LAST AMERICAN HORROR SHOW * USA 2018 Dir: Michael S Rodriguez. 82 mins
There’s a slightly queasy element of fanboy wish-fulfilment in this feeble anthology’s casting of Felissa Rose as a lonely horror fan with an impressive movie collection and a “Fulci Lives” sticker on her laptop. Rose, at least, is characteristically spirited as the star of the wraparound story, welcoming a blind date to her home and declining his preference to watch a nice faith-based / feel-good movie by showing him horror movies instead.
This leads into a trio of amateurish shorts, starting with “Homewrecked”, in which a gang of petty thugs invade a pregnant bank manager’s home, failing to gauge her husband’s (Jim Van Bebber) capacity for revenge-violence. With Tim Quill overacting his way through gratuitous Vietnam flashbacks, this climaxes with weak sub-Manson family antics, complete with tasteless Sharon Tate parallels and a spate of rapidly edited ultraviolence seemingly in imitation of Van Bebber’s own, more compelling indie efforts. “Night of the Sea Monkey” is an 80’s-set, CREEPSHOW-lite monster effort with a mildly embarrassing Lynn Lowry as an outrageous grandma who admits to crapping herself at the dinner table and freely talks about abortions. The slimy, vicious sea-critter of the title is endearing, but it’s over-extended and overplays its central sitcom family to an irritating degree, including a literal wink to the camera at the very end. Finally, “Lamb Feed” lazily apes Rob Zombie’s stylistic tics in its story of a stranded white-collar worker suffering a blow out in the middle of nowhere, winding up in a worryingly welcoming community for their “lamb feed”. Stock footage-heavy montages proliferate and Arch Hall Jr (as another ‘Nam vet) is another of the film’s I-met-you-at-a-horror-convention-and-I-have-a-camera casting coups. It delivers a cannibal-chowdown finale, but fun and imagination took the early bus home.
Review by Steven West
