we're on a mission from god wendy so i got that going darling i picked the wrong way to quit sniffing blue light of my life we enjoy your films i thought they smelled bad on the outside [Music] welcome to vintage video where we're re-watching the 80s so you don't have to we'll be reviewing every major film release of the 1980s in real time i'm patrick o'reilly i'm jessie bayless and i'm richard wells and today marks the 40th anniversary of the release of effects on june 1st 1980 it was written and directed by dusty nelson based on the novel snuff by william h mooney and released by synapse films all right there was a big old question mark there after 40. i would like to issue a formal apology to the two of you because we're all busy people we don't have a lot of time to do research and i made this list and this movie was shot in 1979 and it played at sundance in 1980 while it did technically screen in june of 1980 at the sundance film festival which at the time was known as the u.s film festival it never got a release theatrical or television or home video until synapse released the film on dvd in 2005. i watched this movie for no reason we we should have skipped this one and i apologize but it was made at the time it could very easily have been distributed it came very close to a distribution deal could it very easily have been good but it wasn't there were there were filmmakers and there was a distribution deal in place and they backed out of it at the last second probably because of the context i don't blame them wow but i just want to like as a preliminary i'm also apologizing to the audience because there are movies we're not going to get to this year and we got to this one and uh and i feel bad because this didn't get a proper release and there are movies that did that we're not going to cover this year because i'm forgetting them but we can't put any more on the list we already have too many movies we start the film with various shots of music and picture editing equipment and close-ups of mustachioed faces with headset microphones close to their mouths we see a girl in a shower lathering up shaving and drying herself she steps out of the shower and she lights a cigarette with an extremely tall lighter she she lights it and the flame is like four inches tall and she is startled by a vision of a guy behind her popping out from behind a shower curtain waving a razor around and very loud discordant music drowns out all the dialogue between her and this character but then she goes and looks behind the curtain again after this weird conversation that she had and there's nobody there and then we see a director say cut and it turns out this was a surreal scene from a horror movie even though we were seeing it edited yeah even or somehow we're watching it edited even though it's supposed to be happening while we're watching it right well that seems to be a theme in this movie yeah we don't actually correctly film movies the way they're supposed to be filmed i don't know that that's i i think for a low budget horror movie in the 70s this might be how horror movies were made at the time i'm just saying like they make they make this actress go through a lot of things that would definitely be multiple shots and the way they showed it to us it was multiple shots but then the way they like tell her okay now in this scene you're gonna do this this this this this this and this yeah pretty good that's not all gonna be one shot but also i feel they do this fake out with the horror scenes and the real scenes like too many times with and to to know to no twist like it's never this time it's real it's i don't think it's supposed to be setting up a twist i think it's supposed to be setting up the mood where you're just constantly questioning everything that's happening is this real but i'm not part of the scene i'm not i never question it beyond that first scene once i realized that they're filming a movie i never assumed everything was just a movie scene yes okay with with this couple i did not so that's the difference between you and i that's a wrap for the day tune in next week we're going to be covering oh thank god that's a wrap for the day the cameraman is unloading a mag in a black bag he labels the can and then he asks if the actors are actually married and someone answers for now they are how because to add to the confusion and so that we're not we're not hinted right away whether something is real or not we learn that the actor and actress playing the husband and wife in this movie are husband and wife in real life to make sure that we're constantly confused the director sits in his cabin and he lifts a mirror off of the wall to reveal a giant camera yeah i i was like oh there's gonna be a camera behind this mirror it's like oh it's a gigantic television camera yeah huge i i was like i was expecting even like a lens the size of like a soda can diameter like just a small hidden well why why be chintzy if you can't see this whole area behind the yeah the mirror anyway this is a studio level that's practically imax yeah lens the size of your head yeah this is you need uh nasa's zeiss lens from barry linden you can get absolute no lighting you can still get a decent picture with it we shoot another scene with the actor couple and the woman is having visions of the man holding a knife at the breakfast table and then getting shot in the head and blood spurting out over the table we cut to the actress performing a monologue