At first I thought they handed me the wrong dossier. I couldn't believe they wanted this movie reviewed. Shot on video. No professional actors or film makers. About a thousand bad reviews online. I'd seen the clips on youtube and they really put a hook in me. Like they said it was impressively bad. Maybe too impressive...I mean perfectly shitty. It was being totted as the worst thing ever shot on video. It was buried for 25 years. Why the fuck would they try to bring it back? 2013 it ends up my problem.
There's a knock at my door. It was my brother...my escort to the mouth of the Nung River...I mean the Mom and Pop Video Store where I would pick up the tape. He wasn't suppose to be here for hours...that boy just couldn't stay put. He had just traded in his Kubrick collection for the Complete Jess Franco box set, and gone tearing around video store to video store looking for the shit. He looked at my wife laying in bed nauseated by sitting thru Wizards of Demon Sword. He asked, "Hey what's this? What is this?" I replied "She's hurtin' pretty bad. About the only thing holding her together are those pajamas. She wants a glass of Kool Aid. Dirty Twilight lover, she can drink puddle water." He screamed back at me, "Get out of here! Gimmie that Kool Aid. Get outta here or I'll kick your fuckin' ass! Any Twilight fan brave enough to sit through Fred Olen Ray can drink my Kool Aid any day." My brother had had a pretty good day. He made himself and some friends a couple of T-bones and beer; tried to turn The Phantom Menace into a screening party. The more he tried to make it Empire Strikes Back, the more they missed it. He wasn't a bad guy. He was one of those guys that had a weird light around him. You knew he wasn't gonna get so much as a scratch watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He advised me that the particular video store we were going to was pretty hairy. When I informed him that they had an uncut copy of Yor Hunter from the Future there he yelled, "Well why the hell didn't ya tell me that before?!? There aren't any good Italian movies in this whole shitty town! It's all goddamn Hollywood studio films!" I informed him the fact that our friend Charlie had checked out that tape yesterday, he yelled back "Charlie don't know Reb Brown!"
We got in his car where he proceeded to put a CD of Ride of the Valkyries in...which gave me a strange sense of deja vu. This whole experience seems to have happened somewhere before...nah. "Shall we dance?" he said as he tore ass down the roads as if he had a purpose. Almost as if he were a colonel in some sort of pointless South East Asian war. We drove faster than I'd ever been. We cut off cars, burned rubber and other descriptive words you use when trying to describe driving crazy. Once we got to the strip mall and the lady from the adjoining Chinese restaurant tried to set our car on fire, I knew we had arrived. "Ok man, quit hiding. Ok, let's go dickhead," he said. We entered the double doors and walked through the shoplifter sensors. He took a deep long breathe. "You smell that? Do you smell that? Stale popcorn and cigarette smoke son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of stale popcorn in the morning. The smell, you know that old dead feet smell, the whole video store. Smelled like victory...no I mean failure. It smells just like wasting your life watching shitty movies instead of getting laid or making friends. Someday these video stores are gonna end." Someday these video stores are gonna end. That would be just fine with most people. They weren't looking for more than a way to sit on their ass and watch things streaming from internet. Trouble is I've been there and know that it will be the same 250 movies rotated over and over again. It was seasons of your favorite shows, but only 30 movies pre-2003. There was enough of that to go around for everyone.
I found 555 sitting on it's labeled shelf. I stared at it's hot pink video cover; it stared back at me with it's cold calculating decapitation photo penetrating my dark heart...my heart of darkness so to speak. I had no idea what I was getting into and no idea what it would turn me into. I grabbed the tape and left. Should have never got outta the car absolutely goddamn right. I referred back to the dossier to learn more.
