A Night to Dismember

1983 "Lust, betrayal and dismemberment…"
3.4| 1h9m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 01 January 1983 Released
Producted By: Juri Productions
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

A woman from a "cursed" family is released from a mental facility, and soon dismembered corpses start turning up.

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Juri Productions

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Trailers & Images

  • Top Credited Cast
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  • Crew
Samantha Fox as Vicki Kent
Larry Hunter as Larry (as Norman Main)

Reviews

CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!
Hulkeasexo it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.
Clarissa Mora The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.
Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.
happyendingrocks This bizarre, hilariously inept offering must be seen to be believed. In a film as rife with gaffes and outright incomprehensibility as this one, it's probably pointless to articulate the unintentional comedic gold on display here. But it might be fun, so let's give it a shot.For starters, this whole outing is so clumsily constructed that it seems impossible to imagine that creator Doris Wishman had ever even SEEN a movie before, let alone made one. The entire film is comprised of a series of choppily edited scenes that rarely follow any sort of logical sequence and are augmented by dubbed-in dialogue that doesn't match the moving of the actor's mouths. In keeping with the disjointed arrangement of the film, there are times when two distinctly different performers' voices are used for a character, sometimes within the same scene.The majority of the plotting comes courtesy of a voice-over narration that blessedly spares the actors the trouble of having to actually talk to each other very often, but even this audio exposition seems to have been edited with the hatchet on the DVD cover. At times, the narrator's monologues cut off or start up in the middle of a sentence when the film leaps to the next scene, and the oration is so poorly written that even though the voice-over is describing exactly what we're seeing on the screen, it's still often completely impossible to understand any of it.The almost silent-film sensibility is reinforced by the constant presence of a background score, the majority of which is '80s grocery store music. Like the video, the audio score jumps around with reckless abandon, sometimes in the middle of a scene, and there are times when you can actually hear the source record skipping. The soundtrack is used without regard for the unfolding images, so we often witness brutal (albeit extremely silly) acts of carnage accompanied by music that wouldn't be out of place in the elevator at a dentist's office. The killings in the film are plentiful and loaded with gore, but the effects are staged with a sophomoric touch that matches the rest of the movie, so these scenes end up being the most humorous bits. Best of all, the film-makers used a real hatchet for several of the murder scenes, so we have the privilege of witnessing the deeds of a thoughtful killer who takes special care to only gingerly tap their victims with the edge of the blade. The story, such as it is, revolves around a young woman named Vicki Kent who is released from a mental institution after murdering two neighborhood boys (I think) for no apparent reason. It's actually hard to tell who she killed because this part of her back story is nestled between vignettes of other homicides that are ostensibly committed by members of her extended family upon other members of her extended family, such as the quick introduction of another young Kent woman who murders her sister in the bathtub before inconveniently slipping and impaling herself onto her own axe. There's also a brief mention of a Kent aunt who walks around in her garden once a day with her ample breasts hanging out of her blouse, a habit that apparently irks her husband enough for him to hire a man to kill her, which he eventually confesses to before hanging himself. This brings us to about the three-minute mark of the film.Upon Vicki's release, her sister and brother (who is played by two different actors within the course of about 30 seconds) start scheming to drive her insane so she'll be committed again. The first step of their nefarious plan is to lure her into a dark bathroom, where they fondle her breasts and smear blood all over her, which vanishes by the time a jump cut finds her fleeing into her bedroom. Later touches of brilliance include the brother dressing up like a zombie and chasing Vicki through the woods. Vicki also has a beau of sorts, her beloved Frankie, who, in addition to shagging her sister, also has another