VIDEO ODDITIES, or VHS: Video House Safari
john cribbs
DR. BUTCHER
page 2
That's the sort of standard B-movie plot I had cooked up in my own head and the next scene seemed to headed in that general direction, furthering the mystery of what's going on in the hospital. The uncensented overnight limb removal is revealed at an autopsy held by goateed surgeon Dr. Dreylock (I checked immediately - not an anagram for "Butcher") for the benefit of a bunch of giggling interns. In a slasher movie formula, you've got a flock of young not unattractive giggling people hanging out together in the second scene of the movie - following the opening killing/amputation - you figure these are going to be the main group of victims throughout the rest of the film. But not here: we never see these clowns again. So instead we focus on Dr. Dreylock. He seems surprised that his patient has only half the amount of hands he should, but is it an act? Is the bisected body part sitting in the glove compartment of Dreylock's Monza in the physician's parking lot? If so, he throws suspicion off himself by declaring to a blonde nurse: "We must have a psychopathic deviate in the hospital!"
That's a hell of an accusation - a hypothesis at best - but his speculation proves founded when more recently deceased bodies are discovered disemboweled. Things are formulating nicely: I'm genuinely curious to know what exactly Dr. Butcher is up to! What's going to compel him to move from cadavers to living victims? Will his hospital homicides mainly be committed to cover up his corpse carving? Somewhat abruptly and shockingly, the movie provides an answer...
The next night an orderly is making his rounds and ends up in the morgue. So this is where the doctor is caught and forced to kill! Watch out dude! The orderly walks up to a body and uncovers it. Wait, what's he up to? He pulls out a scalpel and splits the dead man's chest open, and in the same motion starts scooping innards straight out of the corpse and into his mouth! Holy lunch! No sooner than has he started gorging, the lights switch on and Dr. Dreylock and associates leap out of hiding places - it was a trap. The intern fights his way out of their grasp however and takes the quickest exit...straight out the window. (The impact appears to break his arm off but it's back on by the time everybody else makes it down to the street.) As he lays dying his final word is "Kito!"
I'm going over these opening scenes in detail because sadly they are the closest this movie is going to get to Dr. Butcher MD as advertised. It's the first twenty minutes of the movie, and five minutes later we won't even be in New York anymore: Dr. Butcher's urban slayground as depicted on the video box will be shucked in favor of the furthest jungle regions of an archipelago of Moluccan islands known as Kito. Evidence that the orderly was an immigrant of the island and that apparently other orderlies at hospitals around the city have been caught doing the same thing (!) sets our heroes to investigate. Dr. Dreylock sits out the expedition, opting instead to send plucky blonde nurse Lori Ridgeway along with a group of travelers including a new guy, anthropologist Dr. Peter Chandler. A fleeting hope remained in my head that Dr. Chandler would go on to contract the same sort of mosquito insanity virus (MIV) on the island that effected the intern, massacre his comrades and return to New York a sick lunatic with butchery on the brain. I wasn't sure if he was our absent serial surgeon, but I did recognize him from Lucio Fulci's Zombi, and Nurse Lori from Fulci's New York Ripper.
That's right: these mugs are dubbed Italian actors! It figures it'd be something like this. Their presence in the movie and the fact that the remaining hour of the film is a half-assed mash-up of Zombi and Cannibal Holocaust suggests a retooling for American audiences. Specifically, the expedition runs afowl of savage cannibals and decaying zombies with worms squirming out of their eye sockets. At this point I'm honestly starting to think we'll never meet Dr. Butcher at all... we'll never learn what makes for a true medical deviate.
Interestingly, it turns out I was kind of wrong about not meeting the depraved doctor, and kind of right about the plot as I had originally guessed. After what can only be described as an orgy of cannibal and zombie assaults which lead to eye-gouging, skull-macheteing, bimbo-lassoing, gut-spearing, multiple acts of flesh-tearing raw organ buffets and finally boat propeller-to-the-face, we find out the man behind it is a guy named Dr. Obrero (not an anagram either, just a palindrome with a "b" in it) who has been experimenting with live victims, turning cannibals* into zombies. Now I'm not sure what the point of turning vicious cannibals who indiscriminately attack anyone on sight into zombies is (they're already eating folks - this process really just slows them down, makes them more docile) but that's kind of what I thought a medical deviate might be up to in a movie like this. And since Obrero is played by Donald O'Brian, and the opening credits/video box specifically listed "Donald O'Brian as Doctor Butcher," this is clearly the eponymous practitioner. So to review: this guy is a) not located in New York, b) is not named Dr. Butcher and c) may or may not actually make house calls. There really aren't any houses on the island, only huts. And he basically stays in his own hut. He's also more like a Bond villain than your classic homicidal, bloodythirsty killer - all planning and monolouging as Dr. Chandler (who we can definitely rule out as a Dr. Butcher suspect) comes up with a way to escape. Also Obrero/Butcher's relation to Snuff Maximus remains entirely ambiguous.