555 was directed by Wally Koz in 1988. It was his one and only venture into the film making business. He split from the whole fucking program after that. He got into gold mining soon after. How did that happen? What did he see when he made 555? 48 fucking years old. If he joined the film industry he would never make it above shot on video. Koz knew what he was giving up. The more I read and began to understand, The more I admired him. His family and friends couldn't understand it, they couldn't talk him out of it. The next youngest guy on his gold claim was half his age. They must have thought he was some far out old man panning for gold. A tough mother fucker. He could have gone for the million dollar gold score, but he went for himself instead. The internet knew his name by now, and they were scared of him. I read a letter Koz wrote his wife from the gold mine:
"Dear Linda,
I'm afraid that both you and my brother Roy (writer of 555) would have been worried for not hearing from me these past weeks. But my situation here has become a difficult one. I've been officially accused of cinema atrocities by the United Internet Critics Association. The charges were unjustified. They are in fact, under the circumstances, completely insane. In film making there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action, for what is often called ruthless, what may in many and many circumstances be the only clarity; seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it directly, quickly, aware...looking at it. I would trust you to tell my brother what you choose about this letter. As for the charges, I'm unconcerned. I'm beyond their timid, lying morality. And so I'm beyond caring.
You have all my faith.
Your loving husband."
555 was close. It was real close. I couldn't watch it yet, but I could feel it. As if this car was being pulled down this road. Whatever was going to happen, it wasn't gonna be like they thought. I read further as we arrived back at the house, never getting the full picture of what this movie was. Plenty more happened on the trip back like a run in with some Playboy Bunnies, a bridge blowing up and a freak occurrence where we had dinner with some French people. I'll just spare you the details as it really has no place in this review. The whole French dinner thing really seemed out of place here or anywhere else and that's why it's been mostly omitted from this report. I mean it was really pointless and didn't seem to have a purpose or a reason for being there like at all, so let us never speak of it again.
My friend Hank was at my front door waving his hands and screaming, "It's all right! It's all right!" Hank was a scraggly bastard. His long hair chopped his face in half like a kaleidoscope while his beard sagged to his chest giving him the appearance of war torn photojournalist aged years before his time. He had spent his time with 555 and I think it changed him as a person forever. I asked him about his experience with 555.
"You don't watch 555 man, it watches you. Once you've seen and experienced what it is and what you are, it'll turn around and slap you in the face begging you to question yourself. Questions in your face saying do you know that 'if is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head watching 555 while all those around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you . I mean no, I can't. I'm a little man and that's one shitty movie."
I go in the house to look at other reviews of this film. After consulting the one thing 555 and Koz hated, the internet, I had found horrifying things. Like severed heads used as decoration, all the previous reviewers of this film had gone completely crazy or had ended up dead. I was a professional and come hell or high water I was going to complete my review, but all this had become unsettling like a Tom Six film. I could feel the darkness creeping up on me and filling my soul with...well...black stuff. Hank crept up behind startling me with a tap of my shoulder. With calm and half lidded eyes he said, "The reviews, you're looking at the reviews, I uh...sometimes 555 goes too far you know...Wally Koz would be the first one to admit it." I calmly replied, "You're drunk." His expression burned a hole straight through me while he screamed, "Wrong! Wrong! If you could have just seen me yesterday while I was watching it! You're gonna tell me I'm drunk?...alright fuck you I drunk as shit."
Everything I saw told me that 555 drove men insane. If I was still alive, it was because the movie wanted me that way. I went into my room to put the dreaded tape into the player. It smelled like slow death in there, boring plot line, shitty actors and production values, nightmares. This was the end of my journey alright.
The shitty hot pink opening credits flickered in my minds eye. The nightmare was beginning. The film quality reminded me of war footage I've seen before. Hap hazard and unprofessional...off the cuff. It opens with a clumsily staged murder by a guy in a hippy wig and beard. He's shirt gave me fits of seizure. After chopping the head of the male of the naked and copulating couple, he stabbed the girl with a sacrificial dagger. He pulls down his pants and mock humps her corpse. The police arrive and the nightmare grows stronger. Lots of shittily written police procedural dialog and bad jokes. This can only take me further down the drain pipe deeper into hell. We enter a pea soup green room and barely leave it for the full 90 minutes. The cops blame an old war vet for the crimes but have no proof. We introduce the D.A. and his female reporter girlfriend. She's a total bitch. I can barely stand to listen to her voice as it reverberates in my skull. Plus she looks like my mother another reminder of how much I don't want to do this. We get to another murder. It's basically the exact same scene played in repeat. I don't know if I can handle this. They bring the same old Marine in for questioning, but can't peg him down. The lady reporter decides to use her feminine whiles to get info on him. These two old people proceed to make out as he unbuttons her shirt and...oh my god! Is this 50 year old woman going to do a nude scene!?! As he exposes her saggy breasts, I stop the tape and run outside to hide in the shed.
