Blood Diner USA,
NR, 88 m, 1987
When
connoisseurs of schlock cinema talk about the worst of the worst directors,
I’m surprised that the name Jackie Kong doesn’t come up more often. Golden
Turkey Award-winners such as Ed Wood and William “One Shot” Beaudine are
veritable maestros of the medium next to this hack. And if you dared to think
that Kong couldn’t make a shoddier film than The Underachievers, then
feast your eyes on Blood Diner, her first foray into the macabre since The
Being. No question about it, The Being was a reeking pile of
mutant muck, save for the (downright baffling) presence of Martin Landau, who
helped make the film of some interest to genre buffs. But Blood Diner, a
comedic splatter fest, doesn’t offer up a single frame worthy of consideration
to even the most forgiving of midnight movie crowds. It fails abysmally on every
level. The
story of Blood Diner is damn near incomprehensible, which would be fine
if there was a unifying theme, but the whole blankety-blank thing is just a
series of lame-brained bits that wouldn’t cut the muster at a junior high
school no-talent show. One day circa nineteen-sixty-something, two young
brothers, George Tutman (who wears a pound of pomade in his hair) and Michael
Tutman (who looks half-Asian and wears a pound of pomade in his hair), are paid
a visit by their mad uncle, Anwar (Drew Godderis), who was happening by after
slaughtering a girl’s glee club. Following a needlessly dramatic entrance into
the Tutman residence (that is, chopping through the cardboard front door Jack
Torrance-style), he instructs his beloved nephews to follow their dreams: Mikey
(played by the director’s daughter, Roxanne Cybelle, a horrid little actress)
is an aspiring hypnotist, while Georgie Porgie (Sir Lamont Rodeheaver—and, no,
I haven’t been able to verify if he’s an honest-to-god sir) has a penchant
for the culinary arts. (He whips up fancy dishes out of Play-Doh.) Uncle Anwar,
his crazy eyes moistening with the sense that his end is drawing nigh, gives
each of the boys an ancient amulet and tells them to never forget him. Then,
with a meat cleaver in one hand and his genitalia in the other, he bounds for
the doorway, only to be gunned down by Johnny law. Fast-forward
twenty years. George (who has devolved into an utter retard with a thing for
wrestling) and Michael (who now looks half-Hispanic and has a thing for
abhorrent fashions) are partners in a (tackily decorated) health food diner.
(It’s filled with the types of characters that you know would never be caught
dead in such a place.) Late one night, the boys decide to stop by the cemetery
where their uncle is buried. After sending the boneyard’s drunken security
guard to that great beer hall in the sky (thanks to a crack on the noggin that
forces his bloodshot eyes to pop out of their sockets), the boys exhume
Anwar’s corpse and remove his brain. (Please don’t ask me to speculate on
how—after two decades—it didn’t rot away.) Giddy as a couple of
schoolboys, they put the brain (and an attached pair of equally well-preserved
eyeballs) in a jar filled with some sort of bubbling solution. A very old tome
is cracked opened, and an incantation to Sheetar, the Egyptian goddess of
whoknowswhat, is recited. Walla! Uncle Anwar’s disembodied brain is
five-percent functional again. (Though he has no vocal apparatus, it doesn’t
stop the old crank from carrying on about this, that and the other.) He dubs his
nephews disciples of Sheetar, which means that if they follow a set of
centuries-old rules, they will become masters of all. So here’s the plan (I
think): they will hunt down and slaughter dozens of immoral girls and use the
choicest remains to recreate Sheetar. (No, one slut will not suffice; Sheetar is
a goddess of many facets.) Then they will sacrifice a virgin at a “blood
buffet,” which will cue Sheetar to come down from up above (or up from down
below) and inhabit the body that they have constructed for her. And after
Sheetar gets done doing whatever she has in mind for the peoples of the world,
George and Michael will… uh… er… Ah, gee, I have no fucking idea! The
local chief of police, Miller (played by some guy who sounds like Count Floyd),
wants to get the murder of the cemetery guard solved quickly, but his primary
detective, Mark Shepard (played by some guy wearing loud, mismatching duds and
an Earl Camembert-style helmet of hair) is a total dunderhead. So when
chiefy’s sucker-punches fail to straighten Mark out, he assigns him a new
partner, Sheba Jackson (played by some gal who looks like Janet Jackson and
dresses like Tootie from the later seasons of “The Facts of Life”). Sheba is
all business (her lips are always pierced), while Mark is a narcissistic
pussy-hound (though his mannerisms are quite faggoty), so there are lots of easy
jokes at the expense of their contrary personalities. The comic timing of these
