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The Midnight, Double Feature, Picture Show: Puphedz: The Tattle-Tale Heart & Thirst

Elite Entertainment has a mixed track record. On one hand, they championed the latest DVD edition (the Millennium Edition) of The Re-Animator which, apart from being one of the best "campy horror" movies I’ve seen, featured a vast array of extra features and goodies (the DVD almost made my "best of" list, which is yet to be published). However, this just goes to show that the left hand does not always know what the right hand is doing, they have committed some of the worst horror films to DVD (A Night to Dismember and The Incubus). The good news is that the latest batch of horror films features the incredibly entertaining and creative short film Puphedz: The Tattle-Tale Heart. The bad news is that it’s Aussie accompaniment, the 1979 film Thirst, does exactly what a vampire does: sucks.

Horror films, for the most part, fall into three distinct categories. The first being a well-executed "serious" horror film (ex. Halloween, Scream, Psycho), the second being a "campy" horror film, which is almost impossible to botch (ex. The Evil Dead, The Re-Animator), and the third, which is where most films fall, is the failed attempt of a "serious" horror film (The Incubus, the offspring of Halloween). The Tattle-Tale Heart falls into the second category while Thirst, well, I think you know where that one belongs.

Poe’s legendary horror story, "The Tell-Tale Heart" becomes the basic outline for the first Puphedz film, The Tattle-Tale Heart. However, instead of making the story into one of the hundreds of incarnations of psychological thriller, Jurgen Heimann decided to make a Tim Burton-esque fable of comedy and gore that provides a new spin on the classic Poe tale. It seemed bring to mind all of those Halloween Simpson episodes, it’s smart, it’s funny, and it’s crude when it needs to be. The plot, as noted above, is basically Poe’s. The film follows a man who has been committed after the murder of the man he was caring for. The tormented individual performed the act due to the taunting nature of the man’s vulture-like eye (which is done superbly in the film), mutilated the body, and buried it under the floor boards. He is taunted by the dead man’s beating heart when the police arrive and he ends up giving himself away. However, as bland as this summary must sound, Heimann and his team create a new, modern perspective on Poe’s tale. Take, for example, the two police men. One, a Caucasian, is the caricature of an Ebonics speaking white man while the other, an African-American, smirks at his partner and yells at him for his stereotypical responses, all while eating a piece of watermelon. It’s a satire, it’s a farce, and it’s campy. At no moment does the film take itself to be a true horror movie and that is exactly why the film prospers.

And the converse is true for the Australian film Thirst. It takes itself seriously and fails miserably at every level when it attempts to scare the audience. It makes the incompetent assumption that blood, when thrown into any scene, can cause a scream, and it exploits it in every instance. The plot probably even worked itself around the image of blood. It pours out of a shower head, it comes in a milk jug, the film is basically an exercise in how many ways the image of blood can be utilized in a horror film. This poorly constructed plot follows a young woman who has been abducted by a blood thirsty cult that seeks to market the sale of blood for consumption and reap the very gory benefits. The only interesting part of the film is the opening sequence, a montage of dissolves of the woman’s eyes as they open and she emerges from a coffin. It starts with promise and fails miserably (even the video transfer is terrible).

Elite should follow the trend of "block packaged" DVDs that are available. This basically entails the sale of ten or so "B-Movies" for a low price of about thirty dollars. These types of deals make a good marathon for a relatively cheap price, and the copies sell, even more so if one good, or at least some what decent film, is thrown in with the bunch. Movies are all about marketing and the same goes for the DVD medium. Sure, the two films have a few extra features between them (Thirst with a commentary and Puphedz with an extended version and documentary) but, as with most DVDs, the drawing power is with the film and when the film isn’t that great you need to manipulate the market. Elite either needs to learn the market or gain a bit of restraint when they pick what films they are going to bring to the DVD medium.

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