AMERICA'S DEADLIEST HOME VIDEO

Produced by Mickael L. Wynhoff
Written, Edited, and Directed - Jack Perez
Director of Photography - Bill Francesco

Doug - Danny Bonaduce
Clint Dryer - Mick Wynhoff
Venza - Mollena Williams
Gloria - Melora Walters

When that theatrical hurricane known as THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT hit land during the summer of 1999, the internet was a buzz with rip-off chatter from would-be horror film intellectuals. "This movie and that movie stole from whatever movie...", and so forth. The list of titles people were throwing out was seemed endless.

THE LAST BROADCAST MAN BITES DOG THIS IS SPINAL TAP CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST

To drive home how little these internet know-it-alls actually knew, I would always throw out how CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST just ripped off the brilliant DAVID HOLTZMAN'S DIARY and that the fictionalized documentary format could be traced back to NANOOK OF THE NORTH. This always shut everyone up. After repeating myself enough times, it started to sound as if I had some clue as to what I was talking about. Practice makes perfect, I guess.

Anyway, with all the chatter being bounced back and forth, one fictionalized documentary was forgotten about. It's a shame too, Jack Perez's AMERICA'S DEADLIEST HOME VIDEO is the most fun and entertaining of the bunch. It takes the reality premise and forgoes the supernatural to explores the evil that men do.

Doug is your typical "guy". He's a man obsessed with "guy things." On his anniversary his wife buys him a new lens for his prize video camera. He buys her a portable liquor cabinet shaped like a violin case. She wants to make love, he wants to use his camera to make a home porno. He's absorbed into his own world and thinks little of her feelings. It's of no surprise when she finds solace in the bed of another.

We know all of this because Doug video tapes everything: the anniversary gift exchange, the porno seduction, his own suspicions regarding his wife, and her moment of infidelity. He wants to document everything about his life from the most Earth shattering of events to the most insignificant moments. Doug is man obsessed with capturing the "now."

Doug hits the road. Not sure where he's going, he decided to take in everything America has to offer and capture it on tape for prosperity, and maybe, just maybe, during his travels he might find himself.

It is on the open road that Doug crosses paths with The Clint Dryer Gang, a group of low rent outlaws with delusions of becoming a modern day Bonnie and Clyde. Realizing that no outlaws have ever had their own personal documentarian, Dryer sees the possibilities that one could provide. Specifically, fame. It isn't the rush of crime that gets Clint's blood pumping, it's his vanity, his need to be known.

What follows is Doug's decent down the dark path as he becomes pulled into Dryer's world, and eventually partaking in his murderous rampage across middle America. It that regard, AMERICA'S DEADLIEST HOME VIDEO is pretty close to DAVID HOLTZMAN'S DIARY, but like THE LAST BROADCAST and BLAIR WITCH, the movies cover the similar thematic material on two separate wavelengths

Just as THE ST. FRANCESVILLE EXPERIMENT and BLACKWOOD EVIL followed BLAIR WITCH, and used that movie as a model to explore other local legends, one can pick up on the genesis of Tim Ritter's much vilified DIRTY COP, NO DONUT, a movie I absolutely love, in the blacker recesses of AMERICA'S DEADLIEST. Ritter takes the seed and nurtures his film without grounding it in humanity or providing any sense of moral reason. As self-absorbed as Doug might be in AMERICA'S DEADLIEST, he's basically a decent guy. He's the foil to Dryer's psychopathic rage. Ritter's movie is what AMERICA'S DEADLIEST would be like if you removed Doug from the equation all together. The two movies compliment each other well and make an interesting two-sides-of-the-same-coin double feature.

If you can track down a copy of AMERICA'S DEADLIEST HOME VIDEO, pick it up. Not only is it a great movie in terms of it's depiction of everyday evils, but you can talk shit to the internet fanboys on how MAN BITES DOG was a rip-off!

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