The DVD:
Presented in a cardboard slipcase with each disc enclosed in its own mini-keep case, the first in Brentwood/Troma's Toxie's Triple Terror boxsets contains a wealth of weirdness. From shrunken apple-headed zombie rebel soldiers to an insane mulatto child killer, this collection of oddball entries into the world of independent horror runs the gamut of ridiculousness. Individually, we are treated to the following straight-to-video features:

THE CURSE OF THE CANNIBAL CONFEDERATES (1982) – a.k.a. The Curse of the Screaming Dead (original title)
Mel, Wyatt and Bill are longtime friends (Mel and Wyatt even served in "Nam together) and like most males in the late 70s, early 80s, they want to go out hunting. Taking a trail they've never been on before, as well as a trio of tarts who cause nothing but whining trouble, the gang stumbles across an old cemetery and the ruins of a church. Turns out the burial plot houses a mass grave of Confederate soldiers. Mel stumbles across the diary written by their leader. It's a tawdry testament to torture and death. Being an incurable thief – practically everything he owns he stole – Mel keeps the journal. Since this is 1982, our bumbling burglar has yet to learn that swiping an item from the dead is like an open invitation for the zombie stomp. Sure enough, dozens of dirt nappers rise up from their repast and decide to do a little Yankee doodling. It's creature against complainer as these constantly arguing campers discover the reality of being caught in The Curse of the Cannibal Confederates.

Sometimes, big ambitions can scuttle even the most sincere effort. On other occasions, imagination and vision can be sideswiped by lack of budget or talent. And then, there is just plain old CRAP! Amazingly, The Curse of the Cannibal Confederates falls into all three categories and still comes out entertaining as Hell. Though more or less a direct rip-off of Herschell Gordon Lewis's classic gorefest 2000 Maniacs (even the tagline – "The South's Gonna Rise Again...and Again" is far too reminiscent of the early 60s drive-in staple) this warped Civil War revenge retardation strives to deal with the torture of rebel soldiers, the desecration of sacred ground, and irritating sightless Japanese girls. When, during the opening credits, we witness the following scrawl "and featuring Mimi Ishikawa and 'Blind Kiyomi'" you know this is no normal nod to fright filmmaking. Director Tony Malanowski believes in natural settings and lighting to create his mood and atmosphere, so when we spend the last 2/3rds of the film in the pitch black darkness of the deep woods, the lack of visible action is all part of the realistic forest ambiance. Not that we'd want to see any of the idiocy going on. The Confederate corpse corps are just extras in all manner of faux fear makeup. Some wear Halloween masks with extra dried pizza dough stuck on the side; others have their entire face spray-painted white for that ultra effective Scooby Doo spectral look. Between Christopher Gummer, who never met a line he couldn't sneer and snarl at, to the two dumbest cops in the entire Spittle County police force (Cletus the slack jawed yokel has more cerebral integrity than these loopy law enforcement frauds) The Curse of the Cannibal Confederates offers some substantial living dead lunacy. The only question you'll have after watching this ridiculous rebel yell is why Sherman didn't rise up from the grave and mark all over this movie. Score: 3/5

DEMENTED DEATH FARM MASSACRE (1972) – a.k.a. Honey Britches (original title)
A couple of jewel thieves and their thick as post paramours crash their plane in rural North Carolina and try to make a break for it. Having just robbed a major New York gemstone exchange, they figure a scenic excursion through the Blue Ridge Mountains will help them unwind – or at least lie low. When their getaway Jeep stalls, they end up traversing their city slickers up to the door of moonshiner Harlan Craven and his gal-youngen teen bride Reba Sue. Harlan is a God-fearing old goat who frequently "tastes" his still-born corn liquor to make sure it's acceptable for his inbred clientele. But the criminals begin to put a damper on his deliveries, as well as making carnal cow eyes at his wife. When a cat fight breaks out and Reba Sue smashes a gun moll's head with a moonshine jug, the death drives the wedge even further between the villains and the vittles. Trying to keep their country-fried hostages in check, the reservoir dogs decide to horn in on Harlan's homemade booze business. Stating that he will sell no shine before its time, Harlan takes pitchfork in hand and starts metering out sorghum style justice. The bodies begin to pile up as the farmer takes a knife – well, not really; more like a piece of wood – and goes on a Demented Death Farm Massacre.

