This ain't no Blade Runner. It's Blade Butcher. Three cuts. Three timelines. Three fractured mirror shards of a film that shouldn't exist but does, and thank the trash-cinema spirits it does. A Night to Dismember, Doris Wishman's late-career horror oddity, is a hall-of-mirrors fever dream that keeps reinventing itself like a cursed VHS that won't die, only mutate.
1. THE “ORIGINAL” 1983 VHS RELEASE:
This is the one you saw on a friend's crumbling Goodtimes Home Video tape, probably dubbed from a dubbed-from-a-dub source, tracking lines thick as sewer fog. A movie made from the scraps of a fire—literally. Wishman claimed the lab “accidentally” destroyed 80% of her footage. What remains is a stitched-together corpse of voiceovers, murder flashes, and a pounding synth score that seems to be chasing you down a hallway.
Everything in this version is disjointed, missing scenes like a mouth with knocked-out teeth. Yet, it moves. Like a haunted View-Master. It’s horror made from the margins, a slipstream of disconnected narration and wet-red kills. It's a film trying to crawl out of its own grave, missing limbs and screaming in someone else’s voice.
This cut is pure gutter magic—the kind Bill Landis would’ve found screening at 3 a.m. in a peepshow storefront next to a Bronx bodega. It's the official “release,” but it feels like a bootleg from the astral plane.
2. THE DORIS WISHMAN COMMENTARY DVD CUT:
Unearthed by Some Weird Video or whatever DVD gremlin label had the guts, this one has Doris herself talking over the dream. And it’s like a séance with the Queen of Exploitation herself.
She talks about casting, about the lab fire, about horror not being her thing, yet there’s this sly wink in her voice like she knew what she made. In this version, more scenes seem to breathe—a couple extended moments let you watch her unique alien direction style unfold: people talking to lamps, staring past cameras, and that unmatched use of back-of-the-head coverage like she’s afraid of catching souls on film.
You learn nothing concrete, but you feel closer to the cauldron.
This cut? It's a teaching tool from another timeline, where Doris teaches underground film in Hell’s community college.
3. THE “LOST” YOUTUBE VERSION (2010s RE-EMERGENCE):
Now we’re in deep. This one showed up like a whisper—ripped from a ¾” U-Matic, maybe? A longer, grimier, strangely more coherent cut. Still stitched together, still narrated like a radio serial with blood, but there's connective tissue here. A whole subplot or two emerge like spirits in fog.
And somehow, it’s scarier. There’s a pulse here—like it wanted to be a real movie but got possessed mid-birth. The murders linger longer. The family drama in the Kent household plays like a soap opera written by Ed Wood on barbiturates. It’s got that greasy, East Coast grime. You can smell the hairspray and mildew. You feel the low-rent possession.
It’s not the best version of the film—it’s the most haunted.
FINAL CUT:
This is the Blade Runner of bottom-shelf horror, but don’t let Ridley Scott near it. Let it rot. Let it grow mushrooms. Each version is a different dream—the kind where you wake up with blood on your hands and don’t know why.
Bill Landis would’ve LOVED this nightmare. He would've written a whole issue of Sleazoid Express on it, called it “The Zombi Puzzle of Doris Wishman’s Slasher Magic.” He would've stood outside The Deuce with a six-pack and dared you to sit through all three in one sitting.
This isn’t just a movie—it’s a cursed object.
And like all cursed things, it just keeps coming back.
Bill Landis was the patron saint of grindhouse grit, a street poet of sleaze who gave voice to the neon-lit gutters of 42nd Street through Sleazoid Express, his legendary zine that captured the raw, unfiltered soul of exploitation cinema. With the eyes of a scholar and the heart of a midnight movie maniac, Landis chronicled the films, theaters, and personalities that lived and died on the Deuce—elevating smut, slashers, and psychotronic oddities into something mythic. He didn’t just review movies—he exorcised them, translating their chaos into fevered prose that still echoes like projector hum in a haunted grindhouse.
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