A DVD re-release of the 1999 Red Stream video, Through Eyes of the Dead looks about the same in its new format, with slightly crisper picture. Cult horror director Jim Van Bebber (Charlie's Family, Deadbeat at Dawn) directed the videos that comprise this movie, which exults in Killjoy's professed desire to make the raunchiest, goriest, most over-the-top promo flick ever devised. It succeeds. You'll get to see drummer Wayne Fabra masturbate over the skinned body of a lady whose forest sortie with her father, to celebrate some kind of backwoods incest, goes terribly, terribly wrong. A man entombed apparently while still alive wreaks hideous revenge against a hippie freak and gets to make out with his nitrous-huffing girlfriend. A nun gets tastily violated by a coven of Satanists, fed Ecstasy, worked over by ghoulish lesbians and then slaughtered by the Devil himself -- or does she just imagine all this, and commit suicide over her guilt at the lascivious fantasy? A breakneck run through the high points, acid baths and zombie girl head explosions that make up Lucio Fulci's splatter masterpiece The Beyond counterpoints Necrophagia's delivery of their tribute, "And You Shall Live in Terror" (The Beyond's subtitle.) And so forth. The special FX are top-notch, the acting beyond cheesy, the camerawork crazed, the entire production seemingly lensed through a filter of good acid; kill a sixer to this one and don't worry about any of it making sense. Obviously inspired by movies too numerous to enumerate (Bob Clark's Deranged, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Ilsa flicks, Blue Holocaust, etc.) and framed by a ridiculous intro courtesy of the pasty-faced Dr. Creep, Through Eyes of the Dead seems to have originated as Holocausto de la Morte -- in keeping with the general low-rent nature of the project, nobody has bothered to correct the title. The proceedings were filmed in and around Phil Anselmo's House of Shock in New Orleans. It's very entertaining, though hardly shocking, good, sick fun. Check it out.

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