by: Dylan
Posted on 05.04.10 in All Horror Films
Release Date: 2005

“If you give a monkey a camera, it will go out there and shoot something” – Ron Atkins

A fitting statement from one of the featured subjects in Horror Business, a documentary on the horror film industry that has a lot of monkeys with cameras, but very few filmmakers. One doesn’t have to be part of mainstream Hollywood to be considered a director, but most of the no-talent hacks showcased within this movie are shooting stuff at the level and with the same amount of care as a high school student shooting their English Media project. There are a few small appearances from accomplished filmmakers involved in the horror business, such as H.G Lewis, Sid Haig and Lloyd Kaufman, but for the most part the featured “directors” don’t stand the slightest chance of ever making it in the horror business this film professes to be about.

The one exception is David Stagnari, an avid horror fanatic that is attempting to jumpstart a career as a director with his short film Catharsis. Stagnari is a person a lot of horror fans could easily relate to; a fan since he was a small child, Stagnari intelligently discusses the state of the genre today, what he wants to accomplish as a director and reminisces of his past experiences watching double-features at a drive-in, which has now been paved over and replaced by a “Babies R’ Us”. Although only a few clips of Catharsis are shown throughout Horror Business, you can tell that, even though Stagnari may never break it big, he is at least trying to create something of substance.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Ron Atkins, a pretentious douchebag (excuse the terminology, but it’s the most accurate description of the man) who doesn’t even attempt to make anything remotely worth watching. Armed with a consumer camera, Atkins shoots his films without the aid of lighting, a crew, a tri-pod, a script or most importantly, a single intelligent thought. The level his films operate on is best surmised in the instance where Atkins adds a subplot to his film in which Dick Cheney penetrates a dog in the rear, and then laughs profusely at the joke. His view that what moviegoers think of his films is irrelevant as long as he enjoys them is despicable and shows a total disregard for the (few) people who may end up renting or buying one of his films, but his wife’s reasoning that anyone who dislikes Atkinson’s movies actually enjoys them doesn’t even make the least bit of sense in the most warped of logic. Atkins then has the gall to trash Hollywood films for their poor quality, a bold statement coming from a director whose entire oeuvre is disregarding both the audience and any apparent attempt at quality on his part. As well as absent filmmaking skills, Atkins also has anger issues (he cusses out a teenage Burger King employee) and what must be a tendency to lie or at least stretch the truth to hyperbolic extremes, one example being his claim that he’s sold over 30,000 copies of his movies. Considering that on IMDb none of his films have over 94 votes as of this posting (and the average vote-count hovering below fifty), I find this very hard to believe, although admittedly there is the small chance that his parents have purchased 29,900 copies of his films.

The rest of the filmmakers fall somewhere in between the two: not entirely as reprehensible as Atkins, but none nearly as respectable as Stagnari. There’s an alcoholic who chooses his cameraman a few minutes before his shoot, two adult men still living in their parent’s home and producing schlock on par with Atkins, and an animator who specializes in flash animation. It’s about as far from the horror business as you can get. This doesn’t mean that Horror Business had to be a failure: if the documentary had focused on the pitfalls of the various directors and what holds them back, it could have worked. As it stands, Horror Business seems unfocused. There’s no message or apparent point behind the proceedings; it consists of interviews and behind the scenes set footage, stuff that would make a great special feature on a DVD, but isn’t sufficient or substantial enough to work as a film of its own. It retains a certain level of interest, but it never feels like a real movie. That’s the real problem with Horror Business: not that it focuses on people so far outside of the horror business, but that it doesn’t know what to do with them.

• ★★★★★

  Acting:

• ★★★★★

  Blood:

• ★★★★★

  Violence:

• ★★★★★

  Partying:

• ★★★★★

  Language:

• ★★★★★

  Humor:

• ★★★★★

  Predictable:

• ★★★★★

  Girls:

• ★★★★★

  Gore:

• ★★★★★

  Sexuality:

• ★★★★★

  Torture:

• ★★★★★

  Overall: