2002, United States. Starring Tiffany Shepis, Lisa Jay, Karla Zamudio, Jeff Ryan, David Kalamus, Rhoda Jordan, Jason Flowers, Alyson Beal, Michael O'Karma. Written and directed by Brad Sykes. Buy it now from Amazon.com.

Time once again to visit the fertile crescent of microbudget horror film making that is the imagination of Brad Sykes. And by "fertile," I largely mean "spread over with manure." Sykes directed two films that were touched on in brief during our recent spat of micro-reviews, but this is the first time I'm giving the full treatment to one of his feature film endeavors. I figure if he took the time to make a feature-length film, then I should take the time to write a feature-length article about it.

The previous films mentioned here, Goth and Bloody Tease, represent the state of Sykes' filmmaking talent as of 2003 and 2005 respectively. If nothing else, comparing the two films shows at least some sort of progression in that Bloody Tease wasn't as completely boring and illogical as Goth. Plus, Bloody Tease was about vampire strippers, which is always an improvement over a film about pretentious Goth rockers named Goth who can't stop talking about what it means to be a true Goth. As well all know, anyway, being a true Goth means you wear furs, carry a big-ass battleaxe, and sacked Rome. And no one in that film sacked Rome, while some of the vampire strippers in Bloody Tease at least stripped their tops off.

Death Factory is a 2002 effort, which means it is potentially even worse than Goth provided that a filmmaker gets better with each round of experience. This is obviously never the case, not with microbudget filmmakers making movies with their friends, for their friends, and not with Francis Ford Coppola. Good for Death Factory and bad for Goth, Brad Sykes follows in the footsteps of Francis Ford Coppola (Sykes, if you ever read this, I agree to let you use the quote, "Follows in the footsteps of Francis Ford Coppola" in any promotional material you might generate) by having an older film that is much better than more recent efforts. Death Factory is still a phenomenally stupid movie thanks to -- and let's say this all together, to make sure we learn -- a bad script, but at least this is a bad script in which things continually happen and the microbudget film-sinking tendency to indulge in endless, badly acted dialogue is kept to a relative minimum. Plus, you have Tiffany Shepis, one of my favorite microbudget horror stars, flailing about in metal fangs, a thong, and a loose-fitting tank top, and that's gotta count for something.

And in the spirit of full disclosure, I can't call Tiffany a close friend, but she is a friend. She engaged in immoral activities with Enrique Camacho, who is is a close friend, right before he got his head chopped off. In the case of Death Factory, however, I don't think my acquaintance with her is going to color the review much, since her primary job is to make rolling-eye monster faces and rip open chests.

At this point, I think you should assume that a shot-on-video horror film's script is poorly written and the story horrendously derivative and predictable unless otherwise stated. And I'm not statin' anything otherwise for this movie. We open with the "two pointless characters get killed" prologue, and Sykes clues us in that, while he may not have the money for good mutant make-up or a convincing location, at least he paid enough money to get some chick to show her boobs in the first couple minutes of the film. Since another chick shows her boobs later on, I will assume this is where pretty much all of Death factory's budget went, and while I would have liked to have seen it spread about a little more liberally to non-boob-showing causes, I'm also not going to be one to fault a guy for throwing a little extra cash someone's way in exchange for some gratuitous nudity.

What we establish in the prologue, besides the presence of bare breasts, is that there is an abandoned factory on the edge of town, and people go in there to fool around but usually just wind up dead. I've made out in some strange places, and I've snuck into my share of abandoned buildings, but even I have to stop and declare that "the old abandoned biochemical plant where people keep getting murdered" is a little hard to swallow as a nookie spot -- and this is coming from someone who once made out in the high school vocational school auto garage. I snuck with a girlfriend into an abandoned, haunted tuberculosis hospital in Valley Station, outside of Kentucky (Waverly Hill -- you can see it on an episode of Ghost Hunters if you watch that sort of thing), but that's a Louisville teen tradition (I did it, my sister did it, and our parents did it before us) and we didn’t combine the sneaking with snogging, mostly because the insides of abandoned, haunted buildings are a tad squalid. Not to mention, you know, mostly empty. Also, we were scared -- of ghosts, of cops, and of the rumored gun-toting mercenary night watchman who prowled the grounds looking for teenagers sneaking into the place.

