With its gruesome opening sequence, Director's Cut certainly gets things started off on the right track for a horror flick. Setting the stage for more gore to come, the movie begins with two young boys forced to watch while a deranged killer slaughters their parents and cooks various body parts at a delicately arranged dinner table.

What happens to these brothers when they grow up? One becomes a film director whose latest project involves selecting the cast for a reality TV-style horror movie featuring real people, all clueless about the director's evil intentions. The other brother  . . . well, that's part of the film's mystery.

Director's Cut is billed as "a very low budget parody of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." I think most of the money went for fake blood. And there's plenty of it here -- from splatters landing artistically on  white china plates (a la American Psycho) to streams of liquid oozing from the heads of victims. Did I mention there's a horrific decapitation scene, too?      

Unbeknownst to his wannabe stars, director Cole Wilder (Joe Jeffrey) is making a group snuff film. What a terrific idea for a horror film! I don't know why it hasn't been thought of before. Unfortunately, I need at least one sympathetic character to care about -- even in a movie like this, and Director's Cut lacks that important element. Still, director Eric Stacey and co-writer Brennon Jones show promise here. Combining cynical Hollywood humor with a B-movie horror atmosphere, they've created a campy homage to one of filmdom's most popular genres.          

"Not until we had begun filming did we learn that New Line Cinema's remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will be released in October -- about the same time Director's Cut  should hit stores," declares Stacey. He also points out that his film was shot in the same house used for the previous six months by Quentin Tarantino for his new  thriller, Kill Bill. 

Special DVD features on Landfall's "Widescream Edition" of Director's Cut include interactive menus, trailers, scene selection, and a collector's slide show. "With any success at all, perhaps our film can become a model for other small independents which haven't been picked up by major distributors at Sundance yet still deserve a chance to be seen and to find an audience," Stacey says.

Director's Cut, financed with credit cards and self distributed, just might prove it's possible for a little independent film to be successful  nationally as a DVD offering. Considering the number of horror-movie addicts who need frequent cinematic fixes, I'm betting on it.      

(From Landfall Productions. Not rated by MPAA.)