in front of the camera mirror this is a monologue from shakespeare's richard ii yeah i i was like i'm gonna look this up i'm gonna listen to what she's saying you're gonna do google search based on the on the on the text that she's saying i'm gonna figure out what what monologue from what shakespeare play this is i go to imdb it's like the third piece of trivia god damn it there it is look at all that effort i put in we cut to a bar where the camera guy his name is dominic although i don't remember anyone saying his name in the movie but his name is dominic in the credits he's hitting on the girl who was performing shakespeare in front of the mirror this is the gaffer for the film she's not an actress in the film although she would like to be she's an actress in the film that we're watching but not the film that they're making not in the film within a film don't make it it's more confusing than it is she actually kind of is an actress in the film within a film um but we don't know that yet so scratch that the camera guy admits that he's never worked with a female gaffer in the background we see tom zavini wearing a weird like rainbow umbrella hat yeah it reminds me of when beetlejuice comes up out of the model and he's got like the carousel of like of things on his head he wanders into the middle of their conversation and as far as we know he is not a part of the crew of this film he's just a person at a bar that they went to and he's getting in between them and he's like swinging his umbrella hat in both of their faces and annoying them and eventually dominic uh yells at him enough that he stands up and punches dominic in the face and then the girl celeste the gaffer for this movie kicks him in the balls and the two of them leave the bar we get this really close-up insert shot of a razor blade being dragged along the edge of a foot i think in the insert it's a real foot and the blade has fake blood smeared on it and so it's like a dull blade that's just wiping blood on a foot but then we cut to a wider shot to show that it's a dummy leg and they're actually slashing it open um because it's full of blood right it actually has like an arterial spray built into it the director wants it to spurt more but for some reason his whole vfx team is telling him no that's not the way it would look and he says you don't care how it would look this is what i wanted to do in in the movie that we're making aka his whole vfx team being the cameraman and the gaffer yes yes the whole vfx but it's just weird that they're telling him no when it's like i didn't ask yes or no questions i just said make it do this but it seems like she's just mad that she's not in the movie and she turns to walk away from them the camera guy offers to get the director a burger in town and the director also just walks away from him we see a girl getting dressed in a room and she reaches into a hamper which she is very nearly swallowed by whole the camera is shaking and we're getting loud music and craziness um but of course this is part of the movie this was just confusing to me because like i realized that this was supposed to be part of the movie within a movie but what exactly was supposed to be happening here because i don't understand this movie within this movie because i thought it was like this psychological you know thriller type movie where this guy isn't who she thinks he is is he hiding very tiny in this hamper and pulling her in what is happening well it gets more confusing later when the husband who she's been having only visions of being dead becomes a zombie but is like completely rational and talking to her yeah and then just gets in an argument with her well that's not part of the movie within the movie though i don't think it is no no okay that was that was an actual scene the next morning the guy from the bar played by tom cevini is meeting with the director around the breakfast table and they're discussing future scenes from the production so it turns out he is actually working on the movie he tells savini not to talk about the big chase scene around the rest of the crew hey listen when you come over here next week i don't want you getting all coked up and talking about the chase the chase huh hey i'm cool i'm cool i'm cool yeah well if you're so cool how about cooling off my nose then we cut to the lead actor barney waking up at night he walks around the cabin he steps outside he doesn't see anything so he goes to grab a gun because he's hearing weird sounds and he's getting paranoid suddenly his wife is there and she asks what he's doing and we don't know if this is in the scene or in the movie because i do they're married no we don't i said cause i am choosing to abide by the rules of the film which is that i don't know yet turns out that this is real oh yeah no it's not it's part of the movie it's part of the movie it's always part of the movie when it's them yeah so uh we have the camera guy doing a lighting test outside the door and uh he's flirting with celeste again we cut to later that night where he's waking up to loud music playing and he comes downstairs to see uh what the loud music is and it's rita the actress from the film dancing for the director while her husband just takes pictures of her yeah the director's doing lines of coke while her husband is just taking pictures of her kind of lazily strip dancing in front of them we cut to a room full of editors watching the dancing on like a whole control room bay of monitors