The movies posted for the past couple of weeks have been too good. This cannot be. It must be changed. There’s no better way to bring back the cheese than with WEASELS RIP MY FLESH (1979).
This was the first film by cult filmmaker Nathan Schiff, crafted when he was only sixteen and for an Earth-shattering $400 budget. A rocket travelling to Venus comes back with a radioactive substance. Unfortunately it crash lands in a Long Island lake. That radioactive substance turns the local weasels into bloodthirsty monsters. Chaos ensues.
What makes this movie so fabulous isn’t the plot, which barely exists. It’s not the acting, which can hardly be called “acting” but more of reading cue cards and trying to look at the proper place on the set. The rocket going to Venus and back? It looks like office supplies, string, and a lamp. According to the director, whenever there was gore, he used meat from his mother’s freezer. The best part is the titular weasels. They were shown with a combination of paper mache and…a gerbil. I don’t know if he never bothered to look up a picture of a weasel, or figured at that point realism had flown out the window like a handmade lamp rocket.
Schiff would go on to direct classics like THE LONG ISLAND CANNIBAL MASSACRE (1980) about a Long Island leper colony and THEY DON’T CUT THE GRASS ANYMORE (1985)about Texan gardeners who murder yuppie Northerners instead of mowing lawns.
This is by no stretch a “good” movie, but it’s fun, and has become a running joke in our house.
QUESTION OF THE NIGHT–What’s the strangest animal mix-up you’ve had?