A Night to Dismember (1983)

Directed by

Doris Wishman

Genre

exploitation film, LGBTQ-related film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 09m

Rated

NR

Rating

4.9 of 10 from 27 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A young woman gets out of a mental hospital. She is cursed by her family and starts killing people. The movie is patched together from lost footage and stock clips.

low-budgetfreneticcampygoryconfusingpsychoticslapdashunhinged

What happens

A Night to Dismember is a 1983 American slasher horror film, produced and directed by Doris Wishman. The film stars pornographic actress Samantha Fox as a psychotic young woman, recently released from a psychiatric institution, who is driven to kill by an ancestral curse. It was the first and only foray into the horror genre for Wishman, who mainly directed and produced sexploitation films. Inspired by the success of slasher films such as Halloween (1978), Wishman signed on to direct and produce the film, derived from a screenplay by Judith J. Kushner. Principal photography took place in New York in 1979, with the bulk of filming taking place at the homes of Wishman and her friends. The film had a troubled production history: Wishman alleged that multiple reels were destroyed in the photo processing lab, resulting in her having to re-film sequences to graft onto the existing footage, as well as adding in stock material in order to make the film into a releasable final product. The film was completed in 1983 after four years of post-production, and subsequently released on VHS by MPI Media Group in 1989. In 2001, it was released on DVD by Elite Entertainment. In August 2018, a video master of the original "destroyed" cut of the film–previously thought lost–was discovered in the possession of the film's cinematographer, C. Davis Smith, and uploaded on YouTube. This cut of the film features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role, as well as an entirely different plot; Cummings had been replaced by Fox after the purported destruction of Wishman's film reels. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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