yeah so now we got like a cabin in the woods thing going on yeah it kind of is a cabin in the woods the camera guy is trying to teach celeste how to fish and she actually catches something which he then smashes on a rock because that's the the easiest way to kill the fish someone from the woods is watching through a blue filter which over the course of the film will realize is it is the camera pov we see the director playing with a simon says when he's called to set and he's like i'll be right down he has to finish this pattern we're ready okay i'll be right there sabine tries to apologize to celeste and dominic is watching them from near a campfire she says that she isn't she's not going to accept his apology and she doesn't want to talk to him she walks away dominic follows her into the house and they move up to the room where there's that big camera right behind the mirror which she knows about right she knows about but he does not well we don't know that she knows we know that she was performing for it earlier yeah she was doing that shakespeare play and then she looked into it and says send that to lacey so she she's in on it everybody's in on it except for this guy well i knew that by the end but i didn't realize we knew that at this point yeah so the two of them go up there and they have sex in front of this camera and so the room full of editors is now watching the two of them have sex and lisa's still directing yeah lacie is directing as the scene is going on so he's like move up to their faces i'll get more of their legs and like telling them to move the cameras all over the place they're complimenting the microphones on the room because they seem to have a pretty decent budget for this kind of stuff you can hear suction yeah this is great dominic is talking with the rest of the crew in the basement that night about what's trending in horror films he thinks that realism is what gets people to buy tickets it's at least what he seems to connect with when he sees a movie that if there's not something that feels authentic then it's not scary to him they point out you know exorcist and uh night of living dead as like things that were gave them nightmares as children and and he's talking about as an adult something that's scary they invite him to do a line of cocaine and he takes them up on it right away they talk to him about how hot and talented celeste is and the director says she'll be very good in the film and then he says she's not in the film and he says right must be better coke than i thought oh yeah you're right she's not in the film how silly of me but she is in the film they're all on the film the director strings up a snuff film for the guys to watch and i'm not going to describe this in any particular detail but it's a snuff film that means it's a film where a person was probably actually killed to make a piece of uh violent pornography is that the definition of a snuff film basically yeah if we're following eight millimeter rules yeah it's it's a film where someone is snuffed out it's a film where a person is actually killed okay or an animal can be killed sometimes they argue over whether or not it's real for a while the director says that it's impossible to know because he got it from a guy who got it from a guy but as dominic gets more and more upset he finally admits that he made it as a student and that the girl was not harmed and he says well you should have got the guy who did that those visual effects to do your effects in this movie he says that guy died in a motorcycle accident so he was not available one of the guys sitting there keeps asking to see it again like he's joking around like oh well i think we should watch it again just you know to be sure because he's just an insane pervert my pants come off later the the actress rita is complaining to the director that she feels a lot of pressure working on the movie and sometimes she thinks that barney her husband and acting partner is really coming at her with this razor the director offers her sex to make her feel better and she turns him down but thanks him it's a weird scene dominic finds a stack of polaroids in his cabin and he's flipping through them seeing a woman get tied to a chair in the same manner as in the snuff film and barney sneaks up behind him and surprises him which freaks him out the director is blocking a handheld chase scene up a narrow stairway in one of the cabins that the plan is that the actress will be chased up the stairs shouting please don't kill me and then at the top she will push barney down the steps and get a gun out of the closet at the top of the stairs dominic suggests that he and celeste just run away together because this movie is driving everyone crazy and suddenly barney busts in and he's wearing like this white zombie makeup and he's got a pig head on a knife and he uses the razor that he's been waving around to slice off the pig's nose and then it falls on the ground and celeste picks it up and rubs it in his face because she's angry at him and she's trying to kind of push him out the door and when she gets him out the door you see her like stop for a second and look at the carpet to like scoot the pig nose out of the door too the director wakes up dominic early the next morning and he says hey i need you to go out with savini and this other guy and you're going to get some second unit footage of the wilderness because this movie's about possession and i want people to feel like the wilderness