Chattanooga 2023 Review: END ZONE 2 and THE ONCE AND FUTURE SMASH Invite Viewers Into an Alternate Horror History

The multi-film, single project experiment has been done before, perhaps most famously with The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, which saw different perspectives on the same story. But with End Zone 2 and The Once and Future Smash, creative team Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein have done something exciting and delightfully unique.

End Zone 2 is ostensibly a proto-slasher released in 1970 as a cheap cash-in on earlier drive-in classic, End Zone. What “remains” and was “remastered” is the first hour of the film, with the final half hour believed lost. It’s a fun idea, and the film is an enjoyable throwback to multi-national productions that found their way onto screens in 42nd Street theaters.

The central killer, Jimmy “Smashmouth” Smasmouth (casting is purposefully unclear) was beaten within an inch of his life in high school and now has a giant, deformed head with an unhinged, always open jaw courtesy of a fantastic mask. The opening credits of the film are in Italian and set to a light-hearted but not especially good original jingle. One of the five women who make up the core cast is reading the essay collection Sisterhood is Powerful and talks about never wearing a skirt again. 

All of these time-signifiers are fun, but what makes End Zone 2 more fun are the dead giveaways that this was shot in the 21st century. Among them are costumes that feel closer to '1970s Hippie' Halloween costumes than actual clothes from the 70s, the way characters talk about trauma, and architecture that looks like it was built in the 90s, at the earliest. For a movie that exists mostly as set-up for another film, it’s far better than it needs to be, and part of that is the hilarity of the (seeming purposefully) poorly executed verisimilitude to the period.

And ultimately, that is what End Zone 2 is: set-up. It exists to create a reality that can then be explored in The Once and Future Smash, a mockumentary about the legacy of End Zone 2 and the competing claims to having played Smashmouth in that film from Mikey Smash (Michael St. Michaels) and William Mouth (Bill Weeden).

What makes The Once and Future Smash extraordinary as a mockumentary is the inclusion of real interviewees from the horror world. The film features original Friday the 13th writer Victor Miller, later Friday sequel writers Adam Marcus and Todd Farmer, Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, various stars from the Friday, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, and more. Each of these interviewees regales the documentarians with stories of the importance of End Zone 2 and how we wouldn’t have slashers as they exist today if not for this foundational piece of cinema.

It’s a phenomenal bit that almost makes you believe we exist in the alternate history Epstein and Cacciola have created. The joke is also made all the better by expanding beyond End Zone 2. Some interviewees discuss the first End Zone as a classic of the once-popular "football revenge” subgenre, while listing off the names of several fake films that existed alongside it as 1960s drive-in staples.

There’s much disagreement among the talking heads about whether End Zone 3 (an unrelated ripoff film originally titled Cannibal Linebacker that was later retitled to enter the franchise) or End Zone 3D is the better film, including a fantastic moment on the qualities of 3D sequels with Dan Yeager, who played Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw 3D. And a young producer is looking to reinvigorate the franchise by making a remake/sequel that ignores the final half hour of End Zone 2 and picks up at the hour mark because after that it gets bad, or so he hears.

All these meta jokes about horror’s history and current fascination with remakequels (?) are so funny and often genuinely insightful, that it makes the shift The Once and Future Smash takes to more of a narrative in its final third a bit disappointing. The movie never gives up on the mockumentary form, but it shifts its focus from the talking heads to the battle between Mikey and William about who actually played Smash Mouth, and who will get to play him in the reboot.

There are moments of sweetness and absurdity in that story, but it doesn’t quite meet the level of greatness that came before. In fact, the highlight of the narrative portion is when Cacciola says they didn’t get footage of some stuff and relays a story to us over wonderfully silly caricature-ish drawings of what happened might have looked like.

End Zone 2 and The Once and Future Smash aren’t exactly groundbreaking, but they offer an interesting look at the ways that filmmakers can create films within films and develop entire other worlds that just might have existed.