Some horror films kill their characters. A Night to Dismember goes one better: it murders its own narrative, chops up its continuity, and leaves the audience’s sanity bleeding out on the shag carpet. This is Doris Wishman’s first and only attempt at horror, and after watching it, you understand why. The woman spent decades directing sexploitation movies, then decided to chase the Halloween wave with her own slasher. Instead of Michael Myers, we got… well, I’m not sure what we got.
What unspools onscreen is not so much a film as a ransom note made from random strips of celluloid. Wishman claimed reels were destroyed in the lab, so she had to patch together stock footage, reshoot scenes, and graft porn star Samantha Fox into the mess like duct tape on a collapsing bridge. If that’s true, then the “photo lab fire” deserves its own Oscar for Best Supporting Accident.
The Plot: Family Curses and Hatchets, Or Maybe Migraines
There is allegedly a plot: the Kent family of Woodmire Lake is cursed, everyone kills each other, and a newly released asylum patient named Vicki Kent may or may not be behind it. Sounds workable on paper. In practice, it’s like trying to follow a soap opera written by a blender.
Characters pop in and out without explanation, bodies appear and disappear, and at one point, a zombie cousin emerges from a lake just to pad time. The narration—delivered in stiff monotone—tries to glue things together, but it’s like applying Elmer’s glue to a car crash. “Mary dreamed she was being stabbed by her entire family,” the voice intones, while we watch unrelated stock footage of someone’s kitchen.
By the halfway mark, you’re not asking who the killer is. You’re asking if anyone in this movie has ever seen a movie before.
Samantha Fox: Porn Star Turned… Hatchet Victim?
Porn star Samantha Fox (not the British pop singer, mind you) headlines as Vicki Kent, the girl “cured” of homicidal tendencies and released from the asylum. Wishman apparently thought casting an adult actress would add notoriety. What it adds instead is confusion, because Fox plays her role with all the enthusiasm of someone waiting for the pizza guy to arrive.
She tries to rekindle a romance, she tries to act menacing, and she tries to swing a hatchet like she’s swatting flies. None of it works. Fox isn’t the problem so much as she’s just floating in an ocean of incoherence. If you handed her a grocery list instead of a script, no one would notice.
Murders by Hatchet, Editing by Blindfold
Slasher fans at least expect creative kills. Wishman obliges, but in the most baffling way possible. Victims are decapitated, stabbed, and hatcheted, but the editing is so mangled you often don’t know who just died until the narrator solemnly explains it thirty seconds later.
One scene has Frankie and his girlfriend killed mid-tryst—his head burned in the fireplace, no less. Sounds shocking, but Wishman shoots it like she’s directing a dental hygiene PSA. Static camera, awkward pauses, and then—wham—a head is gone. Another character slips in the bathroom, falls on her own blade, and dies. Tragic? Maybe. Hilarious? Definitely.
If you want gore, it’s there—but you have to squint through the fog of bad continuity and mismatched inserts, like a treasure hunt for blood.
Voices from the Void
The real MVP here is the narrator, who drones over the entire film like a confused audiobook. “Mary killed her brother with a rock,” he explains flatly, as if reciting a weather forecast. You start to suspect he was hired just to cover for missing footage. Characters teleport, motives vanish, and suddenly the narrator’s there like a substitute teacher: “Class, we’re skipping chapters 3 through 7, so let me summarize.”
This isn’t storytelling—it’s damage control with a microphone.
Doris Wishman: Auteur of Accident
To be fair, Doris Wishman has a kind of gonzo charm. She was a true DIY filmmaker, shooting in her own house, borrowing friends’ living rooms, and cutting corners like a NASCAR driver. She pioneered the art of shooting random close-ups of ashtrays, lamps, and feet to cover dialogue flubs. In A Night to Dismember, she tries the same trick—except now the filler shots are surrounded by attempted murder. It’s like Ed Wood trying to make Friday the 13th with the budget of a bus fare.
The tragedy is that Wishman thought she was making something scary. What she actually made was a parody before parodies were fashionable.
The Cursed Production
The behind-the-scenes story is juicier than the movie itself. Allegedly, reels were lost in a lab accident, forcing Wishman to Frankenstein her footage together. Years later, an alternate cut surfaced on YouTube, proving there was an entirely different version starring Diana Cummings with a different plot. That means A Night to Dismember exists in multiple contradictory timelines, like some cursed slasher multiverse.
The irony? Both versions are terrible. Wishman didn’t just lose her film—she lost the war against coherence.
Family Drama as Horror
One could argue there’s a theme here: generational curses, paranoia, and family dysfunction. But Wishman handles it with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. By the end, everyone’s either stabbed, decapitated, or hallucinating. The final twist reveals Mary as the true killer, but by then, the audience has already murdered their own interest with a remote control.
It’s less family curse and more family reunion gone horribly wrong. Imagine Thanksgiving dinner where the turkey carves you.
The Horror of 1980s VHS
The film limped into existence in 1983 but didn’t actually get released until 1989 on VHS, which feels appropriate. This isn’t a movie you see in a theater; it’s a tape you rent on a dare, sandwiched between Cannibal Holocaust and a Jane Fonda workout video at the local video store.
The muddy transfer, the box art promising gore the movie can’t deliver, the awkward pauses—it all belongs to the VHS graveyard of the ’80s. The fact it’s still being rediscovered today is both a miracle and a curse, like finding an old sandwich behind the couch and realizing it’s still edible.
Final Verdict
A Night to Dismember is less a film and more a cinematic séance, summoning chaos onto celluloid. It’s incoherent, sloppily assembled, and only intermittently entertaining when the sheer incompetence tips into accidental comedy. If Doris Wishman wanted to prove she could do horror, she succeeded—but only in the sense that watching this film is truly horrifying.
And yet… there’s a weird charm in its failure. You can’t accuse it of being generic; no other slasher feels like this because no other slasher had the audacity to survive four years of production hell, two casts, destroyed reels, and still come out swinging (or hatcheting). It’s like the cinematic equivalent of a mangled survivor crawling out of a car wreck—hideous, confusing, but still alive.
If you’re a fan of so-bad-it’s-good horror, A Night to Dismember is essential viewing. If you’re not, take the title literally: this movie will dismember your night, your patience, and possibly your brain cells.