is possessed so go get some spooky footage so the guys go out into the woods and uh you've just pointed out when they're watching it that they get out of the car and just start walking down the hill with no camera or any equipment or anything i mean maybe they're just looking for a spot to shoot from but they were yeah they were they definitely got a shot but uh savini is carrying a shotgun as they walk down and uh all of a sudden the guy that's walking alongside dominic bolts off to the side and savini behind him shoots him in the foot and dominic starts running full speed down this hill to get away and he collapses on this like leafy hill around a corner and he pulls off his shoe to inspect his foot and the heel is like completely blown open yeah so he takes the sock off his other foot and puts it over the bad one and uh puts both his shoes on and continues crawling away uh we get this blue filtered camera again with radio chatter implying that the the whole editorial team is watching this chase as it goes and then we see the director sitting down and in the control room he says we got lucky and you hear celeste say he wasn't supposed to get hurt so here we're learning that the entire thing is like a the game level prank on this one guy who is the main character of the movie and doesn't know it the camera is following dominic in a wide shot as he moves into a nearby house which is supposed to be patrolled by a guy with a gun to prevent anything terrible from happening but the guy has stepped out of the cabin and so uh dominic goes inside and he hides in a closet like i'm confused as to what was supposed to have happened with this scene like i realized that like they're tricking him to get this realistic movie made yeah but they were just supposed to what scare him with the shotgun and he was going to run away and do like was supposed to go to this house maybe i i think the director was going to kind of let it go yeah because they're they're filming all of this yeah everything you have to assume that everything is being filmed yeah it's kind of the same as the sex scene where it's just kind of like a hey we kind of urged this thing to happen and we're just gonna follow it and see where it goes and that'll be the story yeah but celeste does say something like this wasn't in the script right but they're not filming that i i guess but that implies that there was a script to be followed for her well and well and a general idea of what this guy is probably going to do so i just don't know what they thought was gonna happen i think that they they only knew what was going to happen up to a certain point and then they were going to have to improvise moving forward from that point but i i think at the end of this film the director is 100 satisfied with what he got but so the uh he sneaks into this house uh dominic's hiding in a closet when the guy who's supposed to be on patrol here comes back into the house leans his shotgun against the wall walks outside for a second and dominic gets a hold of the fire poker so when the guy comes back in to grab his gun he just bashes the guy's brains in on the floor i would have grabbed the gun yes that's what i was thinking he ought to do but uh it wouldn't have done you much good because this gun was not loaded at the time but uh he grabs the the fire poker and beats the guy's head in on the floor and then he throws up because it's disgusting and he's a normal person who doesn't have to bash people's brains in often then he takes the shotgun and loads it and he starts crawling until he collapses on another hilltop in the wilderness back at the house barney is chasing the actress up the stairs as they blocked earlier but she's calling him barney which is his real name because maybe he's actually killing her who knows it's not clear at the top of the stairs she shoots him as they planned in their blocking session and dominic wakes up next to a blue lighting kit on a hill i like that where he's like well we want this to feel very realistic but also like i can't see anything so just go put a light next to his body while he's bleeding out on the hill so he gets up and he starts heading down to the house with his loaded shotgun dom enters the house just as uh celeste and the director are having an argument presumably about whether or not she can act or be in this movie and she shoots him at once in the chest and then once in the face and she turns and trains the gun on dom and says he killed we didn't barney but she doesn't shoot dominic no and then we hear a honking outside which indicates an incoming emergency we have uh savini is driving his truck back to the house because he's trying to warn them hey we just found this other guy's body um and uh this guy doesn't know it's a movie and he's gonna kill everybody and they run into the house right as uh dom and celeste are coming out a different exit so then when savini comes back out the front door to beat him up he just fires the shotgun into savini's chest and blows him back through the doorway and then celeste is completely in shock here and she's like you really killed him and he says he would have killed me and they get into the car to drive away and she says this is a movie you weren't supposed to he this is not in the script and then he says what the hell are you talking about and then the car explodes like halfway down killing celeste and dominic and then in the blue filter from upstairs in the cabin we're looking down at the