I'll admit that Jan-Gel 1 & 2 aren't great movies. In fact, they are stupid and badly made. However, I enjoyed the hell out of them. But the trilogy caper, which states in its opening titles that it was written, directed & produced by Conrad Brooks (the series creator), is FUCKING stupid and worst of all it is completely lifeless! It's not always that a movie will receive a red death coffin AND a triple-zero score in the three Bs! PS: This one's going to be a long review...the bad movies always warrant it.

If you've read the reviews for Jan-Gel 1 & 2 (if you haven't, please do so now) then you know I have a soft spot in my heart (and head) for Conrad Brook's caveman-on-the-loose series. When I heard that a third was being made I jumped for joy. But then I found out that Conrad wasn't really associated with it and would only play a bit part. Apparently, some guy thought the first two had been such a hit that the world needed a 3rd movie. I believe Jorge and I were the only two people who really gave a shit. Anyway, I traded Conrad a couple of copies of one of the movies we had done together, Corpses Are Forever, for some of his and got the third installment exclaiming the exploits of...Jan-Gel's son!?

In the first 2 minutes of "film" we are treated to a fat man named Jake who stands around looking at a fairground. In the next scene we are introduced to a bare popcorn stand as Jake belly's (and I do mean "belly") up to the counter. He tells the Popcorn Man "that popcorn looks pretty good", even though we literally just saw the popcorn section EMPTY. Anyway, Jake says he can't have any of that today because "it's HOT...and I have a great thirst." What does this have to do with the plot? Nothing, but since there is no plot, I thought I'd just share my favorite piece-of-shit moments. Soon we are following another fat guy, Zeke, around the fair. At this point I begin to wonder if the movie's real purpose is as a travel guide for fat guys at fairs!

Zeke and Jake meet and we start to develop something of a situation. It turns out that Jake owns the fair and the adjoining freak show and Zeke has rented his "son" (SOJ for short) to Jake for the extravagant sum of $25 a week (!!!) and Jake owes him 3 weeks back pay. Conditions must be terrible for SOJ, because he escapes and runs off into the woods. Jake calls the only man he knows who can handle the job: CONRAD BROOKS! Conrad appears 12 minutes into the cinematic diarrhea that is this "movie" and disappointment quickly sets in when you find out he is playing some guy named Dirty Harry (not Callahan), and not the Conrad Brooks who hunted Jan-Gel in the last two installments. I must say though that watching Conrad pretend to read a comic book is a pure delight. Anyway, he's set loose, but before he leaves he instructs his strangely-shaking partner to stay away from "the girlie magazine he has under the floor over there". Why it's under the floor is never addressed or explained, it's just one of those things.

So begins yet another sequence where a fat guy walks through the fair and in and out of rides looking for SOJ. It doesn't seem to cross Conrad's mind that the "freak monster", as everyone calls him, probably isn't going to hang around the place that kept him a prisoner. But after a boring, padded-out ten minutes Conrad returns to his "office" empty handed and that's it for Conrad in this picture, he disappears to allow the "plot" to unfold and that is a true shame. It isn't a Jan-Gel picture without Conrad getting lost in the damn woods!

We find SOJ, a long-haired goth kid, walking with a hunch to hide his monkey face (or lack thereof) from the audience. We spend an interminable period with him as he wanders through a cemetery, gets caught in a bear trap, and FALLS ASLEEP! He is found by Jason, the assistant to a super-fat dude named Dr. Love, who runs the local sanitarium (out of his damn house). The remainder of this moving chunk of turd vomit revels in the fact that it is completely plotless. SOJ spends his days at the sanitarium following Jason around as he does menial chores. The sheriff shows up one night and Dr. Love decides to set SOJ free so he can find peace in the woods or some shit, but not before he has Jason give him a BAG OF FUCKING BANANAS as a going-away present!

Zeke shows up at Dr. Love's and tells him that he found SOJ out in the woods as a child and raised the boy, a half-man/half-monkey creature, as his own. He theorizes that SOJ is the son of the wild man of West Virginia known as Jan-Gel. This would only mean that Jan-Gel fucked a monkey in between getting gunned down in the first one and getting run over by a damn train in the sequel. The film comes to an open-ended conclusion as a pointless (much like this movie) title card shows up and tells us that Jake is still on the hunt for SOJ. He has hired a guy dressed like a fucking wizard to help him find the freak and after Jake makes a lousy speech by the side of the road and the wizard takes a whiz on a tree, they drive off into the wilderness and the film fades out. They would hope that we'd be at the edge of our seat with such an open-ended conclusion, but this reviewer (a once-hardcore fan of the series) doesn't really give a rat's ass anymore. Farewell...and good riddance.

This film runs for 80 minutes, which is padded out to the hilt and back. The first two run about under an hour or so, and were perfect. The feature length in this case works mightily against it. You know what else works against it? EVERYTHING! There is NOT ONE genuine line reading in the whole damn thing! These aren't just bad actors; these are people who shouldn't even speak! It's like they're not even human! But the worst of the worst is the editing...which there is NONE of in this movie. This whole boring, dull mess feels like it was cut on 2 VCRs and one of them had a delay. Actors stand around waiting for cues, scenes go on ten seconds longer than they should, and there are WAY TOO MANY FAT GUYS walking around that damn fair! There is so much to hate in this movie, which gets everything an SOV movie should do wrong and ends up becoming a forgettable, unwatchable waste of slack-jawed junk. The first one was great, the second may not have had Jan-Gel per se but it did manage to entertain me, and with the third they managed to drive a nail into this wonderfully awful series by trying to make a drama out of the damn thing. For that you need a good story...and oh yeah, talent! Sorry Conrad, this was a massive fail, but in the end it really wasn't your fault. Good night sweet Jan-Gel...wherever you are. We'll always have West Virginia.

- Jose Prendes