June 30 - Zipperface (1992)

The cover of my VHS copy of Zipperface

Zipperface (1992)
Director: Mansour Pourmand
Format: VHS (CBL)

This low-budget flick can't make its mind up whether it wants to be horror, action, romance or a cop flick. Ultimately it fails at all of them.

Mansour Pourmand wrote, directed and produced this, his only filmmaking credit, which stars a bunch of unknown actors and was shot on video on a low budget.

Dona Adams (making her first and only movie appearance) is Lisa Ryder, a go-getter female cop who is promoted to detective by a vote-hungry female mayor. That pisses off most of the male cops she works with, but she doesn't have time to worry about that, because there's a killer in a gimp mask knocking off hookers.

That's pretty much all there is to the plot. Lots of other characters are thrown into the mix - including Michael Walker (Jonathon Mandell), a photographer who Ryder falls in love with; Ryder's partner Harry Shine (David Clover, LOCH NESS MONSTER); and chauvanistic cop Scalia (Richard Vidan, SCARECROWS) - but they're mostly there to act as red herrings.

The acting is for the most part atrocious, with Adams the main culprit. It's not hard to see why this is her only credit. The few special effects are Z-grade (including a laughable decapitation effect). The music is a Richard Band-esque keyboard musical score by Jim Halfpenny (who went on to score such masterpieces as Little Bigfoot 2: The Journey Home). And the fact it's shot on video gives it that distracting TV movie look.

My main complaint is that for a movie about a killer in a gimp mask, it's just not sleazy enough. There are lots and lots of scantily-clad women but only Adams gets her kit off (for run-of-the-mill sex scenes) and everything else is just too PG-rated for a movie of this kind. Sleaze it up people!

There are some moments of unintentional humor, mainly from the dialogue (which features such great back-and-forth patter as "You like being a cop?", replied with "Yeah"), but they are few and far between. It's all a bit ho hum really and the only thing that'll probably keep you watching to the end is the mystery of who's behind the mask. Trust me, even that's a let down, so feel free to skip this one.