Film Appreciation - Corey, What Are You Doing?

Guest contributor and God of Thunder Matt Hill shows Film Appreciation for Little Corey Gorey (1993).

Ah yes, one of my all time favorites. Spoilers aplenty, so if you wish to watch the movie first, here it is in all its uncut glory, streaming for free!

www.littlecoreygorey.com

I would urge everyone to check it out. It really is a good film.

And now, for the synopsis/review:

Little Corey Gorey isn't so much a horror film as it is an extremely dark comedy with gore in it. But, horror, dark comedy, who cares?

The basic set-up: Corey Gorey (yes, this is his real name) is a high schooler forced to live with two of the worst humans ever: his fat, white trash stepmother and his cokehead stepbrother, Biff. Apparently Corey's parents died long ago, his father being the most recent. The circumstances are never clearly revealed, but apparently stepmother was driving the car with the family in it and managed to crash, killing his father and leaving him with a nasty scar on his face.

These two are truly despicable - they treat him as their slave, force him to live in a small add-on to their new house (it's about the size of a small storage unit), abuse him to hell and back, and right off the bat, an altercation brought on by Biff's trap ends with him being hung by the neck with a belt in the living room while they throw beer cans at him.

Corey starts his first day of high school and immediately falls head over heels in love with a cute girl named Jackie: trouble is, Jackie's about as self-centered as his stepmother and makes it clear that she wants nothing to do with him. Still, they have a mutual love for the music of one Ozzy Osbourne, so he decides to buy her a front row ticket, right next to his (he sneaks into her house and leaves it on her bed, taking the opportunity to steal a pair of her black lace panties while he's at it).

Things are going smooth right until the big night. Corey can't find his ticket, when it dawns on him - Biff stole the ticket and is at the concert right now. Corey is understandably pissed like never before and has had enough - and yet, when Biff arrives home, he makes the situation that much worse by saying he got to "feel her all over" and after the concert, he "plowed the shit out of her in a gas station toilet, until she screamed." And at this, Corey completely loses it and hauls off after Biff, knocking him down the stairs, eventually leading to Biff crashing through a glass shower door. Things seem to be going OK and fixable, until Biff's hand is sliced off by a falling shard of glass. He proceeds to bleed out on the tub floor, and going on about how dear old stepmom is going to kill Corey for it.

Corey considers calling the cops, but realizes that Biff's right, he's not going to live if the stepmother gets a hold of him. So, after he chops Biff's corpse into pieces, stashing him in the freezer, he takes the opportunity to tie her to the couch and deprive her of her precious beer, starving her as well, while he finally gets to LIVE!!! Unfortunately things hit a bit of a bump in the road when Jackie comes over, demanding to see Biff and going on about a pound of cocaine he apparently had back at the house. Corey fills her in on the situation, and they seem to hit it off for a minute, agreeing to team together and comb the house for the drugs. But Corey's not so bright and can't see the writing on the wall: she's merely using him. She takes it upon herself to even move in, much to blessedly ignorant Corey's joy. Corey is so smitten with her, he's tucking her in bed at night and even fixing her breakfast in bed.

From here on, various ridiculous setbacks occur; the mail lady pays a visit and just barges her way into the house, finding the body, threatening to take Corey to the cops. He flees immediately, crawling under the car in the garage, which is propped up on a jack. Apparently thining she can take him, mail lady decides to crawl under the car, but she ends up releasing the jack and is slowly crushed to death by the lowering vehicle. Corey figures he's held out long enoguh in letting stepmom eat, so he decides to fix her a burger, which happens to be made from the deceased mail lady.

Things get even more complicated when Biff's coke dealer shows up demanding the money, threatening to burn the house down and kill all three of them if Biff doesn't pay up. Thus, Jackie has the grand idea to throw a party to raise money and pay off the pissed off dealer. Unfortunately, this is where Jackie's true self is revealed to Corey - this goofy Dave Mustaine clone comes in, takes Jackie into the bathroom for a quickie, and then they both completely ditch Corey, leaving him alone with the dealer. The dealer smacks him around a good bit, demanding he take him to the money, when he realizes that there is no hope: he has to kill the bastard. He takes him down into the basement, where Corey tells him that Biff is hiding out with the money inside the freezer. Dealer shoves him out of the way and takes a peak, seeing the mangled body and freaking out... and ultimately never realizing that Corey is right behind him with an axe, seconds away from chopping him to pieces.