Oh yeah – and every once in a while, the Death Judge from Hell stands off to the side of the action and passes barely coherent judgment.

The original title, Honey Britches, should really cue you in regarding what kind of movie this really is. While it is being sold as some manner of moonshine slasher saga, it is really nothing more than one of those typical Harry Novak or Herschell Gordon Lewis southern-fried sex farces dolled up in a psychotic facade. Credited to directors Donn Davison (who seemed to specialize in these hillbilly hoedowns, if you check his credits) and z-film fave Fred Olen Ray (who obviously pulled an Ed Wood here and placed John Carradine as the "Death Judge from Hell" in strategic moments throughout the film) this repackaged cornpone is just campy enough to be fun, just consistent enough to keep you interested. George Ellis, who looks like the love child of a mating between Zero Mostel and Grizzly Adams, plays Harlan like a Bible-thumping buffoon, all facial tics and bombastic line readings. He is supposed to be the comic relief in what is otherwise a tacky, titillating title of unbridled plowman's passion. But screenwriter Barbara Morris Davison (wife of director Donn) telegraphs ever bit of gratuitousness with self-righteous indignation. Before a felon plots a crime, there's a five-minute debate on the pros and cons of illegal activity. A whorehouse madam rationalizes her trade with more analytical acumen than a backwoods bed jockey should have. Following the overly verbal formula, title tinkering Fred Olen Ray gives John Carradine his own heavy handed mini-monologues, mostly dealing with fire, brimstone and failing memory. Still, any movie that features death by sour mash jug and a comely co-conspirator with breasts the size (and color) of suckling piglets can't be all bad, and Demented Death Farm Massacre is NOT all bad. It's not all good, either. It's smack dab in the middle of mindless mountain doodie. Score 3/5

DEADLY DAPHNE'S REVENGE (1987)
Charlie runs a successful trucking business and owns a hunting lodge up in the California Mountains. While driving his half-brother Steve, his milquetoast insurance broker Bruce and his put-upon, non-PC ethnic employee Bobo, up to the shotgun shack, he stops the RV and picks up jailbait hitchhiker Cindy. A few hundred beers, a couple dozen bottles of tequila and a spleif later and Charlie is ready to put the hammer down. But Cindy would rather bed the befuddled Steve, who sees this statutory incident as a way of protecting the girl from his horn-dog relative. Well, all consensual sex aside, Charlie finds Cindy in her skin skivvies and assaults the road rash out of her. Cindy runs to the DA, cries rape, and before you know it, the four men are arrested and charged. After losing a big contract and his hen-pecking spouse because of the publicity, Bruce eats the business end of a gun. Steve and Bobo grow nervous, but Charlie has a plan. The State can't prosecute without a witness and his local mafia friend is famous for making people "disappear". With a contract out on the tattletale teen, Charlie's lawyer learns that the charges will be dropped. But everyone is suspicious that our twisted Teamster had something to do with it. Cindy must be kept safe, and soon Charlie is plotting with Steve to protect her from the hired hitman.

Oh yeah – Deadly Daphne is in this movie too. But her connection to the plot is so surreal you have to simply watch it to believe it.