director in the front yard wiping off blood makeup and he looks up and he says did you get it and then we cut to a movie marquee that says lacey bickle's duped the snuff movie and then we fade to black and we get our credits but yeah i think uh that he kind of had the same thought that dominic did which is that the what was happening needed to be authentic and so he made a feature-length snuff movie where the characters are actually being killed on screen well but he had that in mind all along right like it wasn't dominic that gave him the idea no but i i just think they were on the same page in terms of it needs to be authentic for me to care about it which is why he put that snuff film on for them in the first place is because the whole point of those films is that it needs to be authentic wouldn't it be a really bad idea for you to advertise your movie as a snuff movie because that would be illegal i guess you'd have to prove yeah the burden of evidence is on the person pushing charges although these people have disappeared right but people disappear all the time the ones that you just look like you actually killed in your movie yeah appear all the time i i think that you if someone disappears and you're like well that person was in a movie right maybe the filmmaker killed him like i would that wouldn't be my first assumption no but maybe they actually died in the movie if i watched a movie and it looked like somebody authentically got killed and i'd be like what happened to that person did is this like an actual murder and they're like well they disappeared we never heard from them again but no they definitely weren't murdered in this movie if special effects even if someone told me that i would think oh that's just the marketing campaign that's just them trying to sell me that this person was actually like the blair witch kids oh they're all dead that's weird because they were on jay leno yesterday talking about the movie but yeah no i i think uh although in real life filmmakers have been hauled into court and had to prove that they didn't kill the actors that were in their film cannibal holocaust comes to mind that was a situation where the death scene was so authentic that they were like prove to me that you didn't kill this person and he had to like buy her a plane ticket to come to court but yeah i think the point of the movie for him was just i just want to finish this movie and i think it'll feel very real if i'm actually killing the people and honestly i think anything that happens after the movie comes out he cares less about he cares more about people seeing this movie and becoming a becoming a cult icon because he actually killed people for a movie i don't think he would be that upset if it did get out the writer director here was dusty nelson who also directed white phantom necromancer inferno and a handful of mr rogers episodes those very disturbing ones yes remember the one word enough roger shoes he just slowly crushes a puppet under his foot where he has like the the he does like that great famous dilemma where you have three people on a train track and one person on a train track but it's the puppets yeah or the one where when he takes off his jacket the vest is made of human skin um joseph pilato was dominic here he played dean martin at jackrabbit slims in pulp fiction he's also rhodes in romero's day of the dead and a cop and dawn of the dead uh john harrison was lacey bickel the director here um we're filled with tran channeling like a dan aykroyd yeah he felt dan aykroyd here he also felt um like someone trying to be orson wellesey um but uh he wrote that disney dinosaur movie the cgi dinosaur movie we're back no no no it's called dinosaur oh it's called walt disney sorry that wasn't the disney movie i realized yeah was it ultimate we're back no spielberg we're back with spielberg but but yeah dinosaur was that movie where they filmed actual locations and then inserted the cg stuff oh yes oh yes he also directed a dune mini series in 2000 starring william hurt i remember that he directed a couple creep shows from nicotero's reboot not from the original series he directed two episodes of leverage from your seasons my seasons yeah yeah from season five right yeah yeah he did two in your season yeah two two from your season i think he did five total but two from season five he also did two tales from the crypts um he did one called the pit which i don't remember the one called the pendulum no the pit is one about like uh underground fighting ring but uh he did one called easel kilia which is tim roth is like a painter who like paints like a grisly murder and people like it so much but he has to keep killing people to inspire new paintings or something like that but uh that's a good one and the the john harrison the director character here also composed the music for this film he also did the music for day of the dead and both of the uh original creep show features bernard mckenna played barney here he wrote yellowbeard with graham chapman and peter cook yeah he also played parvis official stoner's helper and giggling guard in life of brian and tom savini is nikki here he's obviously a master of horror effects we saw his work earlier this year on friday the 13th he probably did the effects for this movie as well he did i'm sure and uh he obviously had an earlier role in dawn of the dead on both sides of the camera where he did visual effects for all the crazy zombie blood and gore and uh he played