'm sure there's some reason he's doing this, but whenever the narration comes in, you can't hear a fucking thing over the music and whatever random ambient noise Turner's camcorder picked up.
- Does Turner even know what a glass is? Does he even know that there's a difference between glass and creamic?
- So, why did he even go to the funeral home? What's the payoff?
- So, he's just airing his grievances to his dead brother, who I think is being represented by a vaguely man-shaped object in a burlap sack. And if we saw the sort of shit happening instead of letting him just say it, we might actually care. Funny thing, I can remember a story by, of all people, Ben Shapiro, that somehow managed to do this better.
How do you fuck this up so bad that Ben Fucking Shapiro is running circles around your storytelling ability? - So, he was going to kill the brother himself? And his revenge after all this time is dressing him in a clown suit?
- And he's suddenly alive? So, how did this get past everyone else? And how does he develop superpowers from this? And why does this give him some ring modulation voice that makes him even less intelligible than everyone else, which is really saying something?
- And it's even irritating the narrator.
- Did they include several takes of the "Oh my God, here comes Darryl" line?
- And, instead of a third tale to this Quad, we have Darryl abusing (read: some shit wrestling with) his wife for talking to ghosts and her killing him.
- I think that if I ever get around to updating the Deep Hurting Awards, this is a shoo-in for "Least believable spousal abuse in cinema".
- I think this was an obvious stage knife like the one from Harold and Maude, especially since the "stab wound" is clear and not even red.
RIP Harold and Maude on Criterion. - So, is there going to be a fourth story to this quad?
- You know, I'd mock this movie for having the cops read the Miranda Rights from a card, but I've seen enough footage of police interrogations to know that a lot of times, the cops actually do that. But I can fault the cops for looking fuck-all like cops. Except maybe the one who might have been from a timeline where Ed Kemper actually joined the LAPD.
- Also, somehow, the cops decided to just let her go to the bathroom where she can slit her throat.
- And somehow-er, this takes up an ectremely long time for her to actially get to it. Maybe pad the runtime so we can see her playing with her dead son and I think stimming so we can get this to just over an hour.
- Also, I think the movie's doing a medley of the theme from Rosemary's Baby and "Da Da Da."
- You know, you'd think the cops would just bust down that bedroom door.
- Man, she must have been drinking a lot of tomato juice.
- Why 21 hours later?
- And why does the son have a semi-visible form now? What the fuck rules did Turner put for this shit?
- Tales from the Quadead Zone will actually not return because Turner decided to retire and he apparently didn't even find that there was an audience to his movies for another 25 years.
I'd like to be able to say Tales from the Quadead Zone crawled so Get Out could run, but we all know that there wasn't much historical continuity between Chester Novell Turner and Jordan Peale. Turner's works had a niche audience at best, and if it took Turner himself a fucking quarter century before even he discovered that there even was one. And next week, the Wheel of Pain has selected: Game Therapy, a movie so bad that the only reason it even got a DVD release in its native Italy was because some fans of an Italian YouTuber demanded it so he could review it.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.