We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 167

My Crepitus

Starring: Eric James, Tom Colbert, Julie Hicks

Writer & Director: Michael T. Schneider

"I wanted a mission. And so, my sins gave me one." - Apocalypse Now

Bloody Fun Pictures

Lurking on the shelves, amongst the top low-budget horror entries ever to be found, you may summon up the most raw footage ever displayed. Filmed outside Pittsburgh PA, director Michael Schneider blends in his cauldron a concoction of home effects of a frail man dying of his own cerebral deterioration. Gore has yet to be imposed, in a full feature length, for the 20 minutes of rambled footage spliced together is a pungent picture, extended into an 90 minute movie. Puzzling enough, one may never piece together it’s plot, but, oddly enough, it is a practice of a student project George Romero himself, could never claim. Coincidentally enough, it was produced in the same year as Night of the Living Dead, yet many have never even heard of him, or it. Most peculiar of all, both men originated from Steeltown, PA. Were they some doppelganger destined to stay detached, perhaps? It’s unexplainable, to say the least. My Crepitus, made for the emotionally dead, is an exercise of random thoughts rendering a psyche- crazed mental patient skulking on his last limbs. Nor a zombie or a man, Eric James plays a demon out of this land.

-Smutstrutter

Sleazegrinder heaps on their own praise:

…I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that if Alexandro Jodorowsky started out with nothing but a hi-8 video camera and a few sympathetic buddies, his first effort would look just like this. Who knows just what strange inspiration drove Schneider to create this absorbing atrocity exhibition? I see the influence of death metal (the title, for one), Dario Argento, “Panorama of Hell”, David Lynch, rock and roll decadence (just like Marilyn Manson’s guitarist, Jeffrey likes to, uh…eat his own), Throbbing Gristle, Coffin Joe, Nick Zedd, and JG Ballard, but that’s all just conjecture. All I know for sure is that this magnum opus is an engrossing, enthralling, complete motherfucker of a film, and Schneider’s either got a long and intense career as America’s new favorite outlaw filmmaker or a self-inflicted gunshot wound ahead of him.