STITCHER, THE - DVD review

VCI Entertainment is a company that specializes in handling older films, many B-movies from the Thirties through Seventies, with a healthy dose of dramas, crime thrillers, Westerns, serials, TV shows, sci-fi, and horror. Occasionally, however, they do something different, like help make and distribute this ultra low-budget, 2007 horror flick, "The Stitcher." How could I overlook the opportunity to see what the company was up to when it set its mind to something?

Nor how could I overlook a title like "The Stitcher"? No, it doesn't have the camp-horror cachet of something like "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things," another film VCI distributes, but you have to admit that "The Stitcher" does have the advantage of economy, conjuring up some pretty dreadful and frightening images just thinking about it. Now, if only the film had delivered better on its title, it might have been worth more of our attention.

As a person might anticipate, it's going to be a threadbare operation; IMDb lists its budget at $70,000, lunch money had it been from a major Hollywood studio. Darla Enlow, Dana Pike, and their Next Monkey Horror Films ("Branded," "Toe Tags") produced "The Stitcher," with Ms. Enlow co-writing, co-starring, editing, and directing the affair. According to the credits, she even served as director of photography. Doing that much of the job, there is no escaping the blame.

While "The Stitcher" is a fairly amateurish, standard-issue slasher film, you have to hand it to Ms. Enlow for at least injecting a little new life into the old genre, despite the budgetary limitations. Her camera work is reasonably inventive, her pacing is relatively quick and smooth, her minimal make-up techniques are crude but minimally effective, and her largely first-time actors put in largely yeoman work. So what if the results resemble a student production; it only serves to make the movie that much more fun.

The first thing you'll notice from the very beginning is that the movie features a bevy of beautiful, scantily clad women running around in it. What would a slasher film be without beautiful, scantily clad women? Yet there is almost no nudity involved, no sex, and no profanity. What's more, Ms. Enlow shows no direct infliction of wounds; she shows us the wielding of weapons and then cuts (forgive me) to the bloody aftermath. It's sort of like Hitchcock in "Psycho," the director implying more than he shows. Accordingly, we get an odd morality working here: plenty of blood, gore, and slashings, with comely, half-naked women galore, yet without any profanity, nudity, or sexual acts on display and without any knives actually carving through flesh. Although the MPAA apparently never rated the film, my guess is they might have had to stretch to give it an R. It would be close.

Anyway, the plot involves a group of people invited to a friend's big lakeside house in the sticks, a house she has recently inherited. It's just outside some unnamed redneck village where the citizens look and behave like inbred, sub-cretinous imbeciles. Think here of the savages in "The Hills Have Eyes."

Once they arrive at the house, naturally somebody starts bumping them off one at a time. He's a killer dressed in what appears to be a gunnysack covered in buttons, only much worse. He's obsessed by buttons. He cuts them from his victims' clothes and then, well, you can guess. Early on in the story, we learn that the town once prospered, until the textile mill folded. Hmmm....

If you looked up any of the actors' resumes, as I did, you'd be hard pressed to find more than a handful in the cast who had ever done a film before. Scott Gaffen, Carmen Garrison, Justin Boyd, Heather Surdukan, Laurel Williamson, Celeste Cash, Caroline Wright, Dana Pike, Darla Enlow, Don Blair, Hannah Pike, Rich Bentz, Greg Burns, Craig Walter, Mike Kelley. Do any of these names ring a bell? I thought not. Yet Ms. Enlow draws at least a few good performances from them, particularly from Craig Walter, who plays the county sheriff. Plus, Christopher Rowe (VCI's Director of Publicity) tells me he played not only Kurt, one of the guests invited to the lakeside house, he was also the stunt double for the Stitcher, and he is pictured on the cover of the DVD case as well.

OK, if Enlow did this whole thing straight it might have been a disaster, but she invests it with a modicum of humor, just enough to temper the silliness of the goings-on. For instance, when we first meet two of the male leads, a pair of filmmakers invited to the lake house, one of them comments that the community would be "a great place for a horror movie." Yep. Later, one of the characters suggests their predicament is "like a bad movie." Right again. Still later, a character makes a reference to the hillbilly miscreants in "Deliverance." Then there's the fact that the "lake house" seems to be nowhere near the lake. The closest anybody gets to the lake is at the town's marina, and for most of the movie the closest the characters ever get to water is the lake house's swimming pool.

Clichés? Darned right. Loads of them. What would a low-budget horror movie be without low-budget horror-movie clichés? Like, cell phones don't work at the lake house. Of course not. That would be too easy. And there's a creepy, suspicious old gardener on the grounds of the house. And later there's a creepy little girl doing creepy little things. And the friends always split up and go their separate ways just before the killer strikes. Audible sigh.

Nonetheless, as formulaic as it is, "The Stitcher" manages its few laughs well enough, even if the movie is deficient in serious horror, and it provides a couple of clever, surprise twists along the way, too. Or are those surprises clichés by now as well?

Video:
VCI released "The Stitcher" in its original 1.78:1 aspect ratio but in a non-anamorphic transfer. It's been years since I last watched an entire movie in non-anamorphic form, with the black bars all the way around the picture; I didn't think studios even issued films this way anymore, and maybe if VCI had released it this year instead of in 2007, they might have reconsidered things. But we have what we have, and if anything it lends the film an even lower-budget quality that is endearing in its throwback way. The image itself is slightly soft, but colors look fine, and there is no objectionable grain or noise to distract one's attention.

Audio:
The audio comes via Dolby Digital 5.1 or 2.0, although in both cases they are about ten decibels higher in volume than what you find on most other discs. So be sure to turn down the volume before you load up the disc, or it may blast you out of your seat. Otherwise, expect a soundtrack filled with rock tunes blaring out loudly and often, dialogue that appears distant and somewhat muted (particularly in 5.1; the 2.0 is clearer), and surround channels you might not notice are even functioning.

Extras:
Given that this is a super low-budget film, we shouldn't have expected much, yet the disc comes with a decent complement of extras. The first of them is an audio commentary by the director and a few cast and crew members. They seem to be having a good time and provide some entertaining remarks about the filmmaking. Next is a photo gallery that takes us behind the scenes, moving at its own pace for about eleven minutes. After that is a digital comic book, "Carthage," that lasts about ten minutes. Then there's a nineteen-minute, making-of featurette, "Stitching It All Together," that offers even more on the filmmaking; followed by a twelve-minute blooper reel, spelled "Blooper Real" in the disc menu, that is rather charming. The final major extras are three music videos, "Butterfly" and "Marathon" by RadioRadio, done live, and "In the Wake of Despair" by Darkset Theory.

The extras conclude with a series of trailers for this film and others in the VCI library; twelve scene selections; and English as the only spoken language.

Parting Shots:
If you're a fan of super-low-budget horror films, you could do worse than "The Stitcher." It actually competes well with big-budget dross like the remakes of "Friday the 13th," "Halloween," and "A Nightmare on Elm Street." In fact, if you consider that some day "The Stitcher" may become a minor cult favorite (if it isn't already), it could be of value just to say you saw it. In the meantime, have I mentioned that Universal recently released "Psycho" on Blu-ray? Just a thought.