This is Death by DVD, and I am Harry Scott Sullivan, your host.
And on this episode, we are going to be talking about a movie that may be one of the greatest definitive representations of American culture.
American culture is something that is often debated, and there are naysayers.
They stand there, and they say nay.
There is no such thing as American culture.
Everything that is American culture comes from someplace else.
For example, baseball.
It's just a ripoff of cricket, it's English.
Hot dogs!
As we're talking about baseball, it goes better with baseball than a hot dog.
Well, that's just a German sausage, the pizza that comes from the Italians.
American culture, it's just a ripoff.
But to those naysayers, I also, I say nay.
Against their nay?
All right, that wasn't as funny as I thought it was going to be.
It was funny in my head, fuck it.
But to those naysayers, I've got something to tell you.
You're wrong.
There are some things that are distinctly American.
In fact, they're so distinctly American that they are a part of American culture.
Let's name them.
Number one on the list, we've got eugenics.
That's right, eugenics.
Now you might be asking yourself, what is that?
And before you have to look it up, eugenics is the study.
The erroneously wrong and immoral study of how to arrange a reproduction
within human population to increase the occurrences of heritable characteristics
regarded as desirable.
You know, what the Nazis were trying to do while they were exterminating the people they felt were undesirable?
Eugenics!
Now isn't that fun?
Hot dogs!
You think that's American, but it's German.
Eugenics, you think that's German, but it's American.
The more you know, tell it to your friends at work.
In fact, this whole episode is going to be family-friendly.
Bring the kids out, get the elderly, the neighbors,
bring everyone around.
100% family-friendly.
So that's number one, and I know if that's number one, what's going to be number two?
It's slavery!
Now slavery wasn't created by the Americans, but wouldn't you say that the entire
country really was built on the blood-swettinged years of slaves whose descendants to this day have
no reparation or apology for it?
I'd say so, I think so.
And those descendants are treated worse than anybody else in the country.
Pregidist, nationalism, racism, whatever you want to call it is at large in the United States of America.
Slavery is abolished, but in a lot of places, I'd say most places.
The treatment of people is definitely unequal.
So slavery, it may not be at its creation, at its root American, but it sure is a great way to
define this country because how else would it have been built?
Yeah, this isn't fun, is it?
First we started with baseball and hot dogs and now are eugenics and slavery.
What possibly could be number three?
There are so many things, there's just so many horrible things.
This one deserves a drum roll, though, I think we should have a drum roll.
Drum roll, drum roll, drum roll.
It's a school shooting.
That's right, school shootings.
That's the most American thing, culturally.
I think there is nothing more definable to American culture than a school shooting.
It might not have started originally with us and they say according to google.com,
that the very first school shooting wasn't around 1891,
and we're not going to talk about the semantics and the details and the history or why it's caused.
Scratch that, because later on, I don't know, maybe we will.
This is going to be one of them their roller coaster episodes.
We're going to go up and down and all around.
So I shouldn't be too specific of what I will and won't get to.
School shootings happen all over the world and what we're going to be discussing isn't even
the first one of its era, but the most well-known, the granddaddiest of them all, and beyond the school
shooting, the dynamic of the school shooter and how it happens and how it happens to now be a part
of American culture. Violence is the core of this and violence is certainly American.
Now I know you can't get like a caption.
It's not like Gene Simmons getting the copyright for the money logo.
Violence isn't just American, but I've been at the same time.
It goes back to the whole whole country who's built by slaves.
You don't think violence had a part of that?
It's all a root, but we're not going to get too fucking Freud and we're not going to get too
fucking young. I don't know, I might make a Nietzsche reference because I do that a lot.
I have my bag of tricks is not too many names anymore.
I think it's like the same 10 guys over and over again.
After 13 years, I'm sure you people are fucking tired of it.
I am.
Yeah, no, please keep listening.
Was that discouraging the beginning of this whole episode?
Maybe discouraging?
Oh no, but bear with me.
We're going places. I got points.
Maybe identity as an American is a very strange thing.
I've been overseas and it's funny while I was overseas.
There was a school shooting, believe it or not.
And my friends were, I was in Australia.
They were asking me, how does this make you feel?
And it was very terrible.
It was an awful situation because I didn't feel anything.
It's not that I didn't care, but this was 2018.
School shootings by 2018, what two or three happened a week?
Columbine was April 20th, 1999.
The release of this episode, well, it happens to be April.
And I'll be honest with you, I find it strange that we don't have a Columbine day.
We've got something like Pearl Harbor Day, which I don't understand at all.
What are we celebrating?
What are we mourning?
