Serious gorehounds can, at long last, retire their ragged VHS dupes of Long Island auteur Nathan Schiff‘s grew-strewn sub-sub-sub-cult classicks. Lovingly remastered from original 8mm elements, these seductively titled, yet primitive and gleefully grotesque exercises in backyard filmmaking are an acquired taste.
Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979) begins the trio with a ’50s-style tale of giagundous papier mache rodents crazed for human flesh by radioactive litter from the planet Venus. Blessedly, the running time’s only an hour.
While Mr. Schiff’s first honest and most entertaining feature, Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980), truly delivers on its murderous moniker with nasal-voiced girlies ground face-first into Lawn Boys and a disgustin’ final-reel CHAINSAW dismemberment that’s either the most DANGEROUS ever filmed or the most expertly choreographed! Although it’s a rough ride til that memorable moment, but it’s worth it, especially when the peanut butter-faced cannibal king lets his brood of angelic little girls lick the plate, so to speak.
Finally, there’s Nick’s furious skewering of ’80s greed, They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore (1985), about a pair of hayseed gardeners who butcher anyone who sniffs coke or wears designer clothes. With a yuppie getting pointy unpleasantness shoved up you know where, a nether-noshing canine and about two too many protracted cranial crushings, it’s the most, um, AMBITIOUS of the bunch gore wise.