CAESAR AND OTTO'S DEADLY XMAS -- Movie Review by Porfle

(Originally posted on 8/28/12)


When we last checked in with those wacky half-brothers Caesar and Otto, they were frantically eluding the bloody clutches of a serial killer in CAESAR & OTTO'S SUMMER CAMP MASSACRE and trying not to get sued by the Prince of Darkness himself in CAESAR & OTTO MEET DRACULA'S LAWYER.  Now, with CAESAR AND OTTO'S DEADLY XMAS (2012), even "the most wonderful time of the year" becomes a nightmare of horror and hilarity for our dauntless dim-bulbs.

Directing his own screenplay (from a story co-written with Joe Randazzo) in his usual frenetic and wildly inventive style, indy auteur Dave Campfield once again stars as "effete tough guy" Caesar Denovio, a whirling dervish of cowardly aggression who fancies himself a great actor even though he bungles even the tiniest bit parts (such as "Waiter" or "Background Pedestrian").

Caesar constantly bullies and beats up on his much larger but mild-mannered half-brother Otto (Paul Chomicki), an unemployed "sponge" living in Caesar's apartment.  Together, Campfield and Chomicki form a comedy team that harkens back to such classic duos as Abbott & Costello and Ren & Stimpy, but with their own amusingly unique style.

Several elements from SUMMER CAMP MASSACRE are carried over here, including Caesar and Otto's quest for employment leading them into the manipulative clutches of the deceptively pleasant Jerry (Ken MacFarlane), who now heads an evil organization called XMas Enterprises.  Caesar gets to display his bad-acting chops again, this time failing his audition to play Santa due to a childhood trauma caused by crazy Grandpa Denovio (a hilarious cameo by Troma's Lloyd Kaufman).

There's a road trip complete with endearingly bad (if not impossible) process shots, along with another of Caesar's BABY JANE-style attacks on Otto as they compete for the same acting role.  The suspenseful climax recalls that of the previous film, with Caesar, Otto, and their dad Fred in grave peril at the hands of Jerry and his minions.

One of the most delightfully funny new wrinkles in DEADLY XMAS is when Caesar gets the chance to write, direct, and star in his very own low-budget horror film (financed by XMas Enterprises) which, of course, is a disaster.  "Hand-hold it, the shakier the better!" he says gleefully during one scene.  "That's, like, never done in independent films!"

 

Other returning castmembers include Robin Ritter as Nurse Helen, Avi K. Garg as the plucky Drew (who remains upbeat even though he keeps losing his arms and having them reattached), Scott Aguilar as Caesar and Otto's no-good but lovable dad Fred, Summer Ferguson as Otto's boyhood love interest Allison, Keith Bush as the Caesar-hating chief of police, Dawn Burdue, Jen Nikolaus, and Derek Crabbe. 

Felissa Rose (SLEEPAWAY CAMP), Martin Sheen's brother Joe Estevez, and scream queens Brinke Stevens and Debbie Rochon make their customary cameo appearances, while Linnea Quigley plays Caesar's crabby agent Donna and recreates her celebrated death scene from 1984's SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT.

Felissa's husband Deron Miller, who had a much smaller role in SUMMER CAMP MASSACRE, plays Santa-clad serial killer Demian, a crazed lackey of XMas Enterprises who becomes fixated on our heroes and starts killing off everyone on the "called to cancel" list for Caesar's annual Thanksgiving feast (which features pretzel sticks, popcorn, and toast on picnic plates).  Demian's axe-wielding exploits supply the film with most of its over-the-top comedic gore, aside from a dream sequence in which a mortified Caesar gets drenched from head to toe in the red stuff while Santa dismembers Otto with a chainsaw.

Once again, Dave Campfield is able to overcome a rock-bottom budget simply by means of creative directing, camerawork, and editing (the latter is especially good), along with sound design and a hyperkinetic pace which recall classic theatrical cartoons.  In addition to this, the cast is brimming with talented performers rather than, as in so many low-budget features, a bunch of nitwits thrown together on the cheap.  There's a lot of good comic acting going on here, with each castmember seemingly inspired by the project.

