Review: They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore (1985)
Directed by: Nathan Schiff
Starring: John Smihula, Adam Berke, Mary Spadaro
Written by: Nathan Schiff
Music by: John Smihula, Nathan Schiff
Country: United States
Available on: DVD (Image Entertainment)
IMDb
Lo-fi splatter auteur and noted Long Island resident Nathan Schiff accomplished more before age 25 than most filmmakers do their entire career. The deranged brilliance of his work was already evident in Long Island Cannibal Massacre, shot when Mr. Schiff was still a wee teen brimming with ideas far too grand for Hollywood. They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore, the third in his sometimes-dubbed “Super 8 gore trilogy,” is the culmination of his many “talents.” These include the orchestration of tawdry, ogling scenes of very fake but still pretty unsettling extreme gore; extended conversations consisting of words that exist individually but have never existed together in a comprehensible way, with lines such as “You wanna be my little chicken? Because I’m a disco godfather”; a showcase of Long Island’s most inept members of law enforcement; an extensive collection of library music cues that never stops playing; and fashion mostly comprising goggles-based attire.
What didn’t carry over from Long Island to this is plotting. TDCTGA is just hillbillies Billy Buck and Jacab [sic, according to the end credits that are handwritten on a piece of paper] graphically murdering yuppies, usually by slowly ripping their faces off and squishing their eyeballs between their fingers, because they’re tired of all the condescension. There’s a brief cut to some cops doing cop shit poorly, and to Billy Buck eating a gloopy, rancid can of beans as gray-brown juices dribble down his chin. There’s the furious destruction of a haute-fashion magazine. There’s an out-of-tune musical interlude that’s the equivalent of Hell’s bluegrass. But other than these brief detours, this is unflinching carnal destruction at the hands of two rural vigilantes super irritated by boating shoes and tennis rackets.
But where this flick succeeds like few have before or since is in adeptly stringing together a seemingly disparate series of brain-melting scenes, each more a masterpiece of Schiff’s brand of beatnik-splatter than the last. A woman, who moments before had engaged in a severely overwritten and underacted discussion with her boyfriend about the nature of true love, is literally torn to shreds by our killers while their conversation, now drenched in reverb and tempo-distortion, is looped over and over and over. Two police officers, one of who is channeling his best dollar-store Dracula, urgently interrogate the mutilated remains of a victim as if she’s still alive, then muse that she’s probably better off dead because rap music would have eventually killed her anyway. Dracula-cop ponders, “Will human suffering never end?” before the camera pans out to reveal there wasn’t a body there at all. Another woman’s face is obliterated by a firecracker and her crotch blown out by a shotgun; an elderly German shepherd limps over to eat her spilling innards.
From one moment to the next, it’s tough to tell if TDCTGA is just a disgusting cataclysm of enthusiastic and imaginative but technically woeful filmmaking or the potently disjointed product of off-kilter inspiration. I think it’s the latter. I think. This flick sounds like trash, and yeah, it is. But there’s a singularly bizarre atmosphere conjured in Schiff’s work that could never be emulated by anyone else. It’s all so distinct, and that’s a quality that, although hard to quantify, is impossible to dismiss. This is a tantalizing stew of all the hyperbolic passions of a kid exploring every morbid image and nihilistic thought that emanates from his brain; Nathan Schiff just happens to have the zeal, creativity, and primeval equipment to commit it all to 8 mm posterity.
Overall rating: 8 out of 10