two obvious non-professionals is excruciatingly bad; it’s of no surprise that
neither one of them ever worked in pictures again. Actually, that’s the fate
that befell most of this cringe-inducing cast. Meanwhile,
Anwar’s nephews are on the hunt for fresh harlot meat. (Though how fresh could
the meat of a harlot be?) Their first stop is to the set of a nude aerobics
video. Wearing a Reagan mask (I don’t even want to attempt to decipher the
meaning of that touch), Michael guns down all of the topless dancers (as
well as their gay blade instructor), and then carves out their tongues. (Body
parts that aren’t used to help build Sheetar are figured into the diner’s
daily specials.) Later, the boys (bedecked in fright wigs and sequined
jumpsuits) visit a nightclub to score some more limbs. (When a short, baby-faced
bouncer refuses to let them in for not having IDs, they respond by throwing him
into traffic. The punchline comes when the wheels of a pimped-out car smash the
poor bastard’s head to a bloody pulp, causing the clubbers on line to break
into laughter.) After presenting themselves to the scene in a manner that makes
the Butabi brothers look downright suave by comparison, George and Michael hook
up with a couple of unsightly skanks, and then bring them back to the diner to
hack ‘em up. (Back in the day, Siskel and Eggbert would disparage this type of
movie because they felt it was hateful to women. I can’t help but wonder how
those two would’ve responded to Blood Diner, which was directed by a
woman. Maybe not a particularly bright or creative woman, but a woman just the
same.) Michael
soon finds a virgin in the form of a mousy schoolgirl named Connie (Lisa Elaina).
He does some of his best Bela Lugosi-style eye work on her, and she becomes
immediately smitten with him. So, with their chaste chickie in place and
Sheetar’s new bod fully constructed, George and Michael throw open the doors
to their “blood buffet.” It’s a raucous affair: a hair band bangs out
ear-piercing tunes while the guests throw themselves about and gorge on pink
medicine balls. As the moon comes into alignment with Jupiter, Connie is placed
on a sacrificial altar in front of Sheetar’s patchwork frame. The goddess
awakens, and upon her belly appears a big, ugly mouth with spiky, piranha-like
teeth. (It put me in the mind of
the sarlacc from Return of the Jedi.) But everything goes to shit when
the cops show up with guns blazing, rousing Sheetar to fire bolts of lightning
from her fingertips (kind of like the Emperor in Jedi or the robotic
reincarnation of Vera Webster in Superman III). The merrymakers, having
transformed into flesh-hungry freaks from the drug they were given, start
feasting on one another, their voracious appetites leaving the dance floor
saturated with blood. Well, this gory orgy goes on for a good while, but I
didn’t enjoy one stinking second of it until George and Michael bought the
proverbial farm. I
must say, hanging out for ninety minutes with a couple of jerk-offs like George
and Michael would try even Christ’s patience. Michael is played by some
one-movie-wonder named Rick Burks, whom I found hollow and self-adoring. (To be
fair, Burks took on Blood Diner only for the money; his true love was
music, though a fatal car crash in 1989 dashed his dreams of pop stardom.)
Michael is supposed to be the ladies’ man of the two, but any lady with more
than a handful of brain cells wouldn’t be caught dead in the backseat with
this cretin. Carl Crew as George fares even worse: he doesn’t bother shaping a
character; he just does whatever pops into his head. It’s obvious that Kong
and company found his spastic shtick positively riotous, but he wore out his
welcome with me faster than a New York minute. But I shouldn’t clown only on the performers; the folks behind the camera are just as inept. Everything about Blood Diner sucks: the sound, the editing, the set design, the special effects, the score—everything! But the buck stops with Kong: she recruited a lot of these bungling fools from her earlier pictures. (Her company is so pathetic that it wouldn’t even be welcome on a John Waters set.) Kong is the sloppiest moviemaker I’ve ever seen in action, and she’s so desperate for a laugh that she throws everything she can into this distasteful stew—including weird references to Adolf Hitler. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Kong’s penchant for politically incorrect humor, but it’s of the uncultured, scatological variety that appeals only to those boisterous imbeciles that make up the audience on “Def Comedy Jam.” Lucky for the rest of us, Blood Diner was the last film Kong ever made. All praises to Sheetar! March
19, 2008 “Blood Diner” Review. Ó Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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