JASON STEPHENSON'S TRIPLE THREAT COLLECTION

Hey kid, want to see something cool? Then take a look inside Jason Stephenson’s twisted mind, full of zombie babies and “lot lizards” in his unrated, director’s cut, Triple Threat Collection. Released by New Blood Entertainment, the collection is comprised of the films Doomed To Consume (2006), Strip Club Slasher (2010), and Terror Overload (2009). These movies are to be taken with a grain of salt and viewed through your B-movie lenses to be appreciated, but in a world where staying inside is in vogue, this collection can help to kill four and a half hours and fill the void of visiting your local grindhouse for some good clean exploitative fun.

Things kick off with Doomed To Consume, a zombie film that follows a woman scorned and the men who fall in line with her after they meet during a zombie apocalypse. DTC is followed up by Strip Club Slasher, another smalltown joint, only this time, following strippers as they live, love, and die in Minnesota at the hands of a horny and psychopathic murderer. With slight commentary on the plight of sex workers and the ills of human trafficking, SCS is every dark fantasy one can imagine happening in a strip club. Lastly, the triple feature closes with Terror Overload, an anthology of 4 short films loosely connected as tall tales told by a truck driver who is reminiscent of the deceptively horrifying Large Marge of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Terror Overload is a fitting end to a block of entertaining, gore-filled, and erotic films.

Jason Stephenson, who apparently has been slicing off the nipples of ingenues before Lars Von Trier made it cool, has a raw aesthetic, barebones approach, and jaw-dropping depictions of death in his films — enough sleaze to please any indie, shot-on-video horror enthusiasts. I couldn’t help but applaud the special effects for these low-budget films — Doomed To Consume had fountains of spurting blood and the zombie makeup looked decrepit in the right ways, and in Strip Club Slasher and Terror Overload, the practical effects makeup for kills was all too real looking. Watching them peel the skin off of each other made my skin crawl! I was expecting to hate these movies but I legit loved Strip Club Slasher — it has underground cult classic written all over it. A mute slasher like Jason from Halloween, lesbian stripper fodder, unintentionally hilarious dialogue work together to make one hardcore film — this film, as well as the others, are certainly not for the squeamish! Strip Club Slasher and Terror Overload pretty much turn into torture porn flicks towards the end — I felt this was gratuitous and mind-numbing after a while, but Strip Club Slasher overcame this fault with a darkly surprising plot twist for its ending that should put a smile on the faces of those who relish the unconventional.

Though at times the performances had the familiar rigidity of amateur acting, the acting in the majority of these films was at least a step up from porno-level quality. Nicole Blessing as shrewish survivor Traci in Doomed To Consume was great, her strong presence and command of a scene was a perfect juxtaposition to the mostly macho male characters. Scarlet Salem aka Sarah French in Strip Club Slasher was developed in a way where I actually cared about her and wanted to see her get some revenge on their silent killer. Each character felt fully formed and the actors delivered lines with great timing to fit each film’s jump scares and comedic notes. I would attribute this to screenwriter Joe Knetter, who penned some truly LOL, foul-mouthed dialogue and one-liners that were good enough for an action movie. That is not to say that any of the movies, even the zombie apocalypse flick Doomed To Consume, played like thrillers. I did, however, appreciate the Romero-like zombies in DTC — the pale faces of slow-moving ghouls always made much more sense to me than the superhuman sprinters 28 Days Later popularized.

For horror punks and metalheads, the hard-rocking soundtrack of Strip Club Slasher will have you headbanging as much as you will likely be laughing at the characters’ antics and the ridiculously gruesome kills. Boobs, blood, and morally/intellectually backward kind of characters — what more could a grindhouse freak ask for? The only problem with each of the films is that though the stories and characters are on the fun side, the plots sort of meander on and the endings are all flubbed — great premises, but the conclusions are abrupt and resolve nothing, leaving me wondering what was all of this for? I particularly felt this way after Terror Overload — as this is the third film in the collection, perhaps it was the feeling of being in a marathon by the 3-hour mark, but the gory buffet that this anthology film offered was cheap slop, and moreover, each short in the anthology was much too long. 2 out of 3 is still a good score though, and at least when a scene is in a lull you can expect some form of nudity soon after.

Stephenson obviously has a soft spot (or a hard-on?) for sex workers, as the female characters in each movie partake in the industry in some form or fashion. Each film has a unique genre it fits into, but they all share similar themes of SOV, gore, and when all else fails, boobs. Over four hours of badassery and ghoulish entertainment, through squinted eyes, it is like a Barry J. Gillis marathon. “Three times the horror, three times the girls, three times the gore”, Jason Stephenson’s Triple Threat Collection is available via Bluray/DVD/VOD as of April 7, 2020.