stand-in for Billy during the sequences in which the character wears a Halloween mask. The special effects were provided by Les Lorrain, visual effects by John A. Bezich; cinematographer Smith's son, Chris, also helped contribute special effects. Post-production According to Wishman, several reels of the film were destroyed while in the possession of Movielab, a photo processing studio Wishman had hired to process the film. By some accounts, the reels were destroyed in a fire, while Wishman claimed that a "disgruntled employee" destroyed them when the company went bankrupt. Wishman estimated that the incident left her with "less than half-a negative" of film. "I had about sixty percent of the original film, and the rest were outtakes," she recalled. "It was very difficult to concoct another story that made any sense." As a result, Wishman was forced to piece the film together with outtakes and footage from other projects. She spent eight months entirely rewriting the screenplay, followed by four years of editing the film into a releasable final product. Wishman cut the film together herself, having recently learned the basic elements of film editing. Release Distribution The film was advertised for sale in Variety in 1983. Though some contemporary scholars have alleged the film was not released, it was given a release in the United States directly to video on June 14, 1989 by MPI Media Group. The following year, the VHS was suspended from production along with several other MPI-owned titles, such as Faces of Death, Horror Hospital, and Twitch of the Death Nerve, due to rights issues. Elite Entertainment released a special edition DVD of the film in 2001, which featured an audio commentary with Wishman and cinematographer C. Davis Smith. On December 17, 2019, Frolic Pictures released the film on DVD as a double feature with Effects (1980). On January 1, 2011, the Blue Sunshine film center in Montreal screened a digitally-restored print of the film. On June 4, 2016, the film was screened at the Film Forum in New York City as part of the "Genre is Woman" film festival, and featured an introduction by Wishman biographer Michael Bowen. Critical response Buzz McClain of AllMovie called the film "insultingly bad, infuriatingly terrible, and, worse, it's somehow managed to achieve cult status over the years." Author Brian Albright noted that the film is an "incomprehensible, yet compelling, post-modern mish-mash of gore and nudity." Michael Weldon in