girlfriend with whom he shares a hysterical semi-soft-core make-out scene in which the couple's awkward smooches make them look like they absolutely despise kissing each other. On that note, another definite absurdist highlight is our heroine's bizarre erotic hallucination later in the film (ably described by the narrator: "Suddenly Vicki felt like someone was making love to her in bright flashing colors"), where repeated shots show the lovers' bodies entwined in a way that would make any sort of sexual congress uncomfortable, if not impossible, while super-imposed images of crashing waves and psychedelic lights mingle with their naughty parts.Frankie's demise is notable because of the way he screams with terror when a cat jumps out at him during the obligatory "is someone there?" build-up, yet barely reacts while he's being hacked to death. In fact, several of the hapless victims in the film look downright bored while they're being killed, which is pretty fitting because we do too. I could go on, but space is a factor. Suffice to say that the rest of the film is as delightfully absurd as you can possibly imagine. Frame by frame, ANTD is a glorious example of awful, unwatchable cinema at its finest. If you're a disciple of the "so bad it's great" school of film fandom, you absolutely have to see this, because what we're dealing with here is "so bad it's the most amazing thing you'll ever see". All others should not only avoid this film, you should probably burn your computer after reading this.
Woodyanders This movie is a special kind of bad. There are bad movies and then there are Doris Wishman bad movies. Wishman had a uniquely off-kilter style and sensibility which gave her remarkably rotten celluloid abominations a distinctive identity that was wholly her own. Wishman's trademark singular ineptitude permeates every last fabulously fumbled frame of this faltering attempt at a slasher horror picture: plodding all-thumbs (mis)direction, a meandering ramshackle narrative, badly post-synced and recorded dialogue, bizarre lingering close-ups of people's feet, ridiculous sub-Jack Webbian "Dragnet"-style hard-boiled narration, chintzy cut-rate gore (the severed head that gets tossed in a fireplace is hilariously hokey!), a decent smidgen of gratuitous female nudity and soft-core sex, dreadful acting from a lame no-name cast (porn actress Samantha Fox in particular totally hams it up as the fragile and troubled Vicki), grating, redundant, and often inappropriate music, rough, grainy, shaky cinematography by frequent collaborator C. Davis Smith, choppy editing, tacky psychedelic visual flourishes, the ubiquitous false cat scare cliché, labored use of slow motion, clumsily executed murder set pieces, an absurd impromptu dance number, and a completely ludicrous "what the hell?" surprise twist ending all ensure that this exceptionally atrocious bilge is a gloriously ghastly marvel to behold from start to finish. Wonderfully rancid'n'wretched bottom-of-the-barrel schlock.
AngryChair Famed lame-film maker Ed Wood doesn't have anything on DORIS WISHMAN! This celluloid train wreck is apt proof too. Girl returns home from the loony-bin and someone begins to butcher the people around her. Who is the killer.... and will we care?Hilariously awful slasher is a doozy from beginning to end. All the characters are dubbed (by about two people), the editing is completely chaotic, the gore FX extremely cheap, and the plot is nearly incoherent. Word has it that half of Wishman's shot footage for the film was destroyed and she had to go back and re-edit and re-write the film with the remaining footage. The film is just sloppy enough for it to be true. The only good thing about A Night to Dismember is its memorable title and an amusing DVD commentary by director Wishman and her camera man. The bickering conversations between those two are worth more than a few laughs! The movie itself though is so terrible it's amazing that it was ever released. BOMB out of ****
HumanoidOfFlesh Doris Wishman's "A Night to Dismember" is an ultra-cheap and sleazy slasher flick that simply has to be seen to believed.Wishman was an innovative low budget filmmaker.Her directing,editing and marketing of her films was all self-taught and almost all of her films were self-produced."A Night to Dismember" is her only full fledged horror film.It is also a big mess.The editing is beyond awful,the use of same location in several scenes is painfully obvious,the acting is amateurish and the story is illogical and confusing.Still the film is never boring and there are some fairly nasty scenes of gory carnage including ripped out hearts and chopped off fingers.Basically "A Night to Dismember" is about psychotic woman who gets out of an insane asylum and promptly starts butchering people around her.Give this low budget trash a look.4 out of 10.