A Night to Dismember (Wishman, 1983): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm
This screening will be followed by Dr. Elena Gorfinkel and Stephen Thrower in conversation with BFI National Archive curator William Fowler.
BFI introduction:
It was a surprising moment when, in the 1980s, long-term sexploitation legend Doris Wishman made a slasher. It’s just a shame things didn’t go better – the processing lab destroyed the film reels. As a solution, Wishman incorporated found footage to paper over the cracks. Released from hospital, back into the family home, psychotic Vicki struggles to resists the powers of a sinister ancestral curse. The public greeted the film with disinterest. But the public can be wrong! Jagged, cut-up, even post-modern in shape, the incredibly weird, psychotronic A Night to Dismember distils the core tropes of the slasher genre while appearing hallucinogenically avant-garde. Dr. Gorfinkel, Thrower and Fowler discuss Wishman, her film and the links between horror and experimental film as part of the event.
Chicago Reader review:
Exploitation filmmaker Doris Wishman made her first foray into slasher flicks with this bloody, incoherent, but sometimes quite funny 1983 feature starring soft-core porn star Samantha Fox. Reportedly assembled from outtakes after a disgruntled employee destroyed the negative, it flirts with self-parody, incorporating every horror cliche from the not-very-scary graveyard scenes of Ed Wood to the unconvincing bloodbaths of Herschell Gordon Lewis. The story, recounted in flashback by a deep-voiced private detective, involves a great many knives, axes, and ice picks but never manages to be very frightening; the awful dubbing and numerous mismatched shots are hilarious, but whether that’s intentional is a matter of debate.
Jack Heilberg
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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