CANNIBAL FLESH RIOT (2006)

Stash and Hub are two ghouls, who roam graveyards at night looking for the freshly buried corpses to dig back up and chow down on. These two, who bicker and argue like a married couple and are more friends due to circumstance, have chosen tonight to feast on the recently deceased Mr. Hickle. As they make their way through the patchwork of tombstones looking for the plot, they make idle chat. But when Stash and Hub finally come to their destination, they soon discover that some cemeteries aren't too keen on letting their permanent residents be taken away as a late night snack!

While the current trend in horror has been to cull through 70's shock cinema, writer and director Gris Grimly goes back to the spooky and gothic low-budget flicks of the 50's and even the 30's to bring his twisted and comical tale to life. The movie, while shot on video, is put through the "grindhouse" wringer to give it a wonderful and inviting feel. Through post-production work, the black and white film is laced with scratches and dirt specks and frames are purposefully removed to give the film a jittery motion. Grimly incorporates the classic yet underused iris shutter to fade out and into one scene to the next, cue cards to move along the narrative, and even Tex Avery style sound effects to give a cartoonish tone to the rather morbid material.

Grimly further takes this stylized approach with both his set decoration and camera work. The graveyard is littered with oddly shaped tombstones with even stranger fonts marking the grave's occupant. The graveyard is also inhabited by comical bats brought to life by string and more rolling fog than even John Carpenter would have the nerve to use. Grimly's camera is often off-set at an acute angle, and uses fish eye lenses to give a twisted and warped view into the fiend-filled world.

The protagonists here, Stash and Hub, take their comical appearances from Laurel and Hardy, after of course being given a greasy southern gas station attendant overhaul. The pair even look like they could've just walked off a Cramps record album. Grimly's rotted humor shines magnificently through the pairs' dialog, as much of the film is just them wandering through the PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE inspired graveyard talking with one another. And just what do two ghouls who've been creeping around for decade discuss? Well, Stash speaks of the culinary variety that can be had with a finely carved corpse, especially with the almost limitless amounts of spices and condiments available in the world. Hub meanwhile, seems fixated on commercials that present anthropomorphic food like the California Raisins to make the product more appealing.

Rounding out the fiendish short film is a musical score by Peter Sandorff of Nekromantix and Denmark's Hola Ghost, which further cements this movie as being a psychobilly's ultimate wet dream. Gris Grimly has set up massively cool project here, which will be sure to please fans of horrific 1930's creepers and grim 1950's horror. CANNIBAL FLESH RIOT is currently making the festival rounds, with a full package DVD release planned for July.