A Night to Dismember

Plot

The Kent family of Woodmire Lake is thought to be subject to an ancestral curse that causes each of them to be murdered or commit familicide. Bonnie Kent is among the first, found hacked to death with an axe by her sister Susan; after committing the murder, Susan slips in the bathroom and falls on the blade, killing herself. Later, Broderick Kent's wife Lola is found murdered in her bathtub; he initially denies involvement, but soon confesses to the murder before hanging himself. Broderick's niece, Vicki Kent, is later sent to an asylum for murdering two neighborhood boys in August 1981.

Six years later, Vicki is released from the asylum, apparently cured of her homicidal tendencies. Her release is against the behest of her brother, Billy, and sister, Mary, both of whom want her recommitted. Upon returning home, Vicki's parents, Adam and Blanche, struggle to help her assimilate. Vicki attempts to rekindle a romance with her ex-boyfriend, Frankie, and is soon plagued by hallucinations. One night, Frankie and his new girlfriend are murdered by an unseen assailant during a sexual tryst. The killer decapitates Frankie before burning his head in the fireplace.

With her home life turbulent, Vicki attempts to visit her uncle Sebastian and Aunt Ann; her great-aunt Bea is also staying at the home. They turn her away, however, deeming her and her siblings all insane and unsafe to be around. The next morning, when they attempt to leave their house, Sebastian is murdered with a hatchet before Ann is run over with a car. Bea is pursued inside the house and decapitated, and the killer wraps her head in a cloth before storing it in a cupboard. Later while ruminating at the lake, Vicki is chased by a zombie-like male figure who emerges from the water, only later to find it was Billy attempting to scare her.

Later, Vicki attempts to seduce Tim O'Malley, a detective investigating the murders of Sebastian, Ann, and Bea, by performing a striptease. She subsequently hallucinates a sexual encounter between the two. Billy again attempts to torment Vicki, stalking her in a Halloween mask in hopes of driving her back into madness. That night, Mary awakens from a nightmare in which her entire family takes turns stabbing her to death. While Adam and Blanche attempt to console Mary, the home's electricity suddenly shuts off. Adam goes to check the main braker, and is stabbed to death with an ice pick by an unseen assailant. Shortly after, Blanche is brutally murdered in her bed.

Production

Conception

The screenplay for A Night to Dismember was written by Judith J. Kushner, and the film conceived by Wishman in the wake of the success of slasher films such as Halloween. In order to secure financing, Wishman made a trailer for the film using stock footage and snippets shot specifically for advertising. A financer from Chicago agreed to fund the production based on Wishman's trailer, giving her what she described as "a hefty deposit to finish the film."

Casting and filming

Filming took place in New York in 1979, with many of the locations being the private residences of Wishman and her friends and family. Portions of exterior filming (such as the forest scenes, and the sequence in which the two boys are murdered in the graveyard) in Westchester County. Additional exterior footage was shot outside Wishman's apartment in Queens along the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, while rooms in Wishman's apartment were used to film several interior scenes. The final scene in which Mary's character is picked up by a taxi was shot in a rural area on Long Island. According to Wishman, she paid the taxi driver $25 to shoot footage of the car's advertisement that read "Get it done! America."

Some of the cast members were friends or family of Wishman; Miriam Meth, who portrayed Vicki's mother, was Wishman's cousin, who later worked as a makeup artist on Days of Our Lives. Miriam's house was used as a filming location as well, with her own character's death sequence being filmed in her garage. According to Wishman, pornographic actress Samantha Fox was cast as Vicki after sending a headshot and "writing really nice things" in a letter addressed to Wishman. Louis Birdi, an editor who had worked with Wishman on previous film projects, appears as a stand-in for Billy during the sequences in which the character wears a Halloween mask.

The special effects were provided by Les Lorrain, visual effects by John A. Bezich; cinematographer Smith's son, Chris, also helped contribute special effects.

Post-production

According to Wishman, several reels of the film were destroyed while in the possession of Movielab, a photo processing studio Wishman had hired to process the film. By some accounts, the reels were destroyed in a fire, while Wishman claimed that a "disgruntled employee" destroyed them when the company went bankrupt. Wishman estimated that the incident left her with "less than half-a negative" of film. "I had about sixty percent of the original film, and the rest were outtakes," she recalled. "It was very difficult to concoct another story that made any sense." As a result, Wishman was forced to piece the film together with outtakes and footage from other projects. She spent eight months entirely rewriting the screenplay, followed by four years of editing the film into a releasable final product. Wishman cut the film together herself, having recently learned the basic elements of film editing.

