Deadline

Deadline Directed By Mario Azzopardi. Starring Stephen Young. (1984).

   I hadn't seen this rare 1984 Canadian shocker in a few years, but its back on Youtube thanks to ExhumedVideo  a VHS rip of a film never released on DVD. 

   Steve Lessey, an award winning horror writer with a dysfunctional family has to get his script in on time to a slimeball producer, he's like a Canadian Garth Marenghi (who's a British Stephen King)! We periodically see what horrific images from in his mind (like cannibalistic nuns,murderous children and bloody boobs), they all seem spliced in, as if they could cut them out for network TV if they wanted (but we all know in the U.S., violence is more accepted than sex).

They paid me in food pellets

   During a college seminar, he shows a film with an evil goat that telepathically controls the gears of a thresher that chews up a working stiff. The college audience condemns his work as exploitive garbage and they take out their rage on his films.
   Lessey despises actresses and seems to hate woman (he almost punches his wife in the face), it's all part of the set-up later for you to blame him for his daughter's death! Another scene from within his mind, shows laughing children burning an old woman to death. The film gives gore fans something to latch onto and is very effective! The way the public despises horror and blames the writer for societies problems is very realistic. Stephen is another horror writer based on Stephen King (although when "that" real author is in control of his own film work, its always weak and pitiful)!

There was too much sauce in my calzone

   Deadline interjects constant disturbing images from the authors work as reality threatens to disrupt Steve's train of thought to meet that deadline. It's hard to sympathize with him because he's a terrible father and his coke addicted wife blames him for her problems. 

   You wonder if he is psychotic (or a misogynist) and is constantly tormented by images of extreme violence that serve him well financially. Steve is holding out on his producer and has enough material to give the degenerate breathing down his neck what he wants. All he has to do is type them out into a format, but he refuses because he wants to distance himself from schlock.

Don't worry we look like Nazis but we're actually Canadian

   One fantasy sequence shows a Nazi punk band (who all look like Klaus Nomi), they use the "Brown note" to make the audience literally shit their pants! I'm guessing this is Hitler's postmortem plan for world domination through diarrhea!
   Lessey is really jaded and bored of his own work, but his producer is thrilled by the punk storyline.

Reality comes crashing in as his children hang their little sister while watching one of his films called "The Executioner", his daughter is played by The Brood's Heather O' Rourke-esque Cindy Hinds.

The best character in the whole film is sleazy producer Burt Horowitz (played brilliantly by Marvin Goldhar), he talks about how "French chicks never bleed you dry, when you want to fuck them"! He's like a Canadian Tony Clifton with the pudgy looks of SCTV's Dave Thomas. Lessey's family life completely unravels and even though creative skill in the horror genre is the only thing he has left, he wants to throw it all in the trash. One night to forget his sorrows, he ends up at a party with tons of cocaine and sexy naked ladies, while acting like a Canadian Don Knotts, sashaying around the apartment like a goof! He always has a copy of his own films on hand and plays "The Executioner" at the party (what an narcissist)! 

   It gets pretty ugly as the film strip triggers a self-induced coked-out fever dream.
Chas Balun raved about this underrated gem in the catalog as being one of his personal favorites and it's really demented in a TV melodramatic way with tons of gore, just as much as an H.G. Lewis or construction worker safety video!

Sister Mary Open Heart Surgery

Someone should give this film a proper DVD release (Hey Shout Factory, The Town That Dreaded Sundown is on Blu Ray but not this? Come On)!! Check it out before it's gone from Youtube once again and hopefully someday a restored version will come out.

WATCH HERE 

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