In short: Scream Dream (1989)

In a curious turn of events, her manager fires heavy metal star Michelle Shock (Carol Carr) from her own act and replaces her with some random blonde chick (Melissa Moore). There are rumours, you see, that Michelle is a Satanic witch who not just hides EVIL MESSAGES in her incredibly lame music, a peculiarly large number of her fans simply disappear without a trace after one of her shows.

Of course, that’s because the rumours are true, and Michelle is sacrificing a fan or two a night to Satan and her rubbery little zombie dog rat thing familiar. Given this state of affairs, firing Michelle turns out to do very little but piss her off. Turns out, not even getting killed in self-defence by her guitarist does the trick, and she soon takes over said guitarist’s dreams (and kinda-sorta his sex life), as well as the body of her replacement.

Having gone all “this is basically arthouse” on Donald Farmer’s probable debut Demon Queen, I just had to continue on to this next film – as usually, shot on video for the video market – in the man’s output. This is rather a lot more typical of what I know of the one-man-movie factory’s later output. Most of the surreal and dream-like elements of the earlier film have been replaced by “that’s the best we can do”-style cheap-o filmmaking, where a darkened room has to stand in for a sold-out concert, definitely false and really rather crap metal is supposed to be scandalous as well as a hit, and sleepy gyrating stands in for a sexy stage performance.

The film plods from one rubbery, fake and actually rather likeable gore gag to the next, stumbles upon total ignorance of how the real world works in any aspect – human relations, the music biz, fashion, walking, talking, you name it – and just runs with it. It’s pretty much what you can expect from your typical SOV horror affair, not quite crazy enough to be truly interesting – you can only show scenes of a woman rubbing some organ she’s just ripped out of someone over her naked torso so many times before it starts to feel a bit naff – yet just off enough in its view of the world – and its camera angles – to be not completely devoid of interest.