This is especially true in regard to Campfield himself, who, given the right resources, has (in my opinion) the potential to develop into one of the sharpest and most visually creative comedy filmmakers working today.  While still suffering from a lack of polish that a decent budget would solve, his "Caesar and Otto" series has its own distinctly warped slapstick style and sensibility in the same way that, say, the Zucker Brothers' comedies do.  I'm not saying Dave Campfield is the next Buster Keaton, but I think ol' Stone Face might've gotten a few good laughs out of CAESAR AND OTTO'S DEADLY XMAS.

caesarandotto.com

Caesar & Otto’s Deadly Xmas--Fun Facts and Trivia

Story: With the holiday season approaching, Caesar and Otto find themselves employed at X-Mas Enterprises Inc., where a disgruntled employee wearing a Santa suit has begun a killing spree, and has appeared to have found himself the perfect patsies.

Cast: Dave Campfield, Paul Chomicki, Deron Miller, Ken Macfarlane, Summer Ferguson, Brinke Stevens, Scott Aguilar with special appearances from Lloyd Kaufman, Felissa Rose, Debbie Rochon, Joe Estevez and Linnea Quigley.


Trivia

The film is part spoof of 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night, and features many direct homages. Most notably, Linnea Quigley being impaled upon antlers.

Lloyd Kaufman’s appearance is a direct spoof of an opening scene from Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984).

Deadly Xmas is a sequel to Caesar & Otto’s Summer Camp Massacre, which lampooned “Sleep away Camp” (1983). Summer Camp featured Felissa Rose in a role that parodied her Angela character from the original.

Deron Miller, who portrays Demian in this feature, was lead singer of the hit rock group, CKY.

Deron Miller and Felissa Rose play husband and wife in the film. In real life they in fact are.

Neil Leeds is in fact a local Los Angeles celebrity known for his around the clock television ads as Leeds Mattress owner and spokesperson.

Preproduction has begun on the next installment, which will satirize both Halloween and the Paranormal Activity movies.

Intended to be a modern day throw back to the Abbott and Costello horror/comedy crossovers of yesteryear.

 

CAESAR AND OTTO'S DEADLY XMAS -- Movie Review by Porfle

RETURN TO NUKE 'EM HIGH, VOLUME 1 -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 3/12/14

 

Chances are that, sooner or later, many people who watch Troma Entertainment's latest cinematic outrage, RETURN TO NUKE 'EM HIGH, VOLUME 1 (2013), will reach a particular point in the action where they hold up their hand and say, "Okay, that's just going TOO far."  For some, that point will begin during the pre-titles sequence and last for about an hour and a half. 

For others, it may not happen until the disintegrating penis scene, the tossing-a-dog-over-Niagara-Falls scene, the "duck rape" scene, or the corrosive green slime lactation scene.  For me, incidentally, it was when two guys are arguing about music and one of them keeps insisting "Justin Bieber is the best!  The BEST!!!"

But first, there's a nostalgic opening montage of mayhem from previous Troma "Nuke 'Em High" films (with relatively much lower production values than this one) and a surprise narrator.  A tone of breezy irreverence sets in early and doesn't let up--in fact, it increases with each new and more imaginative atrocity,  beginning with an obligatory teen sex scene in the high school janitor's room that degenerates into horrific extreme gore in which both teens dissolve into heaps of gooey detritus.  (The girl's dramatic last words, "What kind of a god...?" become a running gag.) 

This scene is so colorfully, so gleefully over the top that we know "Okay, we don't have to worry about any kind of censorship, limits, boundaries, or taste--WHATSOEVER--for the next hour and a half."

The cause of this boundless horror is the former nuclear power plant site next to the school, which is now a sleazy "health food" factory called Tromorganic whose product is so rancid that even fast food joints won't carry it, and whose CEO (Troma chief Lloyd Kaufman himself, hilarious as the profoundly unscrupulous Mr. Herzkauf) has a deal with the school principal for his chemically contaminated vittles to be served to the unwitting students.

