Joe Bob's Drive-In: Hell's Highway

You guys need to know about this little bitty movie studio in Syracuse, New York, that's producing, distributing, financing and selling more original independent films than just about anybody on the planet right now -- and, bless their hearts, most of em are down-and-dirty horror flicks.

You gotta love Ron Bonk and Sub Rosa Studios, who started out less than 10 years ago specializing in movies with a maximum budget of $75,000. Even today, when they'll go up to a million, they have an affection for the shoestring underground video quickie.

This guy is the Roger Corman of the video age, churning out enough zombies, vampires, serial killers, sexual deviants and splatter-punk psychos to satisfy the needs of every frat house in the Deep South for the next century. I LOVE these guys!

Ron Bonk is himself a producer, director, writer, editor and financial whiz who has turned Syracuse into a mini-Hollywood, and one of his best known filmed-in-Syracuse creations is a little grisly descent into madness called "The Vicious Sweet."

The premise of the flick is that B movie scream queen Sasha Graham -- she's a scream queen in real life AND in the movie -- is going through an existential crisis. (Yes, that's what I said.) She can't sit through the screening of her latest starring role in "Toxic Mutant Spawn" without giggling. She abuses her agent. She tells her boyfriend to get lost on the day he proposes marriage. She moons around her house in a nightie, stares into space a lot, and briefly considers swallowing a bottle full of sleeping pills. Worst of all, she chain-smokes in the lobby of a movie house.

Then she wakes up handcuffed to a bed in a dungeon. I don't wanna tell you who her captor is cause it would give away the surprise ending, but he's got a crate load of sodium pentothal and a line of psychological bull-stuff that won't stop.

"You're here to relearn all you forgot," he tells her, while donning various psycho-killer disguises. And then we get into Ingmar Bergman territory as this screaming hysterical girl is forced to relive her childhood with an alcoholic mother, the unwanted attentions of creepy Uncle Bert, her drug-haze porn film years, and a few of her more wacko horror flicks.

As the drugs take hold and the camera blurs -- it's really a masterpiece of quick-cut editing -- she hallucinates, talks to dead people, meets the Grim Reaper himself, and flees from hungry scavenging zombie hordes. It's Ingmar Bergman, but it's Ingmar Bergman WITH ZOMBIE FOOTAGE, the way God intended.

The Interrogator finally gets what he wants, but so does Sasha. All I can say is: Don't mess with a drugged-up sobbing scream queen who's just confessed all her sins, especially if she has access to the butcher knife in the kitchen.

Syracuse should be proud.

Six dead bodies. One disembodied blackened hand. Skull-crushing. Oozy zombie-kissing. Butcher knife to the chest. Four mutants in various stages of slime glopola. Closeup drug injections. Face-spitting.

One laughing monster from "Ghoulies." One bony Angel of Death. One maggot-infested apple. Arm-eating. One zombie army.

Gratuitous spitwad. Gratuitous child-abuse subplot. Kung Fu. Chloroform Fu.

Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Joseph M. Zappala, as the nasty director, for saying "You're just yesterday's spaghetti!"; Sasha Graham, as the moody captive scream queen, for telling the man proposing to her that he's nothing but an "out-of-work construction-worker wanna be rock star"; Robert Licata, as the psycho in a mutilated clown face, for saying "Art is never easy"; and Ron Bonk, the writer, producer and director, for doing things the drive-in way.

Three stars. (One star off for bad sound that mangles some of the dialogue, and a ZERO breast count. Shame on you, Sasha.)

Joe Bob says check it out. "The Vicious Sweet" website: b-movie.com.

(To reach Joe Bob, go to joebob-briggs.com or email him at JoeBob@upi.com. Snail-mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.)