In a classic example of what we in the criticism industry like to call bait and switch, Deadly Daphne's Revenge is as much about the demented title character as Friday the 13th was about wood burning. After a brief appearance in a pre-credit sequence (looking like Angela Davis in a radical rethinking of The Fisher King), our unhinged heroine doesn't reappear into the narrative until about 10 minutes from the end. Then she does her payback thang and the film is over. So while it would be warranted to complain like crazy about the significant lack of the lethal loony, the rest of this unsane saga more than makes up for it. Basically, this film is an exercise in setup and take down. As played by John Suttle as a combination of Hank William's Jr. and CW McCall, complete with scruffy country growl and superfluous buffalo beard, Charlie is every miscreant element of the male personality plopped into a single racist asshole, and as his actions become more and more repellant, we can't wait for someone to waste this toad. Yet before we get to the title retribution, we have to wade through several scenes of legal maneuvering, malevolent he-man grandstanding and mid-life crisis moralizing. Indeed, this is not so much a horror or slasher film as a kind of crazy deus ex machina crime drama where the eventual hammer of justice that rights all the wrongs is an insane woman who once beat a kid to death over a guy, Fatal Attraction style. As director Richard Gardner's sole screen credit (go figure) Deadly Daphne has all the telltale signs of a TV movie – massive amounts of medium shots, basic, broad lighting and very strangely spacious sets resembling Best Western motor lodges. Yet even all logic leaps and last minute narrative manipulation (got to get Charlie back into those asylum escapee filled woods somehow) Deadly Daphne's Revenge is a great, goofy guilty pleasure. Score 3/5

In trying to find a theme to this Troma triple threat, the obvious answer would be revenge. After all, Deadly Daphne wants it, the Confederate Cannibals mandate it and the denizens of the Death Farm provide plenty of it. But looking beyond the obvious angles, it is clear that one of the guiding principles behind each film is a desire to deceive. Not a wicked one, mind you, nothing so callous or cold as that. No, in the grand tradition of PT Barnum, Kroger Babb and Dave Friedman, Lloyd Kaufman is out to make mountains out of molehills, chicken salad out of chicken offal and he's not afraid to bend the truth to obtain such results. The cannibal angle is just one aspect – albeit a gore drenched, sickening sound effect laden single sequence of said - of a film that wants to discuss other, broader themes. Harlan is more about homebrew than homicide, having to kill out of necessity, not Voorhess-esque vengeance. And Deadly Daphne? She's an ancillary element in her own film. So it's clear that, from the beginning, Troma stood by the tradition of old exploitationers in promising everything and delivering very little. From the add-on Carradine crapola in Death Farm to the Civil War minute mung of hippies reading from a living dead man's depressing diary, the three films here walk that fine line of disappointment and delight with high wire wisdom.

Not that these movies really disappoint. Each has their component of excusable amusement. All three breeze by with a minimal amount of boredom. They continually push the boundaries of believability, usually with unintentionally hilarious results. And just when you think you've seen everything, the auteurs behind the lens turn up the surreality. But there is also something more meaningful going on, something that will fill the average cinema geek with bygone glee. In actuality, Toxie's Triple Terror creates a kind of nostalgia for those lonely Friday and Saturday nights when a trip to the video store was your only solace from another dateless experience. You will experience the same sense of sensationalized anticipation as you read the title and devour the plot description. And there will be that same stilted sigh when you recognize that your hopes for a horror delight have, instead, transformed into another 80-minute excursion into stupidity. Many a movie maniac developed his or her chops on a steady diet of such VCR vomit and getting another chance to experience such a bad movie rush is resplendent. Here's hoping that all seven boxsets offer as many examples of home video entertainment verisimilitude as found in the fetid features The Curse of the Cannibal Confederates, Demented Death Farm Massacre and Deadly Daphne's Revenge.