Do you get sushi on Pearl Harbor Day?
What do we do?
How do you deal with something like that?
We don't have a Columbine day.
We don't have this day of remembrance where we all have hot dogs
and where USA flying t-shirts and remember what happened.
And Amy and I should have Walmart is 14.88% off.
And looking at our society and American society,
I don't mean to disclude all of our European listeners,
but you take this listening to an American rave.
I'm surprised that 9/11 hasn't become some sensational grilling thing.
Everybody goes and shoots fireworks and grills.
Has some German sausages?
Where's this rant going, Harry?
Does that have a point?
Yes.
It does.
It hit me at that moment.
Regressing back to my story about being an Australian.
I felt really dirty.
I felt really awful to be an American because I didn't really care.
I... it... okay, it's terrible.
There's a school shooting.
But from Columbine to now, there have been a lot of school shootings
and admittedly, there have been shootings in other countries.
And it's neither here nor there.
This isn't a true crime episode.
We're not going to be delving deep into the history
and the semantics about it have already said that.
But violence itself is... is...
unconditionally American.
And we are all whether we like it or not...
desensitize to it to some extent.
From what we see on TV, especially the news,
on this fine program, "Death by DVD" last year,
I did a whole special on Christine Shubick,
and the whole point of that special was,
without her death, nobody would know who she was.
To this day, the only way people learn about is through
two fairly poor movies that are about her life.
And then clickbait articles.
That's what violence and school shootings have become summed up as
in the United States.
They're just clickbait articles.
You click through, you see the grieving, terrible parents,
but you don't feel anything anymore because it happens all the time.
And I'm not assuming you, the listener,
has these feelings.
I'm speaking freely here.
Sometimes on "Death by DVD,"
we have very in-depth episodes
where we talk about the entirety of the movie
and everything that happens
and the subtle nuances and the colors
and why things are done this way.
What is the director trying to project to us?
Sometimes we have very political episodes
where we talk about the same shit,
but the political meanings of it.
I can't do that for this movie.
It would be mundane and boring and pointless,
and just pointless.
It would be so fucking stupid to sit here
and start, "Well, at the very beginning of the movie,
this is the very first shot,
and this is what happens."
I would honestly would like to do a commentary someday,
depending on how this episode turns out,
because I think I would be able to
say a lot of what's on my mind easier
than what's going to end up happening
with this episode.
I don't even think I've said the name of the movie,
but it is what it is and you've got what you've got.
I am very freely.
I need to say this before we really get into things.
This is my opinion, this is my thought.
All of this is all on me.
Does not reflect anybody else at "Death by DVD."
We're just going to talk about this movie,
and if you haven't seen it,
well, gee, Golly Gosh, it's going to suck.
And I don't expect you to have seen it,
which makes things even more difficult,
but also on another hand makes it nicer
than I'm not going to delve into things
and completely ruin it for you,
because this movie is very easily available
for the very first time ever.
It's on fucking Blu-ray.
It's wild.
This movie's on Blu-ray.
And I'll tell you why in just a few minutes,
because I've mentioned American culture,
so you could think we're talking about something
like "Born on the Fourth of July."
No, fuck no.
Oh, God, fuck no.
It's even better than that.
And what's better than Vietnam exploitation?
Tom Cruise, plain a legless,
veat, non-Vet, rollin' around,
fake drunk with a cigarette in his mouth.
Oliver Stone, God bless you, a fucking bastard.
He gets Academy Awards for that sort of shit,
and it's just Roger Corman, man.
You know what?
That's an insult to Roger Corman.
I don't think he ever exploited people as badly in his movies.
That's right, the man that produced Death Race 2000.
I don't think he ever exploited people
as badly as Oliver Stone has throughout his career.
Or, you know, there's so many other numerous
nameless, soulless assholes you could put that title to.
And that's not what this episode is about.
I'm off subject.
So we've got that out of the way.
I had to put the personal disclaimer on here,
and while I'm doing the personal disclaimer,
we're talking about school shootings already.
I'm sure it could be upsetting and triggering.
So listening discretion.
As an American, I can say, in the last 30 years,
there have been a multitude of things
that have happened, that have drastically changed culture,
and they have nothing to do with sports.
They have nothing to do with food.
Columbine was one of them.
It changed the world for a very short period of time,
and of course, 9/11 happened.
And then after that, violence just became a part of culture.
You have video games, punk rock, metal, Satan, horror movies,
all these things, band for it,
but from the fucking revolutionary war forward,
war violence death destruction, shooting gun,
it's a huge part of American culture.
It is definitive of American culture,
violence is American.