like the leader of the biker the biker gang that rides through the mall in the middle of the movie uh jess this is an upper down for you this is about as down as you can get richard yeah it's a down um i think that instead of watching effects you should watch the movie effects or the channel uh no the 1986 fx movie or fx2 no no fx 1 is all you need to watch okay or fxx that's the 10th movie in the franchise spun off into a whole channel um i'm gonna give this an up what i am really yeah i thought it was interesting oh man so i'm sorry guys i like this one i like the the gore and i liked i thought it was interesting the whole guy doesn't know that he's in a movie within a movie subplot but it was so important like i think that that in and of itself is a neat idea it was so poorly done i disagree i i i felt it was confusing throughout and in addition to being confusing when it wasn't confusing it was just bad i disagree i i felt like it was doing what truman show was doing um but it was doing it in this era of like burgeoning gore visual effects where a person's murder could be conceivably confused for a really good makeup job and like this was right at the beginning in the in human history of when that was possible to convincingly fake a murder or actually kill someone and blame it on visual effects i feel like this was the right time for this movie to come out it's a shame that it took until 2005 to come out but i thought it was pretty intriguing i thought it was smart and i like the performances all around so i'm sorry guys letterboxed what are we thinking so i'm i'm putting this pretty darn low on the list right now it's in my let's see one two three four five it is ninth from last place it is right between the privatize and cereal for me uh i don't have it that far down but i have it pretty low um i'm actually gonna put this uh between just tell me what you want and stunt rock okay i am going to put this above heartbeat and just below don't go in the house so that's not like super high on my list it's uh that's in the middle of the road it's right in the middle i think that's everything for this one if you guys have any thoughts you'd like to share on effects even though it's technically a 2005 film we are vintage video pod on twitter facebook instagram and letterbox where as i've said before you can find each of our full movie rankings for the year we can also be found at vintagevideopodcast.com please consider rating us on itunes to help people find the show and if you take the time to leave us a review we will thank you personally in an upcoming episode if you're feeling especially generous you can also support the show through patreon.com vintage video podcast and on that note i'd like to offer a special shout out to our newest five dollar patreon subscriber steven sperling i chat with stephen a lot on twitter and we thank him for his contribution to the program because this is our first episode of the month again i wanted to remind our listeners about our patreon campaign for anyone who hasn't had time to check it out we have a couple of tiers vintage video will always be free to listen to but if it's worth it to you a donation as small as a buck a month is greatly appreciated we are into june now we've been doing the show for five months and this is our 54th episode we're averaging close to 11 titles a month and expect to cover about 14 a month on average over the course of the year which means at the buck a month tier you're donating about seven or eight cents per episode we also offer a five dollar tier which is 36 cents per film and includes a shout out on the show with a monthly exclusive episode reviewing a title from the 70s and a hand in choosing each month's film we've recorded six of our seventies episodes so far and for july the second tier members are choosing between three titles they call me mr tibbs the second installment in the in the heat of the night trilogy starring sidney poitier as virgil tibbs detective in the san francisco police department joe a drama from john g avelson director of rocky about an unlikely duo of hippie-hating maniacs starring peter boyle as the titular joe and susan sarandon in her feature film debut and where's papa a black comedy from director carl reiner exploring the bizarre relationship between a mother ruth gordon and her son george seagal each of which will celebrate their 50th anniversaries this july if this sounds like something you'd be interested in you can find our campaign at patreon.com vintage video podcast and if not i hope you'll at least do us the honor of continuing to listen thanks again and i hope you'll join us next time when we'll be discussing the mountain men which imdb summarizes like so a pair of grizzled frontiersmen fight indians guzzle liquor and steal squaws in their search for the legendary valley so full of beavers that they jump right into your traps in this fanciful adventure we leave you now with the trailer for the mountain men charlton heston brian keith god mountain men the west wouldn't have been the same without them [Applause] [Music] they had their share of danger [Music] they had their share of women right you're gonna keep her running moon why don't you go home i go with you reckon i got any choice he opens the path for others but he will not have her or one more thing belonging to my people alone they were explosive together [Applause] dynamite [Applause] the mountain men the wilder the country the wilder the men you