Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus! (2010)

Rating:

Canada. 2010.

Crew

Director/Story/Special Effects Supervisor – Tony Watt, Co-Director/Makeup Effects – Vivita, Screenplay – John Ervin & Tony Watt, Photography – Tex Watt, Background Music – Peter John Ross, Songs Performed by A Brokeheart Pro, Dobby Dobson & Tony Watt, Special Photographic Effects – Shawn Thomson & Vivita. Production Company – Tony Watt Incorporated, Studios/TonyWatt.com/VivitaOnline.com

Cast

Tony Watt (Tony Escalus/Osiris), Amabelle Singson (Detective Divine Otaku), James Taggart (Bobby Barzel/Bernie/Sheriff Ballnuts/Taggart the Bounty Hunter), Angela Faulkner (Ingrid), Ashleigh Garbatt (Genevieve), Vivita (Nurse Olga Krotchwarmer/Lady Ilham Kolbassa/The Vixen Gang), Robert Johnston (Police Chief Theo Crosby), Bogart D’Jointe (Godfather Escalus), Martin Magee (Tricky the Pimp Assassin), Reg Harrt (Reg Hartt the Commentator), Shauna Howe (Honey Milf), Danielle I. Szlawieniec-Haw (Brunette Hippie Chick), Sunshine Blocke (Blonde Hippie Chick), Deanna Prall (Mrs Milf), Maan Fung (Don-Kee Dick)


Plot

Three women make an armed breakout from jail and a manhunt goes out for them across Marshall County, Minnesota. Marshall County is also home to aging rock star Bobby Barzel who desperately needs a liver transplant. While groupies party outside his house, Bobby receives a phone call from the alien Osiris with whom he made a pact for his soul in return for wealth and success. Osiris now wants to claim his half of the bargain and tells Bobby his UFO is arriving from Saturn shortly. Bobby puts out a desperate call to his godfather in New York, asking him to procure a liver via the blackmarket. At the same time, detective Divine Otaku has been despatched to Minnesota on the trail of folk singer Chadwick Van Helsing who has gone on a killing spree. Meanwhile, the godfather’s nephew Tony Escalus sets out on a road trip with his girlfriend Genevieve, her Canadian roommate Ingrid and his ultra-nerdy friend Bernie. Their paths and those of Chadwick and Osiris will meet up in the woods.


Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus! is the second film directed by Tony Watt, a Toronto based filmmaker who is behind the Twisted Sinema exploitation festival. Watt has minor acting roles in three Canadian horror films – Sinners and Saints (2004), Awakening (2006) and Reel Zombies (2008), as well as produced the documentary King Kaufman: The Passion of Lloyd (2008) about Troma head Lloyd Kaufman. I previously reviewed Tony Watt’s Frankenpimp (2009), a collation of gonzo exploitation movie elements that was an excruciating mess made without anything resembling a plot or technical skill that Watt managed to drag out for three-and-a-half hours. Frankenpimp may possibly be one of the worst films I have ever seen. Tony Watt subsequently went onto make Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter (2011) and Nosferatu vs Father Pipecock & Sister Funk (2014).

With the agonising experience of Frankenpimp still in mind, I dreaded the prospect of watching Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus!, which seemed to be another film in a similar vein. Like Frankenpimp, Vixen Highway 2006 seems intended as a wilful compilation of exploitation movie elements. The title homages the cinema of Russ Meyer around the period of Faster, Pussycat Kill! Kill! (1965) – indeed, the film is supposedly a sequel to the US-made Vixen Highway (2001), although there are no connections between either film beyond the title. Thrown into the mix are aging bad boy rockers and their groupies, a trio of escaped female convicts on the run, Mafioso, dominatrixes, Blaxploitation elements and aliens in UFOs, although this is not quite as mind-boggling an array of exploitation elements as Frankenpimp managed.

The production values of Vixen Highway 2006 have been deliberately intended down at the level of an amateur film. Aspects are deliberately cheesy, including bad racial caricatures – in the opening moments, we get a Japanese man with Coke bottle glasses, buckteeth and singsong accent named Don-Kee Dick. Cartoon sound effects and fart noises, which give the impression they have been taken from a public domain library, are added over much of the action. The film drags on and on and on for an excruciating two-and-a-half hours – the scenes with the groupies partying and getting stoned outside the aging rock star’s house with a middle-aged tv reporter take up something like the first 30 minutes of the film. There is a long and mind-numbing scene that pretends to be set in the woods (but looks more like Tony Watt and co shot it at the local park) where idiotic nerd Bernie (James Taggart) proceeds to ignore every overture from Angela Faulkner, which just keeps on going and going until one wants to scream. Everything has been slung together with madcap editing schemes that give the impression the film was edited under the influence – it, for example, manages to randomly switch back and forward between anamorphic and unsqueezed frame formats.

There is no particular plot to Vixen Highway 2006 – just a series of random scenes that the film endlessly cycles back and forward between that go on without any seeming point. The film often seems indifferent when it comes to remembering to tie plot points together. A perfect example might be the vixens that escape from prison at the start of the film and go on a killing spree – yet for all their being mentioned in the title of the film and a manhunt being raised, we never hear anything about them again. Satan/Osiris is an alien who makes a phone call from a UFO in orbit around Saturn at diametric oppose to the title’s claim that ‘it came from Uranus’. The film claims to be set in Minnesota, yet you can clearly see that the background locations are in Canada and highlight franchises such as Canadian Tire. This is a film that thinks silly foreign accents, people wearing bad wigs and fake buckteeth, absurd caricatures of stupid people and cartoonish fart noises are the height of hilarity – although to its credit, Vixen Highway 2006 is marginally a less excruciating experience than sitting through Frankenpimp (although that may well be down to the fact that there is three-quarters of an hour less running time to this film).

You eventually suspect after watching both Frankenpimp and Vixen Highway 2006 that Tony Watt may be some secretive operative for a clandestine government organisation that is engaged in psi-ops and psychological warfare – one that might be experimenting with the new technique of trying to destroy the minds of film viewers, critics and psychotronic fans by producing films that are so excruciating, so removed and alienated for normative values that we expect of a film that continuing to watch causes you to consider engaging in serious harm to oneself. The level of a mind that can set out to deliberately make a film so astonishingly bad may be something akin to genius.

(Winner for Worst Film at this site’s Worst of 2010 Awards).


Trailer here


Director: ,
Actors: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Category:
Themes: , , , , , , ,