Fortunately, a good ole boy named Steve Sessions recently spent about 40 bucks of his hard-earned salary making a movie called "Cremains"--cremated remains, get it?--and it's . . . well . . . okay . . . I've got to admit this right off the bat, it's one of those dreaded anthology movies, but it ain't too bad and it does satisfy the first rule of drive-in movie-making: Anybody can die at any moment.

The problem with most movies that guys plan on their kitchen table and then shoot on weekends is not the photography, or the sets, or even the script. It's the acting. I don't know why there aren't more professional actors available to make no-budget movies, since almost all of them are unemployed on any given day of the week, but you always end up with a lot of theater students and models and would-be internet babes when you'd be better off with a homely gal who needs a lot of makeup and a Wonder Bra but by God she can act.

This little puppy starts off with a cameo by Count Gore de Vol and his assistant Countess Von Stauffenberger, a pair that I haven't seen in years, ever since they stopped hosting the late night horror movies on WDCA-TV in Washington, Dee Cee, along about 1987. Count Gore is a sleazy lecherous vampire who makes painful puns, and the Countess has two enormous talents. Anyhow, Count Gore reviews the movie you're about to see, and then the very first screen image is of a nekkid whimpering woman, trussed up like a hog, writhing around on the floor with a black hood over her head. I don't know about you, but I was hooked.

Pretty soon we get to the framing story, which involves a scuzzball funeral director who's being interrogated by two off- camera otherworldly investigators, one of whom is scream queen Debbie Rochon. (She's never seen on camera, though, which is an absolute crime.) It turns out that the town mortician has been trying to save money by packing the crematorium with more than one body at a time, and that's stirred up a little voodoo anger from a witchy woman in Nawluns. The investigators wanna know about every single horrible violent death that the undertaker has ever been involved with--and come to think of it, so do I. So he starts to spill his guts and . . . fade to . . .

A woman from up north comes down to the Gulf Coast to visit her sick mother, but Daddy is acting weird and he's stowed his wife in a hospital an hour away because he refuses to take her to the town of Wyndham, where weird stuff happens during every blue moon. Of course, the bimbo is diddling around with her tape player, gets lost on the highway, and drives into Wyndham, where she ends up not enjoying the local snake-around-the-neck ritual very much.

Next thing, the undertaker tells us about a troubled teen who accepts a ride from a stranger and thinks it's a little weird when the stranger knows his name, a little weirder when the stranger plunges a syringe into his arm, and weirder still when the stranger ties him to a chair and tells him you oughta be more careful who you talk to when you call the Suicide Help Line.

My favorite segment is about an erotic lesbian ghost who likes to imitate the plots of cut-rate vampire novels, doing some fang work on the gorgeous Kimberly Lynn Cole. Then there's the Nawluns voodoo woman who takes one of the "mixed" cremation urns to a witch house, sets it in the middle of a pentagram, and conjures a burly charcoal-face zombie in a safari hat, who proceeds to kill the rest of the cast until he comes face to face with the only thing that can kill him.

A pistol.

The good news is that Steve Sessions knows how to use a camera, and even though he doesn't twist these plots much, he does deliver on the suspense and gore effects. Pretty dang decent.

Twelve dead bodies. One undead body. Ten breasts. One leather-bondage monster. One zombie. Funeral-urn voodoo. Multiple sword-piercing. Knife to the eye. Snake strangulation. Syringe to the arm. Checkered-shirt redneck posse. Neck-chewing. Plastic- baggie suffocation. Crucifix-plunging-into-a-toilet imagery. Zombie-splattering. Head rolls. Head smushed by tire. Gratuitous lava-lamp montage. Body-bag Fu. Bible Fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Wanda Plimmer, as the woman who just had to take her own car; David Christopher Williams, as the creepola who hangs around parks and says "Life is just a series of irreclaimable moments"; Jeff Dylan Graham as the hitchhiker who ends up saying "I don't wanna die anymore"; Dawn Duvurger, as the hot-to-trot ghost vampire; Kimberly Lynn Cole, as the woman who dreams about being eaten by a ghost, and then gets eaten by a ghost, for saying "What's happening to me?"; R.W. Smith as the pipe-smoking supernatural novelist who explains a "hypnogogic hallucination"; Lilith Stabs as the punky Elvira-haired beauty who practices southern Louisiana voodoo and says "I know what you're going through, but let me take care of it"; Rebecca Allen as the Final Girl; and writer/director Steve Sessions, for doing it the drive-in way.

Three stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

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