Albuquerque has no shortage of homegrown, hardscrabble filmmakers. Not only would you please the film-lovers in your life by stuffing their stockings with a made-in-New-Mexico DVD, but you’d make the Christmas of a poor, starving auteur just trying to scrape enough money together to shoot another feature.
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Flicks Defective Man! ($15, sb-films.com) This unashamedly low-budget, gleefully lowbrow superhero parody presents the origin of the Duke City’s very own defender, Defective Man. Our tights-wearing hero teams up with other largely ineffective heroes Horn Dog, Captain Orange-Piss and Bill Gill (the Man From the Rio Grande) to form the "greatest freelance, low-impact law enforcement team the world has ever seen." There’s even a cameo by Troma Films founder Lloyd Kaufman! Copies of the “Duke City Limited Edition” DVD are still available. Flicker ($14.95, eggmurders.com) A group of friends embarks on a particularly ill-advised camping trip in this occasionally surreal stalk-and-slash starring Katy Houska, Babak Tafti, Kate Schroeder and Hannah Kauffmann. For a change, the filmmakers escaped Albuquerque and lensed most of this in the picturesque Sandia mountains. A lovely setting in which to kill people with a shovel. Fugue State ($19.99, fuguestatethemovie.com) The official, final cut of Tim McClelland’s apocalyptic thriller finally comes to DVD. In it, a frantic security guard searches for his missing wife after a mysterious plague scrambles all of humanity’s brains. Worse yet, some of those brain-scrambled humans are behaving like dangerous, zombified killers. In Trouble ($10, facebook.com/InTroubleMovie) Director Chris L. Dillon ( Cross ) and writer Robert Paul Medrano ( Wedding Slashers ) team up once again. (Medrano starred in the 2004 feature Cross .) This time around, the goal is comedy with four seriously screwed-up slackers rampaging across the city in an attempt to salvage what they can of their pathetic lives. Klown Kamp Massacre ($14.95, klownkampmassacre.com) This slapstick slaughterfest, filmed a few years ago by directors David C. Valdez and Philip H.R. Gunn, is finally available through Amazon.com’s self-publishing site CreateSpace.com. Grisly (not to mention funny) murders occur when a long-dormant clown-training camp is reopened. Oh, how the cream pies and blood flow. And look, it’s another cameo by Lloyd Kaufman! The disc includes more than two hours of special features, including audio commentary, a behind-the-camera featurette and deleted scenes.
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Fashions In addition to carrying several of the above films, Burning Paradise Video (800 Central SW) also stocks a fine selection of genre-film-based T-shirts. Alongside cult classics such as Evil Dead and Zombie , you’ll find a few local efforts: 2010’s Defective Man! and 2007’s Gimme Skelter . Those’ll set you back about 20 bucks.
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Tunes Psycho Bettys From Planet Pussycat Soundtrack ($14.49, eggmurders.com) Actual soundtracks are a major rarity among local indie films. But Aaron Hendren (the writer-director responsible for Flicker ) has actually pre-released the soundtrack to his next film, a campy sci-fi musical called Psycho Bettys From Planet Pussycat . Word is the film is still deep in the depths of post-production. But in the meantime, you can rock out to tunes like “Dirty Thoughts,” “I’m Your Heroine” and “Men Always Cry.” The soundtrack’s available “via iTunes, Amazon and anywhere soundtracks from rock and roll musicals are sold.”