The Video:
In perhaps the most bizarre twist of them all, the oldest movie here (Death Farm) has, by far, the best picture of the set. All the films are full frame, 1.33:1 VHS friendly presentations, but two are clearly the worse for wear. Deadly Daphne has a flat, TV movie feel to its production and said lifeless lensing comes across in all its generic glory, with this transfer. Colors are muted and there is very little detail to the image. But nothing could stink harder or more fragrantly than Cannibal Confederates. Like listening to the Human League's first album, this dreadful DVD image takes you right back like a visual Way Back machine to the magnetic tape monstrosities of early video tape trash. Looking 7th or 8th generation, with night scenes that resemble blackened India ink and very little corrective contrasts, you occasionally feel like a goldfish with glaucoma watching a dirty TV screen through an alginated aquarium. On the other hand, Death Farm looks like it was made in the late 80s, not the early 70s. Everything about it screams contemporary, from the vivid hues to the semi-professional production values. The only element not original to the film – aside from the completely goofy inserts of John Carradine – is the slow motion manipulation of the action scenes. Sequences we see occurring at a normal rate in the trailer are chopped up and made more "dramatic" by dialing down the frame rate.

The Audio:
Dolby Digital Mono can sound one of two ways – overmodulated and tinny or flat and satisfactory. In the case of Demented Death Farm Massacre and Deadly Daphne's Revenge, the latter provides the aural attributes here. Voices are clear, dialogue is understandable and the entire soundscape has a level of ersatz-professionalism. Death Farm does use an obvious, non-original overblown orchestrated score that occasionally drowns out what is happening, but it also heightens the surreal sense of the film. Cannibal Confederates falls into an unreal realm all its own. Voices sound muffled and muted, like the actors stuffed silencers in their mouths, and the "screaming dead" sound like unemployed porn stars auditioning for foreign groan voice-over work. While sometimes stumbling into a tidbit of ambient excellence, the only sound this Southern schlock can seem to register is almost unintelligible.

The Extras:
Unlike standard Troma fare that features founder Lloyd Kaufman lewding it up with various toilet humor and sophomoric rants, as well as other bonus content goodies, the individual DVDs here are very bare bones. Each contains a trailer, and they are usually not the original ones at that. Both Confederate Cannibal (which, by the way, if a far superior title to the Screaming Dead nonsense) and Demented Death Farm Massacre contain Tromatized ads, created specifically to spin the movie the way the company was trying to sell it. Death Farm looks like Evil Dead meets Macon County Line while Curse keeps with the corpse rising ridiculousness inherent in the film. Since Troma produced Deadly Daphne, it has a standard, decent direct piece of promotion. While some may argue that having three movies is more than enough added content for one box set, this overview of Troma's early releases would benefit from some sort of historical perspective or filmography foundation.

Final Thoughts:
While it may seem hard to get a handle on, us bad film fanatics understand. There is something so very ripe and juicy about a horrible bit of cinematic hackwork, a movie so monstrously mediocre that it blows tumbleweeds through your thought processes and leaves your aesthetics parched and arid. The spurting of fake blood...the dismay at a horrible make-up job...the zipper-backed creature that is supposed to scare but only manages to instill snickers – this was the manna from hundreds of homemade horror films, each trying to find a niche in the volatile VCR market. Back before DVD tapped into the crap just sitting on distributor's shelves, VHS was the cottage industry, and anything could be made profitable as long as it could be packaged and marketed smartly. Nobody did it, or still does it, better than Troma as the Toxie's Triple Terror #1 boxset indicates. From the almost-zombie movie of Cannibal Confederates to the wannabe –slasher sagas found in Death Farm and Daphne, each of the titles presented here represents ballyhoo at its most basic, and medicine show sentiments at their most shiftless. Where the pleasure comes from is perfectly clear – movies such as these tap into a strange center of the brain where good and bad battle it out for entertainment superiority. Said war has waged as long as basic cable offered free in-home movies and magnetic tape made all cinema living room adaptable. Like a pressed paper journey back to your local convenience store's video rack, Toxie's Triple Terror #1 is a tasty throwback, both to Troma and VHS's heyday. Enjoy the ride.

Want more Gibron Goodness? Come to Bill's TINSEL TORN REBORN Blog (Updated Frequently) and Enjoy! Click Here