Corey goes completely insane after this: he has several nightmares, imagines that the dealer isn't really dead and is coming back for him (he even goes to check to make sure that the corpse is still in its place), thinking about Jackie and how she betrayed him...

And all this leads to the AWESOME climax: Corey calls up Jackie, telling her that he has found the coveted pound of coke, and telling her to get back to his place. Jackie shows up a bit later, where he leads her into the kitchen, demanding an explanation for last night. Unfortunately for Jackie, she doesn't realize that this is her last chance to save herself, so she continues to be the cocky bitch she has been for the entire movie. It goes like this:

"What about last night?" 
"What *about* last night?" 
"Don't you think you owe me an explanation?" 
"No, I don't *owe* you anything." 
"You don't owe me anything? No, you're right, you don't owe me anything, I owe *you* something." 
"Corey, what are you doing?" 

And with that, Corey grabs a power saw from the cabinet and begins to slice her flesh open, chasing her around and wounding her, all the while screaming at her about how much of a bitch she is. Eventually the cord is yanked out of the wall after Jackie is severely wounded, so Corey resorts to strangling her on the floor while shouting "I love you!" as she dies in his hands.

At this, Corey feels that things have gone too far and that he cannot take anymore, so he showers off the blood and contemplates suicide. He's about a second away from slicing his wrists open in the tub when stepmother opens the door and swings a machete at him - she had finally gotten loose from her ties. She chases him through the house until the cops bust in and shoot her dead. "Thanks man, she was gonna kill me... she was gonna kill me, just like all the others." Corey says with a grin, as the movie finally ends.

Wow... I really do love this movie. It's taken a lot of negativity in the short time it has been released, but I have never been able to see why. I think it is an extremely effective and very funny and charming dark comedy film that always manages to leave me with a smile. It truly is an undiscovered masterpiece, but the sad thing is, it really could have been more. The movie has a rather troubled and interesting past.

The movie started filming in 1988 and wrapped in 1990, eventually seeing release in 1993 at a couple festivals. It was never released on video until 2001, when Tapeworm and BCI distributed it on DVD. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a severely cut version that removes next to ALL of the gore. Fortunately, this is the version that I initially fell in love with and it IS still a very good movie, but now that Bill Morroni has released his uncut, gory version on his website, that is the way to truly watch it.

But on the actual movie's production - it was written in the late '80s, the script got a good reaction from some money men, who put up a decent budget for the film. They even got infamous transvestite Divine to play the role of the stepmother, but he died in a hotel the night he signed the contract. This proved to be a critical blow to the film, as the money men never returned any more calls from the director and completely abandoned the film. So Bill, wanting desperately to capture his vision, decided to ahead and film the script. It took 2 years to do this and it was shot on 16mm, with a Bolex camera. This meant that once the movie's photography was finished, every single sound and line had to be dubbed into the film in post production, which also took up a huge amount of time. The editing dragged things out another couple years, until the film was finally finished in 1993.

Unfortunately, Bill was ripped off by distributors left and right and the movie was never actually released by anyone until the DVD came out, which had the erroneous production year as '2001.' Of course, this may have been what drew me in to the film in the first place - when I first sat down to watch it, I thought it was a film from that year, but then when I started watching... it looked exactly like an '80s movie! Captured my attention immediately.

But, when all is said and done, I think it is a really good movie that could and should have been a cult classic on VHS in the '90s. The performances are all really fun, the comedy works, the gore is well accomplished (in the uncut version), and the way the finale is set up... it's probably a bit predictable, but the execution of it is just completely satisfying and always leaves me with a sly grin on my face. And the movie is never once boring - 90 minutes go by in what feels like 45 minutes tops. Definitely one to rewatch several times, I recommend it to anyone with an open mind and a true appreciation for horror and comedy films.

So watch it at that link!!!!