1 gibble out of 5

Director: Fred Vogel, various

Okay, let’s get this over with.

Some backstory: flashback several years.  I’m a horror fan.  I’ve watched some underground stuff, and seen bits and pieces of Cannibal Holocaust, and watched Evil Dead and Dead Alive and knew who Tobe Hooper was.  It’s enough to get you entrance into the horror society.  At some point, my film knowledge was called into question, and so to conquer this – to have the ability to always have an informed movie opinion – I pledged to watch every movie ever made.  Things were slow going before Netflix, just working off random promos I had gotten when working at Tower Records and cheapie used deals you’d pick up at Blockbuster or what have you.  Still, I was watching things I wouldn’t normally watch.

Then: Netflix.  Netflix introduced me to the concept of the uber-low-budget.  The kind of stuff you’re not going to find unless you’re directly looking for it.  And it sort of blew my mind: I knew I’d never realistically be able to watch every movie ever made, but now we’re adding independently made, super low distribution flicks into the mix and that amount of movies to watch becomes nigh infinite.  (Mind you, I still am attempting to do this and loving every bad-movie-minute of it.)

Then internet research started sending me to the fringes.  With my eyes opened to movies I hadn’t noticed before, being a “horror” fan, I realized I’d be digging into some wacky shit.  At some point, if you’re reading about fringe horror, you’re going to come across August Underground.  What I read, frankly, pissed me off and disgusted me.  It sounded like metalheads playing up the trenchcoat aspect of their lifestyle by showing they had no substance and just wanted to watch people die.  The boards on IMDB are filled with people just wanting to know the details of the kills in the AU series, and details were provided.  And sounded beyond horrible.  Interviews and pictures of Toe Tag productions’ Fred Vogel (one of the lead figures in the company, which essentially made the films) made me feel like he was the single-celled jerk I assumed he was.

Whatever.  My incredible bias toward it made me realize that I’d eventually, at some point, have to watch the movies.  They’re not readily available, and unless you’re a downloader type, can pretty much only be gotten right from the distributor.  I finally saw the series at one point, watching the three films – August Underground, August Underground’s Mordum, and Penance – over three days.

And they’re pointless.  I have to retract all of my negativity from before to say something a bit more level-headed: Fred Vogel and crew set out to make simulated snuff films.  These are the recordings of fictional serial killers.  And to that extent, the films (the first one moreso than 2 or 3) achieve their goal.  A lot of the movies are just random flashes of whatever the killers felt like recording, or just snippets of pointless (and generally stupid) conversation.  I would later hear Vogel speak some more on the films in a much better movie – S&Man, by J.T.Petty – and it made me understand the intentions of the series a little more, and I no longer saw Vogel as exclusively one-dimensional.

There are tons of arguments here about whether or not all film has merit, and that’s some of what Vogel spoke to in the S&Man interview.  That’s too broad of a topic to address here.  I offer what’s above as my logic in arriving at my feelings regarding the movies, that I can understand the need for the niche, but that shitty movies are still shitty movies.

‘August Underground’ seems to be the most “accurate” of the bunch in terms of showing us what a killer’s tape might be like.  ‘Mordum’ is just stupid, however many minutes of upping the gross-out factor with vomit and every offense you can think of, perpetrated by annoying people.  And ‘Penance’ is a stupid person’s attempt at creating a plot to this non-story.  The gross kills don’t actually happen on-screen – Toe Tag productions is no After Human, Rob Hall’s effects company that made some devastatingly awesome, practical, on-screen effects happen in Laid to Rest 1 and 2.  But what’s on screen is still gross, don’t get me wrong.  That is real vomit, and spit, and while the blood and shit might be makeup, it looks real enough with the poor lighting.

Now, as you can also read on the IMDB boards, all of this loses any sense of anything without context.  It’s not scary, or frightening, or even gross because there’s nothing to latch on to.  It’s annoying because most of the sound is screaming or cursing.  There’s no plot (especially in 1 and 2) beyond following people who kill people, and even that isn’t plotted too well.  We don’t know the victims.  This is, in a sense, part of the “experiment” – presenting all of this without any context at all – but, fine, experiment concluded.

If you want disturbing, watch Martyrs.  If you want to question your movie watching decisions for 6 hours, watch August Underground.