B-movies don't tend to live by many rules, but here's something that usually seems to be true: the worse the movie, the better the back story. Movies can't be as bad as "A Night To Dismember" all on their own, surely there must be something I don't know. Thankfully, director Doris Wishman (often referred to as the female Ed Wood, how's that for an endorsement?) helps out on this matter. According to her a disgruntled lab employee destroyed almost half the footage of this movie, which I guess explains it...to a degree. I get now why the movie's such a jumbled mess and why the worst narrator in movie history constantly has to fill in blanks, but that's just the tip of the iceberg really. What's with the game show music during tension scenes? Why did they only bother to dub in about a third of the dialogue, making the actors look like total morons for most of the time? What's with all the unwatchable scrambled footage, was this accidentally sent to a meth lab? I'm sure that the original material, if it ever existed, could have made this movie into well, an actual movie, but I think it would have still been an absolutely terrible actual movie. Let's all just be grateful this was Wishman's only attempt at a slasher and stick to laughing at her nudie flicks.

According to director Doris Wishman, much of the negative for A Night To Dismember was wiped during processing by a disgruntled lab employee, forcing her to complete the film by re-editing the remaining material together with hastily shot new footage and a god-awful narrative to try and explain what the hell is going on (it fails: within minutes I hadn't a clue what was happening).I'm not sure if I believe her story (after all, it's so easy to blame someone else for your own incompetent film-making), but if that's really the case, then what that lab guy did was unforgivable—I mean, he had the perfect opportunity to remove the entire thing from existence for good, but the douche-bag still left Wishman enough material to cobble together this abomination!Anyway, whether Wishman's story is true or not, the fact remains that A Night To Dismember redefines the word 'awful', being a thoroughly incomprehensible, horribly dubbed mess of disjointed scenes that even a liberal sprinkling of unconvincing gore (beheadings, axe murders, finger chopping, a heart removed etc.,) and gratuitous nudity cannot improve.Some call it 'surreal'; some describe it as 'so bad, it's good'; others call it 'a cult classic'. I call it s**t! Watch at your own risk.

This movie is a special kind of bad. There are bad movies and then there are Doris Wishman bad movies. Wishman had a uniquely off-kilter style and sensibility which gave her remarkably rotten celluloid abominations a distinctive identity that was wholly her own. Wishman's trademark singular ineptitude permeates every last fabulously fumbled frame of this faltering attempt at a slasher horror picture: plodding all-thumbs (mis)direction, a meandering ramshackle narrative, badly post-synced and recorded dialogue, bizarre lingering close-ups of people's feet, ridiculous sub-Jack Webbian "Dragnet"-style hard-boiled narration, chintzy cut-rate gore (the severed head that gets tossed in a fireplace is hilariously hokey!), a decent smidgen of gratuitous female nudity and soft-core sex, dreadful acting from a lame no-name cast (porn actress Samantha Fox in particular totally hams it up as the fragile and troubled Vicki), grating, redundant, and often inappropriate music, rough, grainy, shaky cinematography by frequent collaborator C. Davis Smith, choppy editing, tacky psychedelic visual flourishes, the ubiquitous false cat scare cliché, labored use of slow motion, clumsily executed murder set pieces, an absurd impromptu dance number, and a completely ludicrous "what the hell?" surprise twist ending all ensure that this exceptionally atrocious bilge is a gloriously ghastly marvel to behold from start to finish. Wonderfully rancid'n'wretched bottom-of-the-barrel schlock.

Night to Dismember, A (1983) ** (out of 4) A woman hacks up her family and then five years later is released from the asylum only to have more bodies start piling up. Is it the same woman or is someone trying to frame her? Director Wishman is best known for her sexploitation flicks of the 60s and 70s but this here is probably the best movie I've seen from her. I don't want to come off like I'm saying this is a good movie because it's not. In fact, the movie could be called the Plan 9 From Outer Space of slashers because it's so cut up, features nothing but narration and at times doesn't make a bit of sense. Apparently the film was completed in 1979 but the lab ended up destroying a lot of the film so Wishman had to spend the next four years shooting replacement scenes as she could. The film is certainly so bad it's good but it's good because of how unique and fresh it is. Wishman's directing style is so off the wall and rather interesting that you can't help but somewhat admire what she's trying to do on such a low budget. There are numerous bloody killings ranging from decapitations to throat slashings to even a fake zombie showing up. Murders happen left and right throughout the 69-minute running time and this certainly has one of the highest body counts out there. Most of the violence is cheap looking but there's plenty of red stuff for gore hounds. There's actually one effective scene and that's when the crazy girl first returns home and hears voices coming from the closet. I won't spoil what happens but I felt the scene worked very well. The majority of people watching this thing are really going to hate it but I've seen so many terrible horror films from this decade that I realized I was watching another one but a unique one at that.