Brinke Stevens once again produced and narrates this fourth installment in the Shock Cinema video magazine series devoted to the world of low budget filmmaking. Since it focuses on the same crop of movies that were featured in Volume 3, there’s little here in the way of variety. Still, it’s a solid look at the ingenuity that goes into low budget productions and should be a treat for fans of old school special effects and make-up.
Most of the running time is devoted to behind-the-scenes footage of Murder Weapon and Robot Ninja. The Murder Weapon sequences are the best as we get to see how the special effects (including a head crushing, throat slashing, face blasting, and a heart ripping) were created. The coolest segment is a fast-motion scene of burn make-up being applied to Linnea Quigley. The segment on Robot Ninja is the longest and focuses on fight choreography just as much as it does special effects. Unfortunately, the segments on Skinned Alive and Ghoul School seem to be tossed in there just to pad things out. Both these sequences are little more than a “greatest hits” package of gore scenes with very little behind the scenes footage. If these scenes had been excised and the film only focused on the first two movies, it probably would’ve skated by with ***.
Even then, Shock Cinema Volume 4: Makeup Effects and Behind the Scenes ultimately suffers from a repetitive set-up. First, we are shown a select scene from the movie before we see how the effect was done, and finally the scene is shown once again. Because of that, it isn’t quite as much fun as the other volumes in the series. However, the fact that it contains so much quality behind the scenes footage for such low budget productions in and of itself is heartening.
No comments:
Post a Comment