FILM HOUSE FEVER (1986) **

Steve Buscemi and Mark Boone Junior star as two video junkies who run out of movies to watch at home.  While looking through the paper, they see an ad for an all-night film festival, so they hop in their car and speed down to the theater.  There, they are treated to the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” commercial, drive-in ads, and trailers for The Psychic, 2000 Maniacs, and Blood Feast before the show begins.

The “show” as it is, is nothing more than clips, snippets, and montages of old horror and exploitation movies.  This stuff is a lot of fun, but the scenes with Buscemi and Boone are corny, unfunny, and sometimes painful to sit through.  Their screen time would’ve been much better spent on more trailers or clips.  The useless cutaways to them eating popcorn in the theater get annoying fast and ruin the flow of the compilation.  

It’s really not their fault though.  I like both actors a lot.  It’s just that the shtick they’ve been given is awful thin.  Also, with an hour-long running time, that means you only get about forty minutes of clips and twenty minutes of their mugging, which isn’t a good trade-off if you ask me.

The clips themselves are pretty good though.  They include:  Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Rocktober Blood, Something Weird, The Gruesome Twosome, The Wizard of Gore, Color Me Blood Red, Daughter of the Sun, She-Devils on Wheels, Sex and the College Girl, Living Venus, Bad Girls Do Cry, Warrior and the Sorceress, Just for the Hell of It, Suburbia, Sno-Line, Steel Arena, and Scum of the Earth.  Even with an impressive line-up like that, it pains me to say that the best segments aren’t always shown.  The best snippets come from a black and white Indiana Jones spoof called Cleveland Smith:  Bounty Hunter, starring Bruce Campbell.

I’m a big fan of horror movie compilations and I’m here to say, this is not the way to do it.  If you’ve got your heart set on showing the bozos gawking at the clips, do it in such a way that it doesn’t disrupt the flow of the movie.  I did like the segment about then-unknown actors (like Harvey Korman and Charles Grodin) paying their dues in schlock, which is fitting because Buscemi and Boone are doing the exact same thing.  

Still, I can’t completely hate any horror compilation that has such a heavy concentration of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies.  It also contains a montage of his work that is very similar to the one found on all those Something Weird releases.  Because of that, Lewis fans will probably want to check it out.