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After the dinner ritual was over and I was alone in my own place, I put a movie in the player I never got around to seeing, although I bought it more than a year ago.  I noticed as the opening credits rolled that I had never heard of the director -- Wolfgang Schmidt -- but two of the actresses's names alarmed me:  Laura and Linda Steckler.  NO, I thought.  COULD IT BE?

The movie itself turned out to be going under a pseudonym.  What I thought was called Blood Shack was in fact the theatrical-release version of a forgotten non-classic called The Chooper -- not  The Chopper but The Chooper -- with 15 minutes added because no film distributor wanted to handle an hour-long horror picture.  Yes:  the director's cut is SHORTER than the theatrical release.  Yes:  The director was Ray Dennis Steckler, who brought you Rat Pfink A Boo Boo[/b and The Incrediby Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies.  Onward.  (The movie was rolling and what choice did I have?)

PLOT SUMMARY:  A rural legend proves to be true, 100% true.  Anyone who sleeps in this shacky old house is horribly murdered by someone or something called the Chooper.  Through the whole story I thought they were saying "Trooper," and since IU was watching a movie I thought was called Blood Shack, I was none the wiser until the story was blessedly over.  In spite of the fact that this is clearly NOT just a legend and people get killed there all the time, idjits keep going there to spend the night...and nobody has padlocked the place or torn it down or surrounded it with detectives.   

We start out watching a young woman strip down to her undies to lie down on the grossest mattress I've ever seen shortly before she is chased down and hacked to death by a shadowy figure.  A "farmer" who tends no crops and husbands no animals, but who wears pointy-toed cowboy boots and a Zorro hat, goes into the house in the morning, hauls out the body and buries it on the back forty rather than, say, calling the cops.  Why, I could not begin to guess. Later in the picture he does a bit of a soliloquoy and says "you keep on killin' 'em and I'll keep on buryin' 'em."  OK, but why, man, why?  When the woman's husaband comes after her and also gets killed, he too is buried without ceremony.  When a deputy comes out to investigate the missing couple, he is killed and buried.  NOBODY EVER SHOWS UP TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM.

At some point, a lovely but washed-up B-movie actress named Carol, played by washed-up B-movie actress Carolyn Brandt (Steckler's ex-wife), arrives on the scene because she has inherited the ranch where the farmer lives from her uncle and wants to get away from it all.  She spends the rest of the movie trailing listlessly through the desert landscape, providing melancholic voice-overs and modeling great outfits.  Oh, and arguing with this guy who insists on buying the ranch fron her.  He desists after a fistfight with Daniel, the "farmer," during which Carolyn whacks him with a 2x4.  The action scenes are everything you've come to expect from Ray Dennis Stackler, let's put it that way.

Then the Chooper comes after Daniel and Carol in broad daylight, and the menace...sort of trails off.  I won't spoil it completely, but this movie definitely deserves a Smithee Awards nomination for Crummiest Ending.

When Steckler was advised to add at least 10 minutes to his movie to get it seen on the big screen, what did he add?  Did he explain who the Chooper was or why Daniel was covering up his crimes?   Did he explain where the rest of the cops got to after one of the deputies disappeared, or even what Daniel did with the cop car?  Oh no.  He added completely unrelated rodeo scenes.  Long ones.  Two long sequences in a movie that, at 70 minutes, already felt unbelievably long.

I watched the special features, and Steckler himself explained that he feels now, looking back, that this movie was even better than he originally thought.  He also said that he made the whole thing for just under $500.  And believe me, that really shows.

Did you have a turkey fo this Thanksgiving?

 :hot: :hot: :hot: :hot: :hot: :hot: :hot: :hot:

     No, but I remember reading about this picture in THE MONSTER TIMES, back in the 70's, and I may have even seen part of it, on a Detroit station years ago when the "skip" was good.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTnq3aUP9_k

That was a cool movie!

I saw this one under the title Blood Shack years ago. I didn't really like it too much. I felt there was waaaay too much padding for my liking. I would like to see The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher though - seems pretty cool.

I have a DVD with both versions on it: BLOOD SHACK and THE CHOOPER.  A double-dose of Ray Dennis Steckler is always a good thing.