• Straight to Video
• Director: Brian Crow
• Written by: Brian Crow, Walter Reuther
• Running Time: 75 minutes
• Language: English
• MPAA Rating: UNRATED
• Cast: Calico Cooper, Tasha Castor, Brian Crow, Mike Darmo, Danielle Fisher, Sasha Lightstone, Alex Thompson, Paul Hill, Navon, Sasha Lightstone, Kyle Konvalin, Evan Lucas

Boasting at least one recognizable name in the cast, Calico Cooper, sexy grown up daughter of heavy metal music legend Alice Cooper, “Scarlet Fry's Junkfood Horrorfest” is a cheap SOV effort that tries for great things but fails so miserably that even writing about it feels like a monumental waste of time. Guitarist Ryan Roxie, a friend and ten-year collaborator of Alice Cooper, provides a song to the soundtrack, giving the film a hint of respectability, however, and this is just conjecture mind you, but I suspect that single song addition only happened because of Calico’s involvement.  Just one look at for the utter cheap-as-fuck quality of “Junkfood Horrorfest”, it’s pretty evident that Brian Crow couldn’t afford to purchase the rights to one of Roxie’s songs even if he wanted to, had not someone had some prior inroads to the artist. This film is so bad that not even Alice “I just ate a bat on stage” Cooper would touch it.

Calico Cooper (2005's "The Curse of El Charro"), the film’s “celebrity”, has only a brief cameo early on playing a grungy homicidal junkie in desperate need of a fix. Yes, she’s actually credited as “Junkie”. Sadly for Calico, her drug dealer, one of those sleazy back alley types (is there any other kind?), has secretly switched her regular heroin for new Folgers… er… for a videocassette. Shocked by her sudden find, Calico returns with a tire iron and proceeds to bash his face in. Covered in blood and needing to take her mind off of her chemical cravings, she quickly spots a friend and asks if he’d like to go inside his house and watch THE videocassette. From there, we segue into “Scarlet Fry's Junkfood Horrorfest”, a miserable film that it’ll leave you wishing Calico would show up at your house (preferably in a bikini) and bash your face in with a tire iron just to alleviate the pain.

Host Scarlet Fry (Walter Reuther), located out in some forest somewhere, is one of those hillbilly guys that have become familiar folk round here in films like  “Lunch Meat”, “Devil’s Moon” and “Dimples”. You now the type; the plaid and cover-all wearing, awe shucks, outdoorsy kind of Republican-votin’ hayseed that we all love to hate. Fry seems personable enough, though, almost pleasant. Forget that he’s wearing human skin (ala Ed Gein) on his face and he’s got a girl tied up to a tree behind him, ready for slaughter, he’s a pretty jovial presenter -- working wraparound to six unconnected horror vignettes. None of the vignettes are particularly done well, and only a few of them seem to be aiming for anything outside of a quick junk food-like gore fix. There’s this feeling throughout that the vignettes weren’t fully fleshed-out before committing to shooting them – a sort of pointlessness to it all. In each of these stories, there’s a beginning and middle but no actual conclusion, and no build up either. They quit just as they are getting going. The vignettes are just there playing out and there’s nothing keeping you interested because you know that nothing will come of it.

The first is titled “Blood Thirsty Butcher” and it fits the film’s formula perfectly, in that there’s no recognizable ending, outside of the obvious one we saw coming a mile away. Brian Crow (the film’s writer and director) plays an unstable young man who, upon spotting no food in his fridge, follows a young woman (Danielle Fisher) to a nearby Laundromat and proceeds to invite her back to his pad to wait for their clothes to finish their cycle. She half-heartedly takes him up on her offer -- the promise of food the main incentive (nice double entendre on the filmmaker's part). So, about three seconds after arriving at his apartment, he proceeds to kill her and eat her. That’s it? No build up. No suspense. No nothing. A punchline, maybe?

Next is “The Solution” a short film that is so illogical and inane that I actually couldn’t believe that somebody would want to attach their name to it. Giant leap of faith as we’re supposed to believe that actor Paul Hill, barely out of his twenties, is an old man, and not just any old man, but a ‘cranky old man’, as he is credited. We have to take the filmmaker’s word for it since we never actually see him being all that cranky. His live in nurse, Cary Moody, is at the end of her proverbial rope, and instead of simply resigning, she works out this ingenious plan to have her boyfriend (Charles Schmidt) shoot ‘cranky old man’ with a sniper rifle in a crowded park whereupon she runs off laughing and dancing. WTF? Seriously, WTF? This is one of those shorts that makes you never want to watch b-movies ever again, wondering if the filmmakers or the actors or anyone involved at even the most minuscule production level, asked about how stupid the whole thing was. This is idiocy for idiocy’s sake.

