A fifteen-minute bargain basement VHS homage to FRIDAY THE 13TH sparks a teenager's love affair with genre cinema with MVD Visual's special edition of THE VIOLENCE MOVIE.

On his way home, teenage Joey Hammond (Joseph Shaugnessy) overhears on the radio a report about the escape of a psychotic serial killer (David Wilkinson) described as just an average guy in normal clothing. He comes home to find his garage open and his bedroom rifled through before he is attacked by a masked assailant who simply will not die. That's pretty much it. THE VIOLENCE MOVIE is a slasher film homage primarily to FRIDAY THE 13TH with bleary VHS camcorder photography, so-so sound – apart from an added original score by Harry Manfredini (HOUSE) – awkward "acting", staging too rough to be called "fight choreography", and crude gore effects (including a re-capitation in which the real head of the killer can be seen craned off to the side as he "reattaches" his masked cabeza. For all its shortcomings, the film is nevertheless endearing as it resembles so much our own untrained home movie camera experiments with cinema whether inspired by the slasher or any other genre so influential in childhood.

Shot in 1988 and finished in 2003 for its "fifteenth anniversary" with some pick-up shots by the brothers Wilkinson – including a HALLOWEEN-esque fall by a dummy – THE VIOLENCE MOVIE (14:22) was followed up like so many actual mainstream slasher films with a sequel that was not so much a continuation as more of the same. THE VIOLENCE MOVIE II (19:24) reworks the events of the first film with greater technical "polish" while also seemingly referencing the prologue of FRIDAY THE 13TH as Joey Hammond wakes from a dream of the first film's events to discover from a TV news broadcast that the same killer has escaped and then discovers that the hockey masked psycho in his driveway. The fall from a window becomes a daring rooftop tussle followed by a car pursuit in which both human and dummy stand-in are really dragged, followed by a chainsaw battle along a steep hillside before a show-stopping finale involving a severed arm as a weapon. While the videography of both films just captures the action, THE VIOLENCE MOVIE II finds Wilkinson seeming not to have read film books or taken courses but filming the action linearly and staging shots – it would be stretching things to call it coverage – to edit in the camera with more finesse than the original. The result is certainly the better film, not just in comparison to the first film but as far as fan films in general despite the greater polish and technical sophistication of more modern efforts.

Both films have been "remastered" for DVD in so much as they have new credit sequences and presumably the audio on the Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks has been given some basic cleanup while the brevity has allowed for both to be given high bitrate encodes of iffy source material. There are jumps in the quality between new and old footage as well as shifts between original mono and stereo audio. Both are accompanied by audio commentary tracks: the first with the brothers Wilkinson and friend Michael Kahn whose scenes wound up on the cutting room floor. They point out the many mistakes caught on camera along with the new footage – they mention it was shot "last November" meaning this disc was long in production as Wilkinson was also responsible for the DVD menu designs and authoring – as well as the new sound effects and a scene deleted from the original but reincorporated thanks to the new footage to flesh it out (the re-capitation shot was originally left out but included in the new version because it was so bad). They also note that the film is not only a homage to FRIDAY THE 13TH and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET but also LETHAL WEAPON and DIE HARD (hence the hand-to-hand combat). The trio returns on the second film, acknowledging the padding, the quality shifts, as well as realizing as adults just how dangerous some of the action scenes were.