This will be the cause of serious trouble later on when bully magnets The Troma Poofs, a glee club composed of the school's biggest nerds, eat Tromorganic tacos and start morphing into sadistic monsters known as The Cretins who then terrorize their former antagonists along with whomever else gets in their way.  Much of the resulting mayhem may remind viewers of Peter Jackson's blood-and-guts-drenched horror comedy DEAD ALIVE not only in the high level of gore but in how downright bizarre much of it is. 

Comedy-wise, RETURN TO NUKE 'EM HIGH, VOLUME 1 makes NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE look like GIDGET GOES HAWAIIAN.  Director Kaufman stages crowd shots that are as densely packed with sight gags and elaborate set design as early MAD magazine panels, with Tromaville High so fully realized that it comes off like the legendary "National Lampoon High School Yearbook Parody" on acid. 

Against this backdrop comes the new girl, Lauren (Catherine Corcoran), whose pampered life is envied by the lower-class orphan Chrissy (Asta Paredes), an activist-blogger with her sights set on bringing down Tromorganic.  They meet-hostile at first, but somehow we know (since everyone's a familiar stereotype and every situation is a takeoff of the usual teen movie plot developments) that after a couple of highly stimulating catfights the girls will become friends. 

What we don't know, but I'm giving away now, is that despite the constant urging of her ultra-horny boyfriend Eugene (Clay von Carlowitz) to have sex with him, Chrissy is actually a budding lesbian, and that, even though obese, ultra-horny geek Zac (Zac Amico,  who's like a cross between Harry Knowles and Harry Knowles) begs her to go to the prom with him, Lauren is, in fact, also a budding lesbian and the two former enemies are now falling in love with each other.  (Wow!  This movie has everything!) 

Surprisingly, after the action has been barrelling along non-stop since the fade-in,  it's the lesbian sex scene which finally brings everything to a grinding halt (so to speak), but most viewers who have stuck it out this far (so to speak) won't be complaining.

Dialogue includes memorable lines such as "F*** me with your fish dick, Gil!",  which, unless I'm mistaken,  is an original.  There's also a series of those obligatory freeze-frame introductory thingies for each character that are so funny ("Caught masturbating to the Food Network") ("Black guy")  I didn't even care that I was never going to remember half of these nimrods or their quirky traits.  The script by Kaufman and four co-writers doesn't just deliver a gag and bow out gracefully but pounds us over the head with gleefully horrible variations of it until I can imagine a live audience screaming with laughter and literally rolling in the aisles.  Okay, figuratively.

All of the lead actors are fine, with Kaufman playing Lee Harvey Herzkauf with such unreserved wackiness that he makes Mel Brooks look like Emo Phillips.  Herzkauf's cohort in sleaze, Principal Westly (played by someone named Babette Bombshell) is like a fatter David Frye doing a more extreme version of his famous Nixon impression.  (As it turns out, he's the only person who has actually read Chrissie's anti-Tromorganic blog.)  Familiar faces such as Debbie Rochon and Lemmy pop up in welcome cameos, along with the aforementioned surprise narrator.  The gore effects, needless to say, are extreme and plentiful, as is the requisite boobage. 

The DVD from Anchor Bay is in 1.78:1 widescreen with stereo sound and subtitles in English and Spanish.  There are two commentary tracks, one with the main cast and the other featuring Kaufman and several fellow writer/producers.  Other extras include the featurettes "Casting Conundrum", "Pre-Production Hell With Mein Kauf (Man)", "Special (Ed) Effects", "Cell-U-Lloyd Kaufman: 40 Years of TROMAtising the World", a music video from the film's consistently awesome soundtrack, and a preview trailer for Vol. 2. 

RETURN TO NUKE 'EM HIGH, VOLUME 1 is the kind of resolutely "wild" and "crazy" comedy that can become tiresome, lame, and/or overwrought real quick if the people making it don't know what they're doing.  Wonder of wonders, the people making this one actually knew what they were doing!  Needless to say,  decent folk are hereby warned to stay far, far away from this movie.  As for me,  the only thing I found disappointing about it was the abrupt ending--when Kaufman says "VOL. 1" he really means it.

RETURN TO NUKE 'EM HIGH, VOLUME 1 -- DVD Review by Porfle