There is no greater pleasure for a filmmaker than to make your first movie and do it all yourself. Thanks to the rise of video stores in need of product and the relative inexpensiveness of video cameras we were given the shit-on-video boom...oh wait, I meant SHOT-ON-VIDEO or SOV for short, my mistake. SOV is a unique genre in the filmmaking world. As the name clearly explains, this is a movie (or a short) that was shot on consumer-grade home video. The kind of stuff you would shoot birthday parties and Jackass-style stunts with your friends on. And speaking of Jackass-style stunts, here I humbly present Dusty W. Fleishman's The Corn Stalker.

I will preface this by saying that I do not want to be intentionally harsh or mean to Dusty and his picture. My first film was an SOV (shot on prosumer dv though) and wasn't all that awesome, either. However, I knew that by the end of day one, and turned the movie into a comedy so people would laugh with it...not at it. Dusty seemed to have realized this after he filmed said picture and his letter to our offices at Strictly Splatter mentioned that he hoped we would enjoy his comedy and his sense of humor. I will tell you that Corn Stalker does not play like a comedy...intentionally. I have decided not to spare this film it's deserved Red Death Coffin or my no-holds-barred review. But first allow me to state my case.

We'll begin with the plot, and I hope you're sitting down. The Corn Stalker is about a big fat guy who wears a pillow case on his head and kills people...in a corn field. Why? Well, when a farmer's "dumbass" son was run over by a plow, his family decided to use black magic to bring him back to life...and now he spends his days stalking the corn for androgynous fat girls that wander aimlessly through the corn looking for camping sites. Admittedly, this only happens once, but the film stars with the ridiculously slow stalk of this gal and then CS attacks by choking her, then exposing her ample (and I do mean AMPLE, check the pics below) bottom and humping her through his OshKosh overalls.

Then we meet the dead girl's brother, an ex-bounty hunter named Hank, who dresses like Snake Plissken, but looks like his redneck cousin. Hank is on the trail of the CS and along the way he meets up with a group of useless twits in the cornfields that get in the way and look stupid running, which is what they do for the remainder of this unbelievably amateurish production. The film concluded in what is supposed to be a massive, knock-down drag-out fight between CS and Hank, but looks silly and staged. And now:

THE TOP TEN REASONS TO NOT WATCH THE CORN STALKER

1.) It's all out-of-sync!
2.) Amateurish camera work.
3.) Terrible John Carpenter rip-off score, mixed with lo-fi droning, generic rock music for the kills.
4.) Ridiculously lame editing transitions that make it look like a high school production.
5.) The sub-par acting (and re-acting) makes it all feel like the actors made up their dialog on the spot!
6.) The mic and the camera BUMP INTO THINGS and they keep it in the movie!
7.) The actors stand around in shots, waiting for their "action" cue to move!
8.) Clothing changes from one scene to the next.
9.) You can hear a crew member saying "PAUSE IT" during a used take in the film!
10.) Instead of a uniform (for which you would need a budget) the Sheriff dresses in a casual brown sport coat and sensible slacks like he's going to a fucking senior citizen's mixer to get some old, wrinkly tail!

This movie is so completely inept, that I am stunned by it. SOV films aren't known for their technical prowess and perfection, but come on, man, this was just lazy junk. And then, to top it all off, it doesn't even deliver the goods on gore or boobies! I watched it with my friend Jenny Kumis, and she rightfully commented: "If you're going to give me shitty filmmaking, then at least give me some Goddamn gore!" There is a bit of gore in one of the "commercials" in the opening of the film featuring the fictional Mort's Meat Shop, where you can buy human meat. There is also another God-awful commercial about halfway through the movie and I instantly got that Dusty was trying to recreate the grindhouse experience, but it ultimately added up to more crap for the bullshit sundae that was this movie.

It all mercifully comes to an end at just about 62 minutes, making it ineligible to be considered a full feature, but I don't know that I could have taken much more grainy, badly-composed footage of doughy guys stumbling through a cornfield. I know Dusty might want to "stomp a mudhole in my ass" after reading this, but as he stated in his letter to us, he wanted me to be honest. I will say to you Dusty that I have received bad reviews before (terrible, soul-crushing ones), but I didn't let them stop me. If you want to make movies, then you go and fucking make movies however way you want, just prepare to have your art judged, because in the end we do not make it just for ourselves...although in the case of The Corn Stalker, you probably should have just left it in your closet. Now I will say to everyone else, stay away from this movie, it isn't worth your time, unless you are very drunk and like to watch terrible, cheap movies. The one good thing I will say about the film is that The Corn Stalker is a great title...I'm surprised no one ever used it before.

- Jose Prendes