Dr. Chopper

Dr. Chopper's prologue shows a surgeon and his nurses, who look like they've borrowed costumes from a porno, chopping up a couple tied to tables (in S&M  style) so they can harvest body parts and 'be forever young and beautiful'.  The scene following the opening credits has some of the clumsiest exposition I've ever heard when two cops break into a building and one says to the other (and I paraphrase) 'You better be damn sure of what you are doing because Dr. Max Fielding is the best plastic surgeon in the world - he practically invented it' to which the other replies 'I know he's a murderer because this parking ticket for his bike was issued at the time and place where a couple were abducted and the bike is registered to this building'.  They then go into the back room where they come across the bloody carnage.
 
Twenty years later and Nick, his girlfriend Jessica and three friends from college, Jimmy,  Reese and Tamara head up to Lake Tatonka where Nick's late mother had a cabin that she bequeathed to him.  Intent on a weekend of sex, booze and drugs, they find their plans are interrupted by a couple of deformed nurses and a leather-clad biker who start picking them off.
 

When the four remaining members of the party are safely holed up in the cabin, the action inexplicably moves to the woods where two sorority sisters have taken three pledges for their initiation.  As the pledges hand over their tops (but keep their bras on) and head into the woods to look for human skulls, the sisters start to get high and the seemingly cannibalistic nurses close in for the kill.
 
There is very little of Dr. Chopper that makes narrative sense and isn't appallingly badly written or delivered.  I'm not sure whether it is supposed to be a comedy - there aren't many laughs so I suspect it was supposed to be a straight horror - but when the only authority figure in Lake Tatonka is a Park Ranger who was a chiropractor and faith healer until he gave it up when he couldn't heal his wife and is now suicidal, I really didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The film has intellectual pretensions with a conversation about Ginsberg and the Ranger giving a monologue about the mysteries of the elephant graveyard which fall flat and seem badly out of place.
 
The acting varies from horribly wooden to nearly mediocre and you don't care about any of the characters.  That the villain gets his nickname from his mode of transport - it's not a motorcycle as anyone familiar with Pulp Fiction will know - and confusion arises because you are not sure whether he and his nurses are cannibals or surgically graft young flesh onto themselves whilst searching for the fountain of youth.
 
Another failure is Dr. Chopper himself who looks a bit like Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in leather fetish gear and isn't the least bit scary - he only bears a slight resemblance to the picture on the front of the box, not having the sharp teeth or evil grimace.  This is a desperately bad movie, though not the worst I've seen in the last week, and I can't believe anyone involved would be proud of the finished product.
 
 

The Disc

 
Picture and Sound
The production values look reasonably high for a modestly budgeted film and the transfer is sharp and clear though the full frame 4:3 (1.33:1) picture is puzzling - I expected a widescreen picture as I didn't think films were made in this aspect ratio anymore.  The costumes are far from convincing and the continuity is terrible - watch for the end where Dr. Chopper's hand disappears and then reappears or when a syringe is full before the nurses have taken blood.
 
The sound is generally clear, though occasionally muffled, with a really cheap score and poor sound effects that fail to elicit the desired jumps.
 
Final Thoughts
Dr. Chopper is a terrible film that is unintentionally funny and inept in just about every department.   As the disc only comes with some trailers, MVM have set a very ambitious RRP that only the most morbidly curious will consider paying as the quality of this film and disc is more like the recent releases from Brain Damage Films that retailed at a full tenner less!