Dollar store DVD bins beckon me. It’s not the prospect of finding something familiar and sought-after. In fact, if I recognize a lot of titles, I take it as a sign that I’m unlikely to find anything funky, and I abandon that bin. Rather, it’s the lure of the obscure — as horror geeks know better than anyone, underexposed doesn’t mean bad. There are all kinds of reasons a good film might miss the hype train, and the small distributors who provide the bulk of dollar stores’ stock are the best places to unearth those diamonds.
Unless you’re lucky to live near one of the scarce remaining video rental outlets, the dollar store is one of the last places you can visit in the flesh, pick up a physical object containing a movie, and take a chance on it sight unseen without much monetary risk. That activity was an important part of life in my younger days, so I’ll concede this hobby has a nostalgia element.
But there’s another benefit to dollar store archaeology, and this one has everything to do with our current moment. When I grab a movie from the barrel’s bottom and decide to take it home, that’s my decision, untouched by any targeting algorithm like the ones pushing whatever’s hot to the top of my streaming suggestions. A lot of people are just fine with the algorithms—after all, they show you stuff you’re likely to enjoy. But for the growing number of us seeking the freedom to choose our own weirdness, a scoop from the dollar bin is a great way to fortify our media diets with some essential anarchy. After all, every system deserves a little noise.
Like with most kinds of collecting, I grab them faster than I can watch them. From various visits to those fluorescent-lit mystery pits, I have a big stack of blind-bought discs waiting to be viewed, so I thought I’d turn it into a series and bring you along for the ride.
It’s not my intention to roast these movies—I’m sure many of them will be quite bad, but I’m not interested in dunking on indie creators with the tenacity to get a film made and distributed. Instead, I’m here to celebrate these titles and the way I acquired them. After all, between physical media’s slide into irrelevance, inflation (the minimum price is already up to $1.50, making “dollar store” a misnomer), and dwindling stock, the days of dollar store movies are numbered. Let’s have some fun while we can.
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Deathday starts in the Peruvian desert, where a trio of low-rent Indiana Joneses, one of whom is named Robert (Robert C. Pullman), finds a buried artifact. They also meet the demonic creature attached to the artifact and learn a bit of its lore. Apparently, there are five parts to your being, each of which the devil has to take, one by one, before your soul fully belongs to it.
We then meet Morgan (Rachel Amanda Bryant), Robert’s daughter. It seems the curse followed him back to the U.S., and now that he’s dead, it’s passed to her. When she returns home upon his death, she finds herself stuck in a time loop, dying in a different way each time as another piece of her soul is taken. Morgan must find a way to outsmart the devil before the fifth death, after which she’ll be gone for good.
That’s as close to an accurate summary as you’re gonna get because almost none of this is clearly communicated by the film. But that’s okay because you’re not here for the story. Each time the loop resets, Morgan faces a different menace: masked slashers, zombies, ghosts, and body-horror parasites. This gives the film a fun Cabin in the Woods-style mix-and-match nature and seems suspiciously similar to the premise of the upcoming Until Dawn.
The film, originally titled The Campus, was released as Deathday to capitalize on a much bigger time loop movie that dropped around that time. The mockbuster rebrand might make sense from a marketing perspective, but inviting comparisons to Happy Death Day does this film a disservice. The tone is wholly different; far from a madcap concept, Deathday is played somber to a fault. Very little is explained, the whole thing is color-corrected within an inch of its life, locations seem to blur into one another, and the film can’t decide whether it’s day or night.
All of those low-budget peccadilloes somehow combine into a surreal, nocturnal hypnagogia that won’t be to most people’s liking. But if you catch it in the right mood, you might fall into a time loop of your own.
Misleading box art? Yep, there is no cake in the movie, nor is it anyone’s birthday.
Decision: Dollar Store Decent
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