Hank bolts outside to come and get me. Not so much for the sake of being concerned as much as it is to see what has happened. He twirls his beard and watches me rock back and forth in the fetal position. The blackness is consuming me throughout. "Dialectics. It's very simple dialectics. No maybes, no supposes,... no fractions...you can travel through space, you can't go out into spac..." I interrupt Hank, "What the fuck you talkin' about?" He pauses "Really dude I have no idea. I polished off that bottle of SoCo about half an hour ago and I'm just spacin, But there is one thing I can tell you, there's only love and hate, you either love a movie or you hate it!" "Then I fucking hate it," answering him. "You don't know that. You didn't finish that movie man. How do you know you hate it if you leave it hanging in the wind like an Arby's fart?" I throw my shoe at him at this point. "Is this the way it ends man!?! Look at the fucking shit you're in! And with that I'm fucking splitting Jack!" Hank runs off into the woods only to resurface much later hooked on Nitrous asking hookers to call him Daddy I presume. He was right though. I had Arby's earlier that day and wouldn't let the same thing happen to 555. It's judgement that defeats us. I put my big girl pants on and continued the film.
Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror...but not just yet. I fast forward to after Delta Burke puts away her fun bags. As much as I thought there would be answers in completion, I was wrong. The cops continue to spout bad dialog and harass Beetle Bailey about the crimes. This is going nowhere. everyone knows he's not the killer, but yet they continue the charade that this is a whodunit film. Then something happens. One thing. One thing happens in this entire film. Another murder, this time with a top notch decapitation scene which shouldn't surprise me as it is the box cover imagery of the film. Thank god for tiny horrors. The cops figure out that he kills on the fifth month killing five people for five days for a tiny explanation of the title. I didn't want it, nor did I need it, but it is there. More bullshit cop dialog. I want to hunt them all down and assassinate them, but I'm merely a video store clerk sent to collect on late fees. Out of fucking nowhere the female reporter reveals that she has seen the D.A.'s high school year book and figured out he is the killer. What the fuck? They find him and gun him down. The end. The horror, the horror of this shitty fucking movie. It's not only poorly made but insulting in it's banality. It's been a waste of my life as well as my sanity. It never even attempts to entertain. It sits there like a sacrificial ox waiting for slaughter. I now understand why other reviewers went insane or turned up dead. There is literally nothing to talk about or even poke fun at with this film. It's like watching a home movie or a slasher film made by twelve year olds for a class project. It is the anti-cinema. It is absolutely nothing.
They were going to make me a site moderator for this and I wasn't even on their staff anymore. Everybody wanted me to do it, the movie itself most of all. I felt like it was sitting in the VCR waiting for me to take the pain away. Even Koz wanted it dead, and that's who it took it orders from anyway. I rubbed my body down in Bath and Body Works face mask and approach the VCR from the side quickly hitting the eject button. I throw the tape to the ground as Nena echos through my head. "99 Luftballons Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont Hielt man für Ufos aus dem All Darum schickte ein General..." I pick my laptop up from the desk and begin to bash the tape with all the anger and hate that I can muster. Bash! The viewer window breaks. Bash! The case itself snaps and breaks. "'ne Fliegerstaffel hinterher Alarm zu geben, wenn es so wär Dabei war'n da am Horizont Nur 99 Luftballons." Bash! The tape comes flying of the spindles. "99 Düsenjäger
Jeder war ein großer Krieger Hielten sich für Captain Kirk." Bash! The tape crinkles and twists. Bash! All of my thoughts and emotions are blank. I'm just a reviewer on a mission. I completed their fucking mission. I completed Koz's mission. Her old lady nipples still burned into my memory...the horror.
I put on my pajamas and bring my wife some Kool Aid. We lay down together and watch Twilight. After 555 nothing can be that bad...right? I still never got that microwave pizza.
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