There is no patent, but it's American.
April 20th, 1999.
Two students killed 15 other students at Columbine.
We know the story.
Everybody worldwide knows the story.
Six months after, the Columbine High Massacre,
Duck, the Carbine High Massacre, came out on video.
Now of course, MGM didn't release something like this.
Oh no, no, no, this wasn't Miramax.
Harvey Weinstein didn't sit down and look over this film.
No, no, no.
This is shut on VHS, S-VHS.
And I don't want to get too deep into the production of this movie
because available right now, I've mentioned this,
you can own this movie on Blu-ray.
Saturn's core, one of vinegar syndrome's sublabeles.
You can go to vinegarsyngerm.com
and this is how I recommend finding the movie.
Click partner labels and find Saturn's core.
It's a great Blu-ray. They put a lot of hard work into it.
And I just don't, there's no point me rehashing the things
that are on that. I want you to give your interest.
Go get it.
See it.
Appreciate the work that was put into it.
And that's what will make this episode differ from our, I don't know,
last 20 or 30 episodes, the whole audio drama, aside.
I've talked about this before on the show.
And I, you know, have long die traps, or I mentioned that film movies.
It's my favorite form of art.
And I get long winded and I bring up shit like Paris taxes.
But this movie specifically makes me feel a great deal of emotion,
duck, the carbine high massacre.
And I, I kind of just, I'm gonna, in a few seconds, go one, two, three.
And I'm just gonna start shooting what I have to say about this movie.
So like the film, this episode will be chaotic.
But that's a good thing, sometimes.
It's just nice to talk.
You're here. I'm here. It's like we're together.
(Music)
So let's go. One, two, three, duck, the carbine high massacre.
I think this is, is maybe the darkest bleakest,
blackest satire I've ever seen in my entire life.
I think the best way to describe this movie is if like,
"Fauspender" and "Andy Kaufman" made a movie together.
"Rain yeah, Van the Fauspender."
And that's my real thought on the thing.
It's, it's "Andy Kaufman" level satire.
And it's, to me, is genius. I think, I think it's beautiful.
And it's such a bizarre, terrible word to use to describe,
for all intents and purposes, a Columbine exploitation film.
And I don't like describing duck, the carbine high massacre.
As a Columbine exploitation film, which sounds fucking stupid,
because the name of the movie is "Duck the Carbine High Massacre."
And we all know what an exploitation film is.
If you've listened to "Depth by DVD,"
I would expect you to fucking know what it is.
And if you're a first-time listener and for some reason,
duck the Carbine High Massacre.
I'm just gonna try and send the name of the movie over and over and over again.
Somebody count, and if you get it correct, I'll give you a t-shirt.
Fuck, that means I have to count how many times I say it the opposite.
The title itself is explicit.
But I think it's a cop out to describe the movie that way, because there
are other exploitation films that I think this kind of takes.
A lot of spirit from "Last Tells on the Left."
And "Iland of Death," which is funny,
because those are the last two movies we've talked about on "Depth by DVD."
So if you heard that episode great,
'cause I'm gonna talk about 'em a little bit more on this episode.
I've read a lot of reviews for this movie, "Jo Bob Briggs,"
most infamously reviewed this film,
and I'll maybe parrot him a little bit.
Without meaning, too, I don't mean to bite on what he has said about the movie,
I just agree with him on a lot of instances.
Not everything, though.
There is a website called "Letter Boxed."
I love "Letter Box," I'm not trying to shit on it,
but there are a community of assholes on that website,
and the reviews for this film "Letter Boxed" are ridiculous.
And it really made me question it.
It was one of the driving forces why I wanted to ramble out of control
about this movie on "Depth by DVD,"
is reading the reviews for this film of, "What the fuck?
How can so many people miss the point?"
I go through and I'm looking at your profiles,
and it's all the same sort of thing.
They all love gutt-eared.
They all have a lame, delon profile pictures.
I get their jive.
I understand it.
But when I saw this movie for the first time,
it completely shocked me and my best friend.
We downloaded it, we skipped school,
and we downloaded it on his computer.
We'd heard about it from older kids,
we heard about it as a fucking Columbine movie.
We heard that it was like a snuff tape.
We knew the name, we found it,
we downloaded it, obviously wasn't a snuff tape,
but as a fucking soundtrack.
And that was it, you know?
We went out high and drank some of his dad's beer
and went, did some miscreant,
punk rock teenagers shit.
I didn't think about the movie for years and years and years
until I got an email from vinegar syndrome saying,
"Hey, guess what, we're releasing?"
Through our partner label, Saturn's Core, Duck,
the carbine high massacre.