Release

Distribution

The film was advertised for sale in Variety in 1983. Though some contemporary scholars have alleged the film was not released, it was given a release in the United States directly to video on June 14, 1989 by MPI Media Group. The following year, the VHS was suspended from production along with several other MPI-owned titles, such as Faces of Death, Horror Hospital, and Twitch of the Death Nerve, due to rights issues.

Elite Entertainment released a special edition DVD of the film in 2001, which featured an audio commentary with Wishman and cinematographer C. Davis Smith. On December 17, 2019, Frolic Pictures released the film on DVD as a double feature with Effects (1980).

On January 1, 2011, the Blue Sunshine film center in Montreal screened a digitally-restored print of the film. On June 4, 2016, the film was screened at the Film Forum in New York City as part of the "Genre is Woman" film festival, and featured an introduction by Wishman biographer Michael Bowen.

Critical response

Buzz McClain of AllMovie called the film "insultingly bad, infuriatingly terrible, and, worse, it's somehow managed to achieve cult status over the years." Author Brian Albright noted that the film is an "incomprehensible, yet compelling, post-modern mish-mash of gore and nudity." Michael Weldon in The Psychotronic Video Guide (1996) noted the film as "a disastrous meeting of Wishman and H.G. Lewis" accentuated by "gore, lots of it." Paper magazine, in a 1998 review, referred to the film as "a baffling utterly fascinating mess." In a review published by Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog, it was noted: "A Night to Dismember is to narrative film what falling down the stairs is to walking erect." Lucas specifically lambasted the film's narrative structure, and its tendency for events to be described via audio narration rather than shown. James Craddock in the Video Sourcebook gave the film its lowest rating (a "bomb"), noting: "Wishman has the reputation that equals Ed Wood Jr.'s as an auteur of alternative classics. This piece of junk cements her place in the cinematic hall of shame."

Todd Martin from HorrorNews.net panned the film, calling it "pointless", also stating that the film "doesn’t have anything going for it whatsoever". DVD Talk awarded the film two out of five stars, writing, "if there is such a thing as BAD bloodletting this is certainly it." Mick Martin of Video Movie Guide wrote: "A must for bad-movie buffs, this insanely disjointed slasher movie features almost no dialogue, actors whose clothes and hairstyles change in mid-scene, and a tacked-on narration desperately trying to make sense of it all." Noel Murray of The A.V. Club wrote of the film: "Between the artful nature scenes, the ugly interiors, and the kitchen-sink soundtrack, A Night To Dismember could almost be an avant-garde Guy Maddin homage to wincingly awful cinema. Instead, it's likely sheer coincidence that A Night To Dismember has become its own entity, a convoluted exercise in viewer endurance that perfectly evokes its title."

Discovery of lost print

On August 9, 2018, Bloody Disgusting reported that the extended cut of the film, previously thought destroyed, had been posted on YouTube. The print was discovered when Ben Ruffett, the founder of the Hamilton Trash Cinema, inquired to cinematographer C. Davis Smith about acquiring a copy of the film to screen. Smith did not own the film's official VHS release, but did have a copy of the original extended cut on tape. This version features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role, and runs nine minutes longer than the previously released version. In letter correspondence, Smith noted:

You have in your hands a rare copy of the “LOST” version of “A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER.”

I only know of three other existing copies of the film. One to a friend in Manhattan, one to another friend in Pennsylvania and the copy I have. Now you are among the elite to join the club. (There are no benefits!)(Unless it is possible nightmares!)

The story according to the Gospel of Doris is that a disgruntled employee of MovieLab, (the film processing company in which all the processing and printing work was accomplished) ruined much of the negative to the original version. “WHY” has never come to the forefront of our knowledge. (Or even IF !)...

Somehow the film was distributed in Europe in the original version. A lot of people are unaware of this... My information could possibly be conjecture. But I have seen paperwork from the distributor of the film showing that at least one print was sold as European Rights.

Smith also divulged in the letter that he had been hired as a replacement cinematographer, and that Wishman recast Fox in the lead role as she needed revenue to "salvage" the remaining footage after the reels had purportedly been destroyed. He also alleged that Fox paid Wishman $2,000 to appear in the film.