But then, I'm willing to give the factory a pass because, though I may have stuck primarily to fooling around in the back seat of a car (unfortunately, not a Camaro or a GTO or a boss custom van, but a white Olds with red vinyl interior -- kind of chilly on frosty autumn nights) the way proper American males are supposed to, I also worked for a summer as a movie theater usher and once busted a couple teens getting it on in the front row of King Ralph. Yes, I know. I, like some of you, did some fondling in a movie theater back in the day (including while employed as an usher), but I was smart enough to 1) pick the movie no one wanted to see, and 2) sit in the back corner seats). Who goes to the second-run dollar theater on a Saturday night and sits in the front row of King Ralph, a movie that was, at the time, packed with nothing but dads and their ten-year-old sons looking for some good fart jokes and scenes in which John Goodman teaches stuffy British royals how to lighten up and have a little fun! And it's not like they were exhibitionists; they were just stupid kids, and they were totally shocked and embarrassed when, after a couple complaints, I had to wander down and tell them to knock it off. They got so embarrassed, in fact, that they soon packed up, slunk out of the auditorium and, I assume, found themselves a nearby abandoned chemical factory to finish what they'd started.

So yeah, I guess teens will do it just about anywhere, especially if they're surrounded by arousing conditions, such as grimy old factories haunted by buxom mutants or with a giant 35mm projection of John Goodman singing "Good Golly, Miss Molly" in front of them.

Luckily, the abandoned biochemical factory of this movie is not only relatively clean as far as these places go, it also comes fully stocked with old couches (miraculously bug-infestation free) and even a goddamned four-post bed with clean linens. And there are no cops or grounds watchmen, and really, considering that the place was once a bio-weapons factory, very little in the way of locks and other obstructions to free entrance.

With our two pointless prologue victims handily dispatched, we get to meet our core cast of players, and yes, this will be yet another "group of kids go to an isolated location and are preyed upon by a killer" movie. This time around, we have the virginal good girl, her noble and hunky boyfriend who is somewhere between a prep and a nerd, the smart-alec tough girl, the metal and/or punk dude, and the black couple. As is often the case with these groups of people, there's no real logical reason why they would be friends with each other. Why does the fun-loving black dude hang out with the wet blanket white dude? Why is the virginal mousy girl friends with the obnoxious dyke? Oh well, friendships aren't always easy to explain.

They have big plans for the last day of their first year of college, and those plans involve going over to the black guy's parents' house and having a party. Except that his parents end up not leaving town, which is big of them considering how expensive it is to cancel or reschedule airline tickets these days (eventually, screenwriters are going to have to face financial reality and stop using "Oh no! My parents canceled their trip/came back early" as a plot point). And so our intrepid group of young heroes come up with the next best thing: let's all go to the abandoned factory on the edge of town, which is supposedly haunted, where people get killed, where there was a massive chemical disaster, so on and so forth.

Now, let's review. They're in college, but not a single one of them has their own apartment yet? Lame, man. And when one location falls through, their immediate option B is the abandoned factory? Not someone else's house? Not a bar or a club? Hell, they could just go to the park. Nope, it's straight to the abandoned factory, which would even be acceptable if they were just looking to goof off and do some property damage and spraypaint "Ozzy' on some crumbling walls. But their chief reason for getting together is to fool around and drink beer. Hell, if it was just drinking beer, even that I could understand. It's fun to break into places and drink beer. But the fooling around? In a factory? A DEATH factory, no less! Oh well -- at least the stupidity of our cast has been established early, so we won't be surprised later when they do things like split up and explore the dark hallways after they know a killer is hunting them down.

Inside the factory, pretty much exactly what you'd expect to happen, happens. Couples go to fool around, and they die. People "split up" to explore the factory and find a way out, and they die (and rightfully so -- if people are still pulling that "let's split up" jive at this point, they deserve to be picked off, one by one). The metal dude uses his special metal mental powers that give him total recall of all events having to do with mayhem, death, the occult, government cover-ups, and what Eddie was doing on the cover of each Iron Maiden album and fills everyone in on the history of the factory. The monster turns out to be a mutated former worker, and you can add child labor law violations to the long list of grievances against the factory, because if she was working there years ago, then she must have been all of fourteen on the first day of her employ.

Some mutants get green pustules all over. Some grow extra limbs and slobber gelatinous goo. The monster here, played by the aforementioned Tiffany Shepis, apparently got splashed with a chemical that makes you wear a thong, metal claws, thigh-high black stockings, and a loose, side-boob revealing t-shirt. What kind of factory was this, again? The mutation also makes her crave human blood, which accounts for all the throat and chest ripping that goes on. Death Factory delivers on the blood, but once you've splashed a fair amount of it about, what's the point in doing it again and again? After the first couple ripped throats and slashed chests, seeing a couple more ripped and slashed in exactly the same fashion isn't all that interesting. Still, at least Brad Sykes throw some gore on screen fairly often. While death factory be derivative and unimaginative and feature an abandoned factory where a couple finds a fully-made four-post bed in one of the rooms, but at least once the scenario is established, we don't waste a whole lot of time. We waste some time, but in terms of the average micro horror film, at least Sykes seems to have trimmed much of the fat. The end result is like micro horror McDonalds. It's not good, you know exactly what's going to happen, but at least it doesn't beat about the bush.

