Director/Screenplay/Producer – Nick Palumbo, Photography – Brendan Flynt, Music – The Bronx Casket Company, The Giallos Flame, Necrophagia & Zombi, Special Effects & Makeup – Jerami Cruise, Ricky Lee Leonard & Fred Vogel, Makeup Effects – Toe Tag Pirates. Production Company – Fright Flix productions, Inc./Third Reich Ventures.
Cast
Sven Garrett (The Photographer), Cerina Vincent (Beautiful Girl), Jade Risser (Jade), Tony Todd (Clerk), Gunnar Hansen (Mechanic), Valerie Baber (Charlotte), Ed Neal (Good Samaritan), Andrea Mitchell (Andrea)
Plot
The Photographer lives in Las Vegas with his girlfriend. The girlfriend’s young daughter Jade finds The Photographer creepy and is suspicious of him. The Photographer is of German background and admires his grandfather who was a Nazi. By night, The Photographer prowls the streets and strip clubs of Vegas, picking up girls or hiring them for modelling sessions and them brutally torturing and killing them.
Murder-Set-Pieces was the second of only two films made by director-writer Nick Palumbo. Palumbo had previously made Nutbag (2000), which is also about a serial killer prowling the streets of Las Vegas, but nothing since that.
Murder-Set-Pieces is a film that is aiming to be as edgy as fuck. It wants to convince us it has gone all out on an extreme in an effort to offend in every way possible. The opening credits, for instance, announce that the film is made by a company called Third Reich Productions, while the end credits list Joseph Goebbels, Herman Goering and Heinrich Himmler as executive producers. When you are allying yourself with Nazis, it seems a harder to find a more irredeemable way to offend people than that.
I am all in favour of films being edgy and going out there and defying taboos. On the other hand, this sometimes just becomes a bad excuse for revelling in assorted offensiveness and unrelenting misogyny. Which is what Murder-Set-Pieces comes close to being, if not entirely crosses the line. The film is a series of plotless sequences where we watch Sven Garrett stalk, torture and kill girls in a state of undress. Now I am not privy to Nick Palumbo’s motivations so I can’t say whether he saw this as an artistically edifying depiction of the mind of a serial killer or he was working out something personal. On the other hand, there do seem a lot of these scenes presented serially that seem to have little purpose to them beyond people watching women being tortured and killed.
Sven Garrett as The Photographer
The film lacks any real plot – all it is is watching Sven Garrett stalk various models and strippers, or girls he picks up. (He seems to have such an incredible body count that you wonder how he manages to kill so many girls, while readily leaving plentiful fingerprints and DNA at the scene, and keep getting away with it). There is little where Nick Palumbo moves out beyond these scenes. One such occasion is the inept depiction of a hold-up at a videostore where Tony Todd plays the clerk and Garrett is a customer who turns and shoots the gangbangers and Todd alike.
In between that we get talk about snuff movies, assorted torture scenes, various scenes of violent sex during the course of which Murder-Set-Pieces goes from being edgy as fuck to boring as fuck and badly made to boot. Nothing seems to reveal what a poseur Nick Polumbo ends up being than the debacle over his claims that the film was rejected for an NC-17 rating when in fact the film was never submitted to the MPAA. Even then, Palumbo had to submit to the indignity of cutting the film of 23 minutes (the version seen here) in order to be able to release it to dvd with an R rating.
To give the film some horror street cred, Palumbo has recruited a number of actors with genre history – Tony Todd alias Candyman (1992), Gunnar Hansen and Edwin Neal from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), where Neal plays the complete antithesis of his crazed hitchhiker and is a good samaritan who offers young Jade Risser a ride home. There is also horror regular Cerina Vincent as Sven Garrett’s girlfriend who was hot at the time on the back of Cabin Fever (2002) – apparently Vincent tried (unsuccessfully) to get her scenes cut from the film when she found out more about what she had signed on for.