And I went, "Oh, shit!"
And I relived that memory and I ordered the movie
and I sat down and I watched it
and it just blew my fucking mind.
It really blew my mind.
And I watched shit all the time.
It's all I do.
I work on this show and I watch movies.
I watch a lot of movies.
And I mean, I watch a lot of movies
of various genres.
I'll go from Elaine Delana, Jean-Luc Goddard.
I'll get stuck watching artsy fartsy shit for three days
and then I'll watch Godzilla movies for six days
and then I'll binge shot on video movies
from Baltimore, Maryland that were only filmed
between 1985 and 1992.
I like movies.
I watch a lot of stuff so I intake a lot of emotion
is what I mean through all of this.
You see so many different types of art.
You see so many different types of productions.
It, you become desensitized to things
just like culturally we've become desensitized.
I don't mean this largely.
I've already said that for everybody.
But culturally, I dare you to fucking argue with me.
School shootings don't matter anywhere near as much as they
use to.
They matter to the people that are involved in them
and who are the survivors and who has to bury their dead.
And I don't mean to be insensitive.
I'm not trying to be crude or crass on the subject matter,
not at all.
But it's true.
It's nowhere near as important as it used to be
because it happens so fucking much.
It's just like you turned to your power.
Like a goddamn another one of those.
Woo.
There's a fucking war going on.
22,000 people killed in 24 hours by the Russians.
There's all sorts of terrible shit that happens all the time
constantly from 9/11 onward.
1999 going into the early 2000s.
It just became--
I want to say the most violent era of American history,
but that's not true.
The Vietnam era was incredibly violent.
The Cold War was violent.
The Russians going into Afghanistan.
We wanted to Afghanistan.
Before that was violent.
And I mentioned this at the beginning of the show,
you've got the descendants of these slaves
that were brought to this country every waking moment
of these people's life has been prejudice, violence,
never the same chances that white people are given.
And it's undeniable, white privilege.
It's 100% a thing.
And even when you look at something like school shootings,
it's always the same problems.
More often than not, I would say white people
are more desensitized to these things.
Take that however you want to.
When violence is a part of your culture,
violence becomes a part of you.
And that leads us into duck, the carbine, high massacre.
[ Pause ]
You're familiar with Columbine then?
Well, that's the movie.
But what we have here is something very, very interesting.
There's a movie called "Last House on the Left"
by Wes Craven.
And in that movie, we are shown some of the most despicable acts
committed on film.
Well, at least at that point, or at least until something
like "Salove came out."
Rape, murder, torture.
It's awful.
We're shown this through these actions of four characters.
You're horrified while you're watching the film.
It's painful.
"Last House on the Left" is a despicable movie.
It's beautiful, and it's despicable.
It's terrible, and it's art.
It's wonderful, it's brutal.
It's sensational, and it's painful.
Throughout that movie, the roles change.
And I think you are given the sickest display possibly.
I mean, I'm speaking freely here, but in my head,
what I can name, to me, the twist in "Last House on the Left"
is one of the sickest things in the world
because you get to these vicious murderers
staying at the home of the parents of the child they just killed.
And you begin to identify with them.
The parents are very bourgeoisie.
You start looking at the killers, and you start feeling bad for them.
I think that is crushing.
I mean, that's paralyzing.
It's one of the most clever, beautiful things
I've ever seen in a horror film.
Duck, the carbine high massacre.
Why am I fucking talking about "Last House on the Left"?
I'm getting there!
The entire movie to me takes that principle,
and it magnifies it by a thousand.
It enhances all of that emotion.
And when you see that "Last House on the Left" it's so brief.
I don't think it's a nailed-driving point of the movie,
but there's a few sequences through that film
where things transition and you start seeing things
not through the killer's eyes
because we've been seeing it the entire way through their eyes.
But we started moding with them because of them just being a common joke,
which is what made them so terrifying in the first place.
They didn't wear masks.
They weren't boogey men.
They were just men.
When Columbine happened, it was sensationalized.
So much on the media, it was the only thing that was available on the news,
which also is a key to desensitizing people to things like this.
You see, it's so constantly, it becomes hard to care.
I mean, you had vultures, people like Nancy Grace,
they had to get their scoop, people camping out
in the parents' yard who had just lost their children several days beforehand
and they stayed for months.
The same thing happened when JFK Jr. died.
I mean, it was just a media circus.
And the late 90s, that's really where it became
all out no discretion.
The media was fanatical.
There was no privacy.
There was no safety.
People couldn't even mourn and bury their children.
The exploitation began the moment it happened.
