BLOODMARSH KRACKOON

BLOODMARSH KRACKOON opens to a 4-minute race through its 2010 predecessor, the no-budget KRACKOON. Here, we see how a drug dealer called Blowjob was killed and dumped in a Bronx river shortly after swallowing a crack-filled condom. When a raccoon subsequently feasted on his corpse, it was sent crazy and ran amuck in the city.

Writer-director Jerry Landi's sequel-of-sorts begins with the same Locus Point suburb of New York cleaning up the mess from the preceding film, with local authorities clearing corpses and searching for a stray dog (the suspected culprit of the attacks) while the media jump on the story and generally get on everyone's tits.

Deputy mayor Peter (Sal Amore) is evidently the hero of the piece, working with the local police chief (Bob Connelly) to solve this mystery while keeping the press at bay. He's going to have his work cut out: the local mobsters and corrupt politicians are both getting antsy with cops and journalists swarming the area in search of the truth.

Meanwhile, we're introduced to several initially unconnected characters: two metalhead hitmen responsible for this whole mess in the first place; head gangster and suspected mental patient Bennie (Rosario Russo); clinic operator-cum-police informant Bob (Anthony Bisciello); a hot stripper whose young son sleeps behind her stage act; two elderly prossies; adolescent Tommy (Joseph Ferri), an orphan looking for a home after originally discovering Blowjob's body and going on the run shortly afterwards.

Along with Peter, who ends up hiring the hitman to hunt down the mystery killer in a bid to keep him in office, Tommy becomes the main focal point of the film as he eventually forms a bond with the killer raccoon - which by this point has been nicknamed 'Redeye'. In the meantime, the messy plot introduces even more characters while deviating at regular intervals into gory attacks by Redeye and its luminous green, toxic offspring.

Frantically paced, pithily scripted and energetically performed, it's difficult not to find entertainment in BLOODMARSH KRACKOON. It's gory - in a wacky, POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD manner - and filled with the type of characters John Waters used to write so well. The cheery songs are fun too.

It's also unashamedly cheap - the odd moment of CGI bloodletting is horrible, truly - and almost incoherent. The script is a mess, each scene barely connected to the last.

If you can get past this sloppiness and uneven performances, as well as the cut-rate production values and rather naff creature effects, you will get to some fun, splashy set-pieces and be rewarded with a daft but admirably straight-faced homage to the low budget monster pictures of the 1980s (THE BOOGENS and especially THE DEADLY SPAWN spring to mind, as well as - VERY loosely - GREMLINS ...).

Presented in its original 16x9 widescreen ratio, BLOODMARSH KRACKOON looks about as it realistically can here. Shot on HD video for peanuts, colours are well rendered and detail is fair, while some noise disrupts darker moments. There's no avoiding the cheap look and feel of the film but, at the end of the day, this is about crack-rabid raccoons...

English 2.0 audio is perfectly serviceable throughout.

Independent Entertainment's region free DVD opens to an animated main menu page. There is no scene selection menu option but the film does benefit from 18 remote-accessed chapters.

Of the bonus features on offer, by far the best is KRACKOON itself. This 62-minute feature is very lo-fi, even more so than its follow-up. The 16x9 picture is soft and suffers from weak blacks, along with some serious lip-synching issues during some exterior scenes.

Having said that, there's an agreeable energy about it that makes it pretty easy viewing. The expletive-riddled script is crude enough to challenge GUTTERBALLS, all the characters are enjoyably despicable and performances are as zealous as they are crazily bad. More of the same, in other words. It's good fun, and the rudimentary violence contained within doesn't disappoint.

Next up is "The Making of BLOODMARSH KRACKOON or How a Crack Addicted Raccoon Changed my Life", a superb 31-minute behind-the-scenes documentary with plentiful on-set footage and insightful input from the likeable, intelligent Landi.

We also get a trailer vault which provides a shed-load of previews for other Independent Entertainment releases: BLOODMARSH KRACKOON, ATOMIC BRAIN INVASION, BACTERIUM, BITE ME, DOCUMENTING THE GREY MAN, I HEART U, INTERPLANETARY, LIZARD MAN, SHOCK-O-RAMA and SPLATTER BEACH.

If you've been bemoaning the lack of new Troma output of late, you could do a lot worse than fill your void with this low-budget, tasteless and cheerfully zero budget cack-fest. It gets a great treatment from Independent Entertainment on this DVD.

Review by Stuart Willis