DVD Review Round-Up: July 16, 2009
Between mounting my own Top 100 Cult Movie Nude Scenes of All Time and being 
just so deeply caught up in Mr. Skin’s Top 100 Celebrity Nude Scenes of All Time, I’ve fallen behind on straight-up movie reviews.
Time to plow through the pile on my desk.
Today’s load includes the legendarily lost Linda Lovelace nugget Deep Throat Part II (1974), and Rob Schneider’s prison-rape knee slapper (co-starring David Carradine!), Big Stan (2007).
Plus there’s Wild Eye DVD’s freaky-sexy-satanical Goth Kill (2009), and the black-and-white body horror anthology Beneath the Flesh (2009). Have at, darlings.
BENEATH THE FLESH (2009)
DIRECTOR: Randall Kaplan
CAST: Michael Whiteny, Steve Arons, Zen Groom
STUDIO: Pathfinder Pictures
SYNOPSIS:
Short films by Randall Kaplan. Each is experimental, black-and-white, and horror-oriented.
McBLOVIATION:
Meat. Teeth. Corporeal abominations. Fluids. Bewilderment. Despair. Film school. Been done. A million times. For decades.
Still, this is … kind of okay.
On its cover, Beneath the Flesh drops the brand names you need to know – Kafka, Burroughs, Lynch, Cronenberg – while the films themselves don’t really add anything to that tradition.
I can muster up one cheer for competence, though. Maybe.
*
BIG STAN (2007)
DIRECTOR: Rob Schneider
CAST: Rob Schneider, David Carradine, Jennifer Morrison
SYNOPSIS: Deuce Bigelow vs. Prison Rape.
McBLOVIATION:
Sporadically funny, occasionally hilarious, ultra-cheap-looking jail farce casts Schneider as a real-estate swindler who gets sentenced to the pokey.
Fear of sodomy prompts him to hire David Carradine as a chain-smoking martial arts master, who educates our hero to high-impact anal defense.
Much footage is devoted to director/star Schneider showing off his freshly-buffed gorgeousness of the body. I think that’s charming.
*
DEEP THROAT PART II (1974)
DIRECTOR: Joe Sarno
CAST: Linda Lovelace, Andrea True, Harry Reems, Jamie Gillis
STUDIO: SecretKeyMotionPictures.com
SYNOPSIS:
Nurse Linda Lovelace and Dr. Harry Reems return from the original Deep Throat. One of their patients is a spy (or something). This leads to CIA and KGB operatives pursuing Linda and, oh-ho-ho, such espionage slapstick.
McBLOVIATION:
One of the great lost pieces of exploitation history – which has now, obviously, been found – the story of Deep Throat II is fascinating, quizzical, amusing, and well-told by this DVD’s liner notes and video bonus features.
For that reason, and for the two pretty good Joe Sarno co-features The Switch (1974) and (especially) A Touch of Genie (1974), the Deep Throat Part II DVD is a must for all students of oddball cinema.
The movie itself, though, is an abomination unto man, God, and fellatio.
In keeping with the ’70s East Coast porn tradition, DT2 was shot in the pitch-gray dead of winter in shittily bland neighborhoods of New York City’s outer boroughs.
It contains a lot of plot, and a lot of extremely non-sexual “action” consisting 
mostly of HILARIOUS men in trench coats following Linda as she strolls through a dirty, leafless-tree-laden public park.
Then all that great stuff is farted together like the cheapest 1950s bottom-of-a-triple-bill no-budget monster quickie, exuding incompetence and a quest to just fill out feature-length running time that very rapidly goes from charming to hideous to contemptible.
As noted, if you are at all interested in the world of grindhouse films, theatrical porn, or just trash culture, period, you must buy, rent, or otherwise come upon this release, which is properly titled Deep Throat Sex Comedy collection.
Secret Key Motion Pictures has done an exquisite job preserving, presenting, and providing great historical insight into what I promise you will rank among the most worthless pieces of fucking shit you will ever fast-forward to, just to survive.
*
GOTHKILL (2009)
DIRECTOR: JJ Connelly
CAST: Flambeaux, Erica Giovinazzo, Eve Blackwater, Julie Saad, Anastasia Andino, Mistress Juliya
STUDIO: WildEyeDVD.com
SYNOPSIS:
Some time back in the Middle-Ages-ish, Catholic priest and merciless Inquisitor Nick Dread (Flambeaux) decides burning witches is no longer for him. This gets Dread tied to a stake and lit up quick.
But after a detour to hell (complete with bare-breasted demonesses), Dread returns to modern-day New York City to collect 100,000 corrupt souls. And where better to start reaping than among Gotham’s gloomy-glammy Goth scene?
McBLOVIATION:
Shot on the fly in Manhattan with non-actors who really dress like every day was Samhain (and you 
know they make sure to pronounce it “Sow-Win”), GothKill is an admirable, acceptably entertaining effort.
Flambeaux’s Nick Dread is a anti-hero worth watching, even as his accent blurs from British to Scottish to Irish to Non-Country-Specific Power Metal Lead Singer.
The gore is good.
The nudity is nice.
The DVD cover painting is way-cool.
And just look at those devil girls.
My only real beef, in fact: green-screen Hell.
GothKill is at least the fourth recent DV horror I’ve seen featuring footage of someone supposedly in hell, but rather comically surrounded by goofball flames imposed behind them on a green screen.
I understand the limits of today’s low-budget special effects. But this one does not work. And won’t. And can’t.
And if the green-screen Hell of GothKill is not quite as bogus as the green-screen Hell in Saint Francis (2007), that’s because I really, really fucking hated Saint Francis – Zalman King as Dr. P. Bernard or no Zalman King as Dr. P. Bernard.
