*Time of this passage: December 17, 2019.
How do I put the façade of giving a shit about the holidays for a living? I guess 17 years in the customer service field has just wired me that way. What other things will I do for money? I am open to suggestions. The life experience I have makes the range of options pretty vast, at least known.
As a typed all that, the solution to why I put up with replying "Merry Christmas" to the constituents of the traitorous Rodney Davis could be a passive aggressive outlet of cursing the season to my non-furry loved one. Perhaps I should turn this into a pro-atheist rant.
Jesus sucks the life out of you under false pretenses. Take it back. The worst that could happen is Satan will accept you. Have you seen or read "Lucifer"?
Since I am letting my better quarter (Eva the Cat still gets a half) use the kitchen to bake and inevitably leave a mess for me to clean, buying a video game on sale is a deserved treat. And "Star Wars" has given me inspiration for another blog post. It was going to be featured in this one, but after my holiday disparagement opening, the post would be too long. If I do not post about my experience watching "Dr. Chopper", what was the point of it?
Really, what was the point of "Dr. Chopper" existing?
In the late 1980's, premier plastic surgeon and custom-motorcycle enthusiast Dr. Fielding went off the deep end in his search for immortality. Instead of modifying bodies to extend life, he decided to just take the best parts off healthy persons.
With a little surgical wizardry, he would replace his decrepit body parts with the parts he swiped. He thought this would allow him to live forever. Once the authorities caught wind of this, the man who became better known as Dr. Chopper vanished without a trace. But over the next 20 years, Lake Tatonka has been littered with loose body parts.
It seems law enforcement had deemed that the responsibility solving the case belongs to drunk and suicidal Forest Ranger Terrell to figure out. Hopefully, he can do that before Nick and his fiancé Jessica take their friends up to check out the cabin his late mother had left him.
Hopes that "Dr. Chopper" might be a good B-movie diminished when it was obvious that this was a direct from VHS tape transfer to the DVD format. If that seems nonsensical, let me rephrase it this way. York Entertainment produced all the VHS copies of this video, and then they connected a VHS player via composite cables to a DVD recorder to create a master DVD to distribute. I had put just as much, if not more, in creating bootlegs to tape-trade at indie wrestling shows.
At least the production of this B-movie (I cannot call it no budget because of the lead actor casting.) means I can definitely distribute "Main Event of the Dead" (ask for a treatment of this wrestling zom-com script by emailing russthebus07@gmail.com) once we complete the production. I guess that made it worth 86 minutes of boredom "Dr. Chopper" provided.
Sorry to point out the boredom. That is a bit of a spoiler because the trailer for a similar York Entertainment film, "Corpses" with Jeff Fahey, seemed to have some potential. The physical picture sucked, but it does not mean that the script and acting would be devoid of charm. Even the credits being just VHS-C font (made famous by "America's Funniest Home Vides") on a black screen could not take that potential away.
The brief, nudity-free lesbian scene in an actual trailer does that.
Once we start the murder spree, you find yourself watching the least effort that you will ever see in a B-movie. Somewhat successful actors like Costas Mandylor ("Picket Fences", "Saw (3-7)") and Chelsey Crisp ("Fresh of the Boat", regular TV guest star) at least show that they can act, but the lack of creative kills, special effects that are nothing more than moist Halloween decorations, and an overall lack of direction makes me certain that the chopper was where all the budget went.
The story feels like it was a poorly constructed one act play. Ironically, a high school stage is where the climax occurs. My biggest issue with adaptations of plays to screen is that the dialogue tends to be structured to be heard with no interruption. Adaptations can work, but the story or the dialogue has to be interesting. This is not "The Philadelphia Story".
If you had some humorous dialogue and interesting murders, you might have a precursor to "Evil Dead: The Musical". You cannot sell an audience people getting stabbed with no fighting back. Shakespeare would throw poison in to mix things up, Sondheim was a genius, and who does not like man-eating plants. If there was one of these things, I may be sympathetic to "Dr. Chopper". Then I would think about how many bad Costas Mandylor films I have seen.
Mandylor can be a solid character actor, but features never seem to write him that way. I did not mind him as the second Jigsaw, and I cannot say I minded him in the live-action remake of "Fist of the North Star". I am a fan of the "Saw" franchise and will give any Gary Daniels movie a chance. But after sitting through this and "Immortally Yours" (aka "Kiss of the Vampire"), he is just an actor who has no discern for work.
There was at least one name attached with the production of "Immortally Yours" and "Dr. Chopper". Since the production values are damn near the exact same, this indicates that Mandylor does not mind doing shit films. Michael Caine may bad movies, but at least Universal went to the trouble of bringing in as much sea water as possible to the set of "Jaws: The Revenge" to make the feature look authentic. Caine at least requires you to make an effort.
"Dr. Chopper" makes me curse the backwards compatibility of all Blu-ray players. You cannot always count on streaming. Once my VHS player dies, I cannot watch a physical copy of the Sony Distributed Gary Daniels classic "Heatseeker", but DVD.com will have no issue sending me a copy of this piece of garbage. Does that seem right to you (provided you know your opinions of Albert Pyun films do not matter)?
Just because your movie has no production values does not mean you are excused from exerting effort when you film it. "Dr. Chopper" should be watched by the director Lewis Schoenbrun friends and family only. He made a thing that is worth being put on the fridge for a week and then forgotten. This is nothing more than a macaroni painting wanting to be a film. That tells me the world has too much pasta (and they won't share it with me).
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