Man, talk about a movie I was not prepared for!

Originally intended to be a documentary of the Gainesville, FL punk/skate/thrash scenes, this somehow became a horror movie just as much as the opportunity to document bands like Psychic Violents, Young Pioneers, Mutley Chix, Doldrums, Just Demigods, Cindy Brady’s Lisp, Officer Friendly, the Smegmas, Hellwitch and the Bill Perry Orchestra.

Yet it can also be the story of the Death Skater, influenced by — according to director Charles Pinion in Underground Film Journal — The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Polyester, Psych-Out, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and Return of the Living Dead.

The moment where a girl sees a killer in her own house on her television before being killed by him and him enacting what he did on the TV afterward messes with time and scene and place and image better than most movies with way more of a budget. It also has tons of filler and moments of nothingness, but you know, we didn’t have jump to chapter buttons back in the days of VCRs.

Also: there’s an extended sequence inside a 1988 7-11 and for someone that hates advertising — and juxtaposition crazy has worked in it his entire life — I absolutely love everything about 7-11. The first thing I do in any new city — our new hometown has two of them — is find the 7-11 and grab a drink. In every fancy city my ad career has ever taken me, I’ve dined at more of these places and “thanked heaven” for them because they’re always there, even if my hometown didn’t get one until a year before I graduated high school. So the opportunity to drink in a time capsule of the store with the older branding and just live that world, man, that’s why I love movies.

If you die on a skateboard and a doctor brings you back to life, I hope that you have the festering brains that it takes to screw your board to your foot, wrap your face in bandages and then hunt down everyone who has ever wronged you.

You can get a handmade bootleg of this from the man who made it, Charles Pinion, on his official site. Sometimes they are sold out, but hey — again, it’s good to be made to wait.