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KILL THE SCREAM QUEEN
Written and Directed by Bill Zebub
Featuring:
Bill Zebub
Kerri Taylor
Isabelle Stephen
Jillian Gold
Debbie D
In the early 1980's, the term "scream queen" was coined to capture a certain type of b-movie starlet. It applied to people like Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer, and Far Wray. Today, it's used to refer to any nubile cutie flashing her breasts in her neighbor's backyard epic regardless of the woman's acting ability. The term, as it once was, is dead.
That's the gist of Bill Zebub's KILL THE SCREAM QUEEN, and he makes his point even before he makes his point, literally. The film opens with a blonde starlet-in-training talking into the camera, answering the usual questions: "Yes, I'll go topless," "Will the movie make me famous," etc... Through the B-Indi forums, I've seen some of the ladies repeat the same "interviews" over and over, and it never ceases to amaze me how thick some of the fanboys lay it on when trying to score a set of breasts for their movie, or how willing the girls will sometimes go just to appear on camera.
After Bill kills this buxom mama, we find him in the next scene monologing about how these starlets have killed horror. The tits have replaced fright. Ass has replaced gore. Talent is a mute point. Emphasis has been placed on superficial elements that are selling points only and in no way affect the quality of the movie. As far as independent horror goes, or at least micro-budget horror, Bill has a point that I happen to agree with.
Further down the b-movie ladder are those that make fetish-oriented features. Murder and sex flicks taped in a day for the sole purpose to be sold by bikini-clad chicks at the next Chiller Con. These are the movies Bill seems to be targeting especially, and he enlists help from a number starlets who have appeared in numerous fetish/horror releases, names such as Debbie D, Debbie Dutch, Isabelle Stephen and Kerri Taylor. According to the DVD slipsleeve, Bill even pulled many of his "episodes" from the ladies' personal experiences and then twisted them into their worst case scenarios.
Simply put, KILL THE SCREAM QUEEN is the most exploitative exploitation satire I've ever seen. It's exactly what it mocks: sleazy tits, ass, and violence.....but in that thought provoking sort of way.
The violence in this film in not intended to titillate or stimulate the audience. It's meant to get under your skin and fester like ebola. By the second sequence I was ready to turn the movie off out of pure disgust. Bill, the character, ties up his victim and verbally describes the actions of his simultaneous rape while the camera holds a tight close-up of the victims face. She thought there was going to be a full cast and crew. The audience thought this was going to be a fetish tape. Everyone gets awakened to the monster that is Bill Zebub.
The pretext of the movie is that Bill is making a fake snuff film and he lures the starlets in by promising them that they'd be featured in key roles. And I know from personal experience how easy some of these ladies can be led astray by the promise of stardom. Names in lights can outshine women's intuition any day of the week. And Bill is out to be every starlet's worst nightmare just so he can eliminate what he sees as the cause of demise of his beloved genre.
Will Bill Zebub save horror by killing Scream Queens? Doubtful. Highly Doubtful. But by placing his wolf in the sheep's clothing of fetish horror, he might convince a few deviants to try a real horror film for a change. Or, at the very least, he'll get people talking about his movies. From interaction on the B-Independent.com message boards, getting people talking is what Bill loves to do.