Weasles Rip My Flesh (1979)

"Some people wish they were never born, others kill others out of hatred or madness,
and then there is the meat." - Narrator

Radioactive waste from space creates a weasel monster!
Starring: John Smihula, Steven Kriete, Fred Borges

Link to IMDB

In the beginning, the theater was formless and empty, and then a 16 year old boy named Nathan Schiff decided to pick up a camera and the 8mm world was born anew.

It didn't take long for me to see that I had found something special here, as the opening narrator promises a perplexing tragedy, condemning all the fragile life on Earth to bear witness to the upcoming horrible events.

A space probe has traveled to Venus (which is depicted here as a cardboard diorama on a kitchen table,) to collect some radioactive slime samples. Upon returning to Earth, the probe crash lands into a lake and disappears. Two curious boys find some canisters near the lake and discover that they're full of space goo, which they promptly pour down a weasel hole in the ground. Some thing starts boiling and bubbling in that hole. It could be a pile of green eggs and ham as far as I can tell, but it eventually transforms into a six-foot tall weasel monster that resembles a deformed turd with arms and teeth! Suitably upset, the weasel monster digs out of the ground and kills the two troublesome kids with its monstrous hands.

This is all pure low-budget clumsiness, and it's absolutely fantastic! By the time the monster claims another victim I realized I hadn't blinked in 10 minutes, not wanting to miss a single moment of the ambitiously unconventional nightmare unfolding before me.
Eight months pass by and two detectives finally arrive to investigate all the deaths that have happened in the area. They meet a crazed scientist wandering in the forest that takes them to his secret lab where he has the weasel monster in captivity. The scientist is scheming to create an army of monsters, so he can rule the world and become immortal. As you can guess, things don't go as planned.

"I think this situation is getting a little out of proportion." - Det. Anderson

At a brief 60 minutes the movie wastes no time explaining what it's doing, so it often felt like my brain was having an out-of-body experience due to the unfiltered absurdity. To be fair though, most plot points are explained and are quite simple, you just have to wait for the answers to click. For example, it takes about 15 minutes to realize that the story jumps ahead eight months at one point.
Considering this was made by a teenager for $400 it is damn impressive. Schiff had the imagination and drive to create the best movie that he was capable of making with his friends. It's a revelation of raw, primitive cinema.

The movie delivers non-stop weirdness, ketchup blood and laughs. You get weasel versus weasel action, weasels gone wild, and even a goddamn shark makes an appearance!
This is a perfect example of the type of eccentric movies that I love to find and constantly hope to find again.

Be sure not to miss:
- "This looks like some kind of laboratory!" Spoken while standing in an ordinary living room.
- Yes, the title was inspired by the Zappa album.
- Rats enough?? It might be a guinea pig, but definitely not a weasel.

Internet review:
"To enjoy a movie like this, one needs to exist on an alternate viewing plane." - JudgeDJ

Should I watch it?
Yes! Cancel your plans, strap yourself to a chair, and fall deep into Schiff's rabbit weasel hole.

Where can I find it?
stagevu link here.

Weasels Rip my Flesh gets...