‘Beauty Queen Butcher’ to DVD

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By David Burke | Saturday, September 8, 2007 11:49 PM CDT | () comments

The “Beauty Queen Butcher” lives again.

At least on DVD, beginning Tuesday.

“Beauty Queen Butcher,” a movie that was taped in the Quad-Cities during the early 1990s, will be released on video disc at that time.

And Shane Partlow, a writer and co-producer of the movie along with director Jill Zurborg, is happy it’s getting a new audience.

“From what I’ve seen as far as the reviews that have come down the line, people hate it or really love it,” Partlow, a native of Taylor Ridge, Ill., said from his home in Los Angeles.

One of his favorite reviews came from the Web site DVDTalk.com, which called the movie “either the worst piece of pop-culture perfection ever created or the best bad movie ever made.”

The movie was dreamed up by Partlow and Zurborg when he was an actor and she was a director at Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse in Rock Island.

After weeks of “hitting ideas around,” Partlow said they decided on a beauty pageant as the setting for the movie.

“It was something campy with the potential for comedy,” he added.

The movie took a year-and-a-half to write, and it was shot in three weeks at locations throughout the Quad-Cities. The cast includes Kim Furness (then Kim Kurtenbach), who has since returned to the Quad-Cities and become a regular at Circa ‘21, and Tammy Pescatelli, a former Quad-City radio personality-turned-comedian who gained national exposure from the NBC-TV reality series “Last Comic Standing.”

Partlow, who held the rights to the movie, was contacted by distributor Troma Productions in 1999 about releasing “Beauty Queen Butcher” on DVD. It was later passed onto DI Cinemas for its “Camp Motion Pictures” collection.

“Camp” is a perfect way to describe “Butcher,” he said.

“It’s not as much a gore-horror movie, it’s more campy horror,” he said. “Their whole marketing campaign is ‘bad has never been so good.’ ”

The movie will be available in retail stores beginning Tuesday, but Partlow said the most likely source should be through online outlets.

There are no plans to make it available for rental, but that may change.

“The golden goose is if Blockbuster would carry it,” he said of the video rental store chain.

Partlow, now an actor with movie credits that include “Georgia Rule” and “The Princess Diaries 2,” and TV credits numbering “Gilmore Girls” and “Will & Grace,” said he remembers the Quad-City shoot as one of the most enjoyable in his career.

“I’ve never been on another set where one person never got upset with each other and everybody got along,” he recalled. “It was a team effort.”

David Burke can be contacted at (563) 383-2400 or dburke@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.