299. Death By Dialogue

299. Death By Dialogue (1988)
Director: Thomas Dewier
Writers: Thomas Dewier and Susan Trabue
From: Drive-In (only 4 remain!)
Watch: YouTube (via Troma)

Five friends find a haunted script that starts inflicting bizarre and inexplicable deaths.

Do you need more than that capsule review to know whether you want to watch this movie? That’s fair. Movies like this can veer from Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe gloriousness to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats levels of dull. This movie manages to do both, which, credit where due, is an achievement in itself.

This is the movie earning 2 points.

So, Death By Dialogue opens with some guy rooting around in a basement. He opens a trunk that explodes, sending him flying across the room, but apparently not injuring him at all. He steals a script from the trunk, reads it outside, and finds references to himself being “fired.” He thinks it’s a prank by his boss and, when he goes to confront her, a woman in fishnets walks out holding a flame thrower and sets him on fire. He got fired, get it?

My notes at this point read, “Man on fire before open credits. What are the odds that it never rises to that level again?” Place your bets now.

Are you ready to wonder why we're here?!

After the credits, the quintet of main characters/deadmeats show up, find the script, and start dying in ridiculous ways. One person is blown through a wall, seemingly by an orgasm. Another is murdered by a heavy metal band that appears out of nowhere performing a song in a field. I was feeling echos of Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare and Hack-O-Lantern at this point.

Then the remaining kids figure out the script is haunted, get told the backstory by an uncle who owns the ranch, and realize they’re all trapped there until the script is done with them. Settle in because we’re in the doldrums of this flick, waiting around watching people do nothing while they wait for something to happen. However, this portion of the movie does include the sequence of the characters trying to add scenes to the script to change their fate. This sequence is a riot because it’s literally the characters pitching and shooting down ideas that the movie doesn’t have the budget for.

The man, the myth, minus motorcycles.

After a lot of thumb-twiddling, the script’s evil manifests as a bald, sword-wielding, dark knight of metal who, standing before a wall of flame summons motorcycles from explosions that flank him

MOTORCYCLES JUMP OUT OF A FIERY EXPLOSION! MOVIE, I APOLOGIZE FOR DOUBTING YOUR COMMITMENT TO AWESOME!

Things move from there to an anti-climatic ending, (THE END) but I didn’t care by that point. This movie is dumb and it is awesome, particularly because it’s so dumb. There’s no sense of pacing, the acting sucks, the story underlying the threat makes no sense, but I do not care. Someone orgasms through a barn wall into oblivion! This is so stupid!

The sluggish parts of the movie are bad, and you feel them. They’re so slow that it’s hard to even riff on them and, to be honest, they run just a little too long for the ridiculous parts to compensate. While I spent the final twenty minutes of the film giddy with laughter, the middle third was achingly slow. I’d still recommend it: it’s a movie about an evil script that seems to be smart enough to use that as an excuse to make decisions that belong in a bad script. That it’s not smart enough to do anything competently really doesn’t matter.

My copy was not the Troma version, but Troma is a distributor of this film and have uploaded a copy to YouTube here. It’s worth a watch. Just start fast-forwarding when you get bored. You won’t miss any plot and you’ll be able to tell when you’re back at a point worth watching.