Drainiac (2000)

Brett Piper is slowly becoming a favorite filmmaker of mine. In the jungle of direct to dvd movies pouring out on the market like sewage he is one of the most professional, even though he is working with the smallest budgets. Drainiac was shot in 2000 with a budget of $10000 which is ridicously small especially since it was shot on real film instead of DV which is the standard today. Sure, the low budget is noticable from time to time but on the other hand, Drainiac is strong evidence that good craftsmanship can outweigh a lot of minor faults.

Drainiac is all about young Julie who pretty much hates her life. Her mother killed herself and her dad is a bitter pig who forces her to clean an old house he bought for restoration, while he goes to the nearest bar to get drunk. Of course, this is no ordinary house in the woods and when her friends arrive to help out things start to happen. It is until the mysterious Mr Plummer (Plummer. hehe. Get it?) arrives that they find out about the ancient waterdemon moving around in the piping of the house.

For a movie that cost $10000, it really looks good. Piper has a nack for both direction and cinematography and makes the best of his resources. Direction is stable and the photography grainy, but competent. It is the special effects that suffer most from the budget and it is fairly obvious that they didnt cost much, but Piper does them all by himself without CGI, oldschool with stopmotion and cameratricks, and they're surprisingly good from time to time. Towards the end of the movie we get a ripoff/homage to Hammers The devil rides out where the characters try to exorcize the demon while protecting themselves in a pentagram. The special effects in that scene are genuinly good and the whole scene is really lovely. You get that warm fuzzy feeling tha you can get from watching some old 80s classic horror and thats a good thing. Something that perhaps isnt as good, and this is something that goes for most of Pipers movies, is that the acting has a tendencey to be very uneven. For Drainiac, Piper has gathered an ok stable of young actors who do a decent job most of the time, Especially Georgia Hatziz in the lead who also serves with a nice, totally gratitous nudescene. The other actors has a tendency to go from underplaying to overacting but none of the actually go so far as to embarass themselves. Too much.

Drainiac is a fine tribute to some of the 80s coolest horrormovies like Evil Dead and Street trash, and while it is far from perfect it is still a good little movie thanx to Brett Pipers ability to extend his budget. A extra plus goes to Piper for his love of slime and we even get a bit of gore and as mentioned earlier in the review, some nice nudity. You come out of the experience in a very good mood and and thats something rare among all the other DTVcrap out there. One more thing - if you have any interest in filmmaking whatsoever you should buy the dvd and listen to the commentarytrack which is an exercise in how you make a movie on no money.

An old school horrorflick for lovers of old school horrorflicks. I liked it a lot, it's probably my favorite of all the Brett Piper movies I've seen.