DIRECTED BY: Tony “Tex” Watt

FEATURING: Vivita, Tony “Tex” Watt, Lana Tailor

PLOT: A teenage goth girl meanders around the New Jersey suburbs killing people and allegedly eating them. Sometimes. But there are scumbags, strippers, prostitutes, F.B.I. investigators, mafiosos, and mafioso’s children who get more screen time than the titular character. Also, breasts.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s unequivocally terrible, which overshadows any weirdness the filmmakers manage to conjure up from the depths of their eye-rolling sexual deviancy. If GWAR and Ween collaborated on an album that was turned into a film, it would be this one, although, unlike Acid Head, that film surely would not be 155 minutes, cast with boorish amateurs, and shot through the most annoying faux-grindhouse filter of all time.

COMMENTS: Tony “Tex” Watt finally answers the question, “should watching a movie feel like a punishment?” with his latest directorial effort, Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter. This guerrilla warfare-style film has a brazen, almost felonious contempt for the audience. The interminably long opening credit sequence involving monotonous driving, out-of-place sound effects, and a song so forgettable I forgot who I was during the chorus sets an unhealthy precedent of open hostility towards anyone who dares to watch.

The gargantuan running time could have serviced two complete films, but somehow it houses around five, all of them claiming to be the same movie, and all of them, infuriatingly, incomplete. It’s a slasher flick, kinda. It’s also an outlaw buddy comedy, if comedy was spelled “zzzzzzz”. There’s a grindhouse sleaze movie in here, a mafia drama, and a sex farce involving the FBI for good measure. It’s all over the map, nothing makes sense, and I suspect it’s not supposed to. It’s an exercise in hatred for the audience the likes of which have not been seen since Thierry Zeno’s Wedding Trough.

How much does Acid Head hate its audience? There is an intermission—not in the middle, mind you, but rather near the end of this behemoth—entitled “The 10-Minute Beach Slut Intermission.” It features the main draw of this production, Playboy model Lana Tailor, and another attractive cast member loafing around the beach for ten minutes, accompanied by two grimy dimwits, doing nowhere-near-the-vicinity-of-sexy things. Ten excruciating minutes. It even throws up a timer on the screen, so you can count the 840 seconds of life that slips away during this torturous and tepid ordeal; as if we had to be reminded of how mind-meltingly tedious this is. These aren’t 10 regular minutes; these are treadmill minutes, these are underwater minutes.

But this is not to take away from the ineptitude and ennui of the other 145 minutes. After all, once the zany sound effects settle into predictable patterns, the innuendo starts to register as vaguely erogenous wallpaper, and the wig-heavy costumes all begin to look the same, Acid Head creates the worst kind of movie environment, which is of course a boring one. It is an excuse to talk about bewbs on camera and play at DIY horror for a cast and crew with tons of vision but zero aptitude. It is an enigma of purpose, like a crop circle or a platypus. And ultimately, it is a waste of time for everyone concerned.

I recommend Acid Head to anyone who loves nothing, and anybody who just can’t get enough self-loathing packed into a 24-hour day.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…seems to go out of its way to confound and drive crazy anyone who comes to it expecting good acting or anything more than a series of aimlessly rambling scenes and random exploitation homages that only ever occasionally connect up into a plot.”–Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film review (DVD)