And it became a part of culture the moment it happened.
Six months later, this movie comes out.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
[ Because that's the thing right now. All your violence is given to you on a plate with everything else. Here, you actually have a moment to look at everything.
We're delivered all of this through the killers. It's remarkable to me because you emote the entire time.
You're shocked, you're disgusted, and it's not a justification. We're given at the very beginning of the movie, a producer's note stating that this is a fictionalized version of what has happened.
And that they are sensationalizing on it first before fucking lifetime does.
And I mean, I was making fun of Born on the Fourth of July, but look at movies like that. The Green Berets, the John Wayne film, that was filmed and came out. They filmed a Vietnam movie in fucking North Carolina.
There's giant evergreen trees in the background. Yeah, tropical Vietnam, look at this beautiful, Douglas fur. That was shot and created while the fucking war was going on.
But this is tasteless. That film itself, the Green Berets is exploiting the Vietnam War. And it's the same situation there. That was really the first time in American society that you had the war brought home to you. You could come home at five o'clock from a hard day's work and turn on the news.
And you could see your son, Uncle Brother, friend, the boy from next door getting killed by Charlie over in Vietnam.
You
You were in the middle of a war, but that was the first time you were in the middle of the war. You were in the middle of the war, but that was the first time you were in the middle of the war.
That's okay. Because those things are exploiting the situation. Those things are extending it just as the media has when you make fun of the media when you exploit the media. That's where things become problematic. And that's the situation with this movie because it is offensive. I mean, I can't beat around the bush with the things you see. Some of the dialogue is over the top and we can talk about, oh, it's over the time. But what's remarkable is the situations that you're going through and you're going through these situations as two people.
You know that what this is. It's fucking Columbine movie. You know the two people that you are watching are eventually going to wreak havoc and kill their fellow students, something that is reprehensible, something that you shouldn't be rooting for. But what we're giving in this movie is mind you of its era six months after Columbine running with what was known running from the other angle and giving you a different perspective of it. And it's supposed to make you feel dirty.
And I further referenced last also on the left when you get to that point where you realize, man, I kind of feel bad for Krugin Company. That's sick. You're fucked up for feeling that way, but the directors did it on purpose. You're not a fucked up bad person.
If the experience of watching the movie, the transgressive nature of being able to watch the movie, and when you're watching something like this, it's so fucking raw. And that term is thrown around very often for not only underground film, but shot on video films. Fred Vogel, you hear, oh, man, August Underground was so raw.
You can exponentially mean you're talking about the violence or how the film was shot or it shot on video. So it's very raw. And this situation, everything from the performances, whether some things being overacting, some things being unprofessional, you've got the wonderful Misty Monday playing a character in this movie who I have to say next to Hellfire and Joey smack. She's the best.
She gives off such a believable performance in a schlock movie, but it's a schlock movie that is, is schlocking what is the culture of the time. You couldn't turn on the TV in 1999 to fall of 2000 without something about school shootings, and then it just became like a domino effect. It became such a part of a culture that you turn on the TV and see something about school shootings and you go, "Oh, fuck, I wonder if Judge Judy's on."
At some point, something changed, but what didn't change is the effect of this movie being able to watch it years later, years after Columbine, years after that it becomes such a part of us.
And I mean that as an American, so I'm only speaking to our American audience at that point. Don't take it personal. But you don't care anymore. But not this. This movie still fucking offends.
I just think that's genius. I think something that can manage to have its spice, to be dark, gritty, painful, raw, all these things, all these adjectives and verbs and nouns that I'm just throwing out years and years and years later.
To me, I guess it's the whole point of the show why I wanted to do this. I know it's all very disconnected and this is different than what I usually serve at the Death by DVD table.
But the feelings that I got from rewatching this movie, and honestly they re-sparked my love for filmmaking. I've very briefly talked about it on Death by DVD, but I shot an indie horror picture.
Well, I didn't fucking shoot it. That's improper for me to say. I got any fill crawl shot it. But I worked on an indie horror film Dark Tales from Channel X.
I got to act in it and I worked on the production. I got to work with a lot of different actors and it was an invigorating, beautiful experience. And you go back home, I work on Death by DVD, spend most of my time watching movies and working on Death by DVD.
It kind of goes away from you and this movie brought some multitude of emotions. And this is on a very personal level.
And I'm going to cut this off here in a second because I don't really want to talk about anything personal on this episode aside from my emotions to this movie. But as a compliment to William Hellfire and Joey Smackle, though he's no longer on this plane of existence, may he be surfing the void happily.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Until next time, Pleasant Amoros.
[Music]