The boys out at Rare Flix–which is apparently a video store in Jersey–join up with Media Blasters to bring us Late Fee, a movie that asks the question, how can you NOT suspect a video store guy of being an evil cult leader?

And on Halloween, a young couple decides they want to rent some horror movies–yeah, them and about everybody else in town.  So they’re just about to get shut out of the last video store in town, but a little finagling gets them in.  They decide on a couple titles–Damnation and The Pick Up–and prepare to go home.  First, though, they’ll have to fill out an enormous membership document with a special late fee clause…and then sign, in blood.

Needless to say, the late fee is…well…murder.

Perhaps the interesting part is that portions of this appear to be taped in the actual Rare Flix store that you see advertised on the DVD.  That’s actually kind of a clever twist. At least, it’s clever until they start hawking their own titles IN THE FILM ITSELF.  Look, I don’t mind a bit of product placement–it pays the bills in a much more subtle fashion than outright commercials–but when they start reading box quotes at me IN THE FILM, I get a little put out.  Seriously, guys…LOW. BROW.

The sheer amount of cheap contained in this movie is downright nightmarish.  The Pick Up appears to take place out front of the exact same house used in Flesh For the Beast.  Their own store is a set, for crying out loud.

The Pick Up is fairly interesting if just a teensy bit mundane–things like this have happened in movies before, if not exactly like this.

Damnation, meanwhile, is the most reprehensible and thoroughly revolting type of horror there is–the kind that shoots the works on gore and blood, but offers nothing in the way of coherent plot.  What’s there, meanwhile, is full of holes.  But at least there’s a half-decent comeuppance in the meantime.

But aside from that, Late Fee hearkens back to the very words of the “video nasties” era back in the eighties, where no-budget filmmakers shot all their crap in VHS cassettes and tried to sell it to video stores.  Needless to say, it didn’t sell very well.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this exploitative lump of video goo a three out of ten for being a throwback in all the wrong ways.