I think we've established the shortcomings of the set, which seem to be a recurring theme for Sykes' films (Bloody Tease featured a strip club that looked suspiciously like someone's basement with some sheets hanging up and a coupe rows of metal folding chairs). The building could certainly pass for abandoned, but not for an abandoned factory, as it lacks any and all factory stuff. Instead, there are drywalled rooms with couches and beds and some broken chairs strewn about the place. And it's not like these are industrial couches or chairs or beds. They're wooden and look like they came from someone's grandparents' house. And the doors aren't metal; they're flimsy wood (or cardboard -- I can hardly tell). I guess, as I reasoned earlier, Sykes spent all his money on fake blood, gratuitous boob shots, and a completely inexplicable cameo by Ron Jeremy as a homeless dude who wanders in at random and gets killed. Thus, he had no money left for proper and convincing set dressing.

As if often the case with this type of film, acting is wildly inconsistent. Shepis has demonstrated previously that she's a decent performer. Here, however, she has no lines other than gurgling and snarling, and her role consists mostly of flashing a steel-fanged grin (what the hell kind of mutation is this, again?) and doing that sort of writhing gait I can only call "goblin stride." If you've ever seen the way goblins caper about in fantasy films, then you know the walk to which I refer. The rest of the cast is pretty forgettable. None of them are so egregiously awful that they stick out as being something special. They're just blandly "somewhat incompetent."

Likewise, Sykes' direction could be called "blandly competent." He doesn't really have much to offer beyond pointing the camera at the scene and filming it, which is OK. Better than over-direction, anyway. It does leave one with little to criticize or commend, so the direction is succinctly summed up by saying that things are staged for the movie, and Brad Sykes successfully records these things. Special effects consist mostly of the usual spurting blood and fake entrails, both of which are delivered in generous quantities but, as I said, never in a way that makes their presence all that special or imaginative. There is a pretty good eye gouging scene, though. The editing is better than we see in most micro films, and while some tedium and overlong moments still exist, death factory is mercifully trimmed of much of the padding and fat that makes other micro horror films so intolerable. All in all, it's an all right effort.

The biggest problem facing Death Factory is that, while it executes the tired old formula in a fairly energetic manner, it's still executing tired old formula with nothing new to offer. There's nothing wrong with trafficking in cliche; you just have to make sure you do it better than other people who are doing the same thing, and on that count, Brad Sykes both does and doesn't deliver. He delivers better than a lot of the other micro-budget horror films, but not against other films in general -- and this is a point on which budgetary constraints don't matter as much, so no free pass there. I can watch plenty of other "group of people gets hunted down and killed" movies that are better. There are plenty that are worse, too, but mediocrity isn't really something to which a film should strive. But that's what Death Factory achieves. The third-act revelation might explain why at least one member of the cast was anxious to go to the factory, but it's hardly an unexpected twist (in fact, I'd just seen the exact same twist a couple films earlier in another micro-budget horror film, Blood Oath -- though it was more of twist there, not to mention more nonsensical in terms of the plot -- and I'll take "happily nonsensical" over "pointlessly predicatble" any day). The characters are the usual bunch, and to their credit, while they are all so cliche that they could have been summoned straight from the mind of Jon Triton in order to fool Ol' Scratch (if you don't get that reference, you really should), at least they aren't completely unlikeable. In fact, the "black couple" seemed like they'd be sort of fun to hang out with, though I still wonder why not a single one them had their own apartment or knew anyone with their own apartment.

Compared to the other Brad Sykes films I've seen, and compared to the bulk of micro horror films floating around, Death Factory is pretty good. But that's relative to the likes of Goth and Blood Gnome, mind you. If you have a soft spot for micro-budget horror films, or if you are simply in the mood for something that is predictable but still gory and adequate, Death Factory stands up all right. I can't imagine anyone getting overly enthusiastic about the movie -- I'm certainly not -- but I can't imagine anyone getting completely vitriolic about it, either. It just sort of exists, does some things well, does a lot of things poorly, and is sort of like, to steal a description from a friend, eating oatmeal. It's not really something to get excited about, and it's not something to which you look forward, but it's OK while going down.

Labels: Director: Brad Sykes, Horror: Microbudget, Horror: Zombies, Year: 2002