This is clearly not the movie I was hoping for. Instead of an urbane American slasher it turned out to be your typically crude Italian gorefest. Nurse Lori finds many occasions to undress but never gains sympathy as the heroine, and Dr. Chandler's just as much a cold fish of a leading man. And this sub-par Dr. Butcher, running around his hut cackling about his plans for zombie manufacturing while native henchman Mulatto (!) lurks in the corner, is of course nowhere near the iconic villain the cover led me to imagine. But as I said before, it's kind of perfect that the first movie I'd watch for this Video Oddities column would be one with such a false front: a product of early 80's video marketing back when exploitation cheapies each had a dozen different titles and would exploit any hook to sucker in the horror crowd. It's a great carnival mentality that certainly doesn't exist today - or rather it does, but in an even more dishonest, glossed-over way like deglamorizing Angelina or Charlize when they play "serious" roles. And it's amazing how the gimmick, the fictious premise the guys over at Paragon Video used to sell their acquired property, was as entertaining as anything in the real movie!
If anything, the phony American ads seem to have inspired 1992's Dr. Giggles - with Larry Drake as a homicidal maniac pretending to be a doctor who did indeed make house calls - although for my money that was too clever and stylized an attempt at the "murderous man of medicine" plot. The real Dr. Butcher only exists, thanks to video box art, in our hearts and dreams.
* I have to point out that these are some of the most insatiable cannibals ever committed to celluloid. They maul, disembowel and consume any cast member who happens to walk by, at least three times the amount of people eaten in Cannibal Holocaust... but at the same time they're all in pretty good shape. Where are the fat cannibals? And do all cannibals just start tearing into their food willy nilly? I mean normal people don't just tear open a bag of Doritos at the market and chow down right there in the middle of the aisle...at least, not most people.
APPENDIX, or What I Learned Later
The viewing of this particular video has prompted me to ad an addendum to these Video Oddity entries wherein I'll talk briefly about what I found out after seeing the subjected film.
As I correctly discerned, most of Dr. Butcher is actually an Italian movie, a combination of the plots of Zombi and Cannibal Holocaust imaginatively titled...Zombie Holocaust. Director "Frank Martin" (not the Transporter) is actually Marino Girolami, whose 75+ directing credits were rechristened with such amazing American titles as Bullet in the Flesh, Sexy Sinners, What the Chambermaid Saw, Violent City, A Special Cop in Action, Between God the Devil and a Winchester (my personal favorite title - a spaghetti western I take it) and most intruiging of all, Flying Sex. Producer Fabrizio De Angelis was also Fulci's producer on Zombi and New York Ripper, which explains the presence of half the cast of that film and Ripper's Alexandra Delli Colli...and that the movie calling itself "Dr Butcher" is mostly a Zombi rehash.
But the truth is, Dr Butcher MD is a combination of two different movies: the opening graveyard sequences (the whole tottering "Snuff Maximus" bit) were from a short film by none other than the great Roy Frumkes, writer-producer of Street Trash, co-creator of Tom Berenger's The Substitute and zombie pie-in-the-face victim in the original Dawn of the Dead. This cemetery footage...is not his best work, to say the least. Apparently the American distributors owned it as part of a propsed anthology film to be titled Tales That'll Tear Your Heart Out, but once that fell through they stuck it at the beginning of Zombi Holocaust (god knows why) and called it (trumpet?) Dr. Butcher MD.
After finishing Zombi Holocaust Donald O'Brian, correct spelling "O'Brien" (who also worked with Girolami on the previously mentioned Flying Sex... is anyone else imagining some kind of kinky kite adventure?) slipped in the bathroom of a Parisian hotel and went into a coma for three days. When he woke up half of his body was paralyzed. He eventually made a nearly-full recovery, but never again played an evil doctor.
THAT WRAPS UP OUR FIRST VIDEO ODDITIES! COMING SOON...
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