Friday, July 9, 2021

TWISTED ISSUES (1988)

"Hey...hey, you got something to say limp dick?!"

"Yeah, fuck you!!!"

A skater is murdered in a parking lot.  Then he comes back to life and starts killing people.

For a homemade movie, TWISTED ISSUES isn't too bad.  Trim off around 30 minutes worth of filler and it would have been much better.  But as it is, there are definitely some interesting moments to be enjoyed.  Unfortunately, to get to those moments, you gotta slog through some dead scenes that add nothing to the film itself...just the runtime.  And considering that most of the vintage advertisement for this film hyped it as an "80-minute movie!!!", that was probably the point of these scenes.

Uneven pace, bizarre lighting techniques that I actually liked a lot (shining a flashlight directly into the actors faces!), tons of distorted random clips of everything from slaughterhouse cow murders to John Waters' POLYESTER, solid acting, a dude using a backwards Chipping Hammer as a surgical device, multiple interesting time-capsule like moments (the inside of an old 7/11; the house party, etc.), old televisions, mediocre rock soundtrack by a bunch of unknown bands that I cannot imagine ever did anything, zero nudity, a little blood, eyeball removing, surrealist storytelling...and one genuinely creepy scene that I loved: a young woman is home alone flipping channels when she sees a channel showing a masked psychopath staring at the camera while standing in her own back hallway!!!  She understandable freaks the fuck out and goes running out the front door only to find him standing there.  Before she can even move, he stabs her all the way through with a sword and then walks through the house and down the back hallway, where he stops and turns towards the camera.  Welp, that fucked me up.  Going to read the Bible extra hard tonight!

Is TWISTED ISSUES worth watching?  Guess that depends on how curious you are about the lower end of low budget filmmaking.  I definitely don't regret watching it.  I mean, it's no THE ABOMINATION or anything, but then again few things are as rad as that.