Review: Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979)

Directed by: Nathan Schiff
Starring: John Smihula, Fred Borges, Fred Dabby
Written by: Nathan Schiff
Country: United States
Available on: DVD (Image Entertainment)
IMDb

Most 16-year-olds in the ‘70s were doing their math homework, shooting hoops, gabbing on the phone with friends, smoking doobies, spinning the latest Osmonds record, or rifling through their parents’ porn collection. Nathan Schiff was recruiting adults with astounding mustaches and aviator sunglasses to star in his homemade splatter flicks. Weasels Rip My Flesh is Schiff’s very first feature-length movie, filmed on Super 8 when he was just a weird 16-year-old Long Island kid.

Subtlety isn’t Schiff’s thing — this movie is about radioactive mutant weasels who rip flesh. There’s some gobbledygook about a mad scientist striving for immortality and the genesis of Schiff’s predilection for Long Island police officers wandering around doing some things that aren’t of much consequence. But, primarily, this is a vehicle for splatter inventiveness of the most frugal order. This is a cornucopia of butcher shop and craft store scrap-art as wreaked by a couple of rubber mutant weasels, one wearing Chucks that looks more like a giant gray biped worm whose face is an explosion of burnt french fries and the other a prop from an alternate-universe rodent-centric Muppet Show parody of Jaws.

Schiff’s affection for wall-to-wall library music is here in his earliest work and it, combined with the dizzying camera work of an operator with poor balance and a limited understanding of where he should be pointing the camera and when and the roughshod editing, forms the germination of Schiff’s brand of anachronistic, surrealist splatter craftsmanship that he’d perfect in monuments to no-budget ingenuity like Long Island Cannibal Massacre and They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore.

As expected, this is a flawed film, and it plods. Schiff is constantly on the lookout for ways to fill runtime, even though the end product barely passes the 60-minute threshold. Actors wander around a lot and trees get a heaping of affection from the lens. There’s a head-scratching deux ex machina courtesy of a plastic shark in what I believe is a body of fresh water. His stuff isn’t exactly plot-sharp, but the artistry with which Schiff wastes time in later films is noticeably absent here. But regardless, this is a brief, brute peek into the proclivities that he’d better exploit down the twisted road of his filmmaking career.

Overall rating: 6.5 out of 10