Interestingly, “Griptape Spank” is one of the few stories that actually succeeds in what it sets out to do, in that it has a recognizable three part structure… or maybe I’m deluding myself following that last piece of shit. Desperate to get high and with no money to speak of, Donnie (Kyle Konvalin) and some of his skater friends, agree to fulfill the desires of a local transvestite pervert (Eric Werner) – namely his predilection for grip tape and for being spanked by young men with their skateboards. “I’ll need to get high just to get this image out of my mind,” says one of the men as he strikes the pervert. Following the buy, their dealer (the gorgeous Sherri Soltis) plants the seed, calling them, let's say, a nasty homophobic name. Back at Donnie’s apartment, his friends continue the derogatory verbal assault, calling Donnie a, I'll say it, a “faggot”, and wondering how he ever even met the perverted skateboard freak. “Did you suck his cock, too?” one of them asks, snidely. Looking for someone to back him up, Donnie’s girlfriend (the striking Tasha Castor) proves little comfort, even calling into question his masculinity in front of his friends, who quickly scoot sensing their eruption to come. A sparring match between the pair ends with homophobic Donnie pushed to edge of his own sanity and it isn’t long before he’s tipping over. Later that night, Donnie crafts himself a special spiky paddle for his pervert friend. He also has a special gift for his girlfriend – something that’ll keep her quiet forever and ever and ever. This is some pretty raw stuff here, one that will most assuredly strike a chord with a larger audience. There’s a certain rawness to this short, a sort of dark and ugly authenticity to it that’ll absolutely wear you down. The actors here aren’t very good but none of the actors in any of the stories are very good, so considering what we are dealing with here, they are adequate to telling the story at hand. Kyle Konvalin does well enough offering up a deeply disturbed character.

"Wasted Life” is a strange, ultra-short piece that plays out like the backend of a really bad Creed music video. It involves a broken young man (Walter Reuther, in a dual role) reflecting on his life, conveyed through a dizzying series of rapidly edited images – before hopping into a bathtub, razor in hand and offing himself. There really isn’t any explanation for the man's suicide, and it isn’t placed into any kind of genuine context, so we feel zilch as the scene plays out. Outside of that conditioned twinge of sadness we feel for the act, there’s nothing to connect us to it. Yeah, he’s dead. What does that matter to me? If anything, it underlines the sourness of the whole production -- a production that Walter Reuther (1990's "Horrorama") had a crucial role in making happen. In hindsight, maybe this piece was conceived while Reuther was in post-production.

"The Devil Made Me Do It” actually could have worked had the filmmaker’s elected to take it further. They don’t and the piece is a failure. Terrified of her Satanist boyfriend (Navon), a young woman (Sasha Lightstone) attempts to break things off with him. Sadly she attempts this just as he’s preparing for one of his spooky candle-burning rituals Satanists seem to dig so much. Incensed, he proceeds to brutally disembowel her and play hacky sack with her internal organs. Like I was saying, this short could have actually gone somewhere, giving, say, the Satanist receive his moral comeuppance or something, instead it’s content to quit just as it gets going. A literal gore feast that ultimately builds to nothing.

The last short is called “Love is Blind” and in my opinion, it’s the best of the lot. It involves a young high school aged girl, Sarah (Danielle Fisher), who realizes that she’s pregnant. Her prickly boyfriend, Reuben (Alex Thompson) isn’t exactly elated about it upon hearing the news, hurling insults at her and growling, “I can barely pay for myself, let alone someone else.” It’s not exactly “Juno”, but it wishes it could be. Back at his apartment, he express regret, insisting that he’s just scared and that he didn’t mean to blow up at her. He even insists that he’d be there for her regardless of her decision. What’s this, actual character dimension?Unbeknownst to him, his insults in the car have done irrevocable damage, sending them dancing towards utter tragedy. The next day Sarah arrives at his door, toys in hand and a frisky attitude to boot. Under the pretence of kinky sex, she proceeds to chain him to the bed and blindfold him. Titillation turns to horror as her true intentions become clear. She’s going to torture him to death. For several minutes we are front and center as she stuffs pins into his chest, yanks at his nipples with some pliers, sews his lips shut and, oh yeah, makes a shish kebab using one of his eyeballs, all while he writhes in agony. Mary Ann Johnson, eat your heart out. There’s a real sadness to this short, as the characters, for as little a period of time that we know them, feel like real three-dimensional people, the last thing I was expecting from this film. There’s a certain accuracy to the way Thompson plays his character, at least in some of his scenes. The trepidation and anger he feels and the way he works to make amends, all of it speaks to the honesty of the situation – a situation that I believe many young men can relate to.

For more information on the film go the imdb.com.