Bad Meaning Good case study #15: 'A Night To Dismember'

Wednesday, March 24 2010

In April of 2009, myself and DJ Intel launched the 'Bad Meaning Good' monthly movie event at The Burlington in Chicago (which takes place on the first Monday of every month). The idea behind the night is to screen cult classics, exploit movies, unintentional comedies and every other kind of film we collectively decide is so bad that it's actually good. In the ongoing search for the perfect 'Bad Meaning Good' film I've decided to take on a weekly (or AT LEAST once-per-week) blog entry in which I'll review, summarize and rate bad movies of every variety imaginable. The goal is to reach somewhere in the range of 75-100 posts within a year, at which point I'll look for a place to publish a first volume of 'Bad Meaning Good' reviews in book form. Stay tuned...

Bad Meaning Good case study #15:
'A Night To Dismember' (dir. Doris Wishman)

Summary:
The directorial career of Doris Wishman is among the very most prolific of any woman in the history of the cinema and is itself a singularly eccentric body of work unlike any other. Much has been made of her reputation as the "female Ed Wood" and while that summation is of course too reductive to adequately tell the whole story, it's at times hard to deny some of the similarities between the two and their mutual go-for-broke artistic sensibilities. While I generally try to stray from this particular brand of descriptive, anecdotal shorthand while attempting to define a person's entire career, this is perhaps one of those rare instances where, in the very most basic terms, the expression might actually be useful on a purely conversational level. Because like Wood, Wishman's films seem to defy narrative and aesthetic logic in such extremely baffling ways that they become their own kind of outsider art form occupying a kind of bent-logic universe unique unto themselves. Additionally, and like with Wood's films as well, we're all better for the viewing experience at the end of the day.

Having spent the bulk of her career creating nudist and sexploitation features in the 60's and her own kind of sex-comedy camp films in the 70's, Wishman made her stab at slasher-styled genre filmmaking in the early 80's with 'A Night To Dismember'. The film revolves around an American family (the Kent family) and a series of bizarre, interwoven murders among their various members. Truthfully though, the less said about the film's messy and incoherent plot, the better. The real reason to watch the film is to revel in its aesthetic shortcomings (and believe me, they are ever-present) rather than concern yourself with the details of its story.

The myriad production problems Wishman experienced while making this film are well documented but apparently (and to keep it brief), through some unfortunate case of industry foul play regarding the production company involved, much of Wishman's original footage for 'A Night To Dismember' was either stolen or destroyed (she explains this in a riotously entertaining audio commentary track accompaniment on the dvd), leaving the film to be cut exclusively from out-takes, spare parts and leftover footage and meaning that she had to create an entirely new narrative based around unwanted footage alone. While the performances and production values of her final product and her rich history of directorial ineptness lead me to believe that her intentional version of the film would itself have been an undeniable camp classic, the end result that is 'A Night To Dismember' is perhaps the most breathlessly discontinuous and unintelligible film I've ever watched.

How 'Bad Meaning Good' was it?:
'A Night To Dismember' reaches stratospheric levels of ineptness that border on the transcendent. I honestly doubt I'm equipped with the vocabulary to truly clarify the experience. It is such an outright mess of conflicting film stocks, contradictory music choices, senseless production decisions and confusing sequential details that the whole thing integrates into its own unique kind of nightmarish and dreamlike, dark comedy unlike any other I've ever seen. 'Blood Freak' is the only film I know to tread such similarly elusive territory of near-psychadelic shittiness.

The film has the look of something that was created at least a whole decade in advance of when it actually was and employs a narrator for its entire duration. As far as I could tell, the narration was never better suited as an expository device than the actual action might have been if left to play out by itself and the horribly edited audio and voiceovers were so comprehensively detached from the reality of what was taking place on screen that the cumulative effect resulted in something akin to a surreal hallucination or a bad drug experience. Both spoken words and significant visual cues are often obscured by bad editing and the sound quality of both the dialog and the music are slapped together in a style so abrasive that the film demands a constant state of remote-controlled volume regulation on the behalf of the viewer.

While watching the film I experienced a kind of immutable internal curiosity over how such an oddity could exist; or how such a group of people could come together with the mind to intentionally create something like 'A Night To Dismember'. The reality of the matter is that movies like this one cannot be created intentionally; they are both in practice and by definition the compounded byproduct of circumstantial failure and technical incompetence; the kind of which, given the heavy financial investments required to bankroll a film of any variety, are seldom unveiled for the world in such gloriously, outrageously artless fashion. It is unclear to me how to define such a thing but the end product is itself undoubtedly a kind of amazing, unintentional art form that cuts to the core of what the 'Bad Meaning Good' movie night was made to celebrate. I loved the film and would call it an absolute, undeniable camp classic equally qualified for both party viewing and academic dissection alike.

It's not easy to come by but if you can get your hands on it, 'A Night To Dismember' is an unforgettable cinematic experience. Highly recommended.

'Bad Meaning Good'-O-Meter:
9.5/10

Below: The original trailer.

Tags: Bad Meaning Good, Bad Meaning Good Case Studies, Doris Wishman

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