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Brett Piper is back with one of his earliest monster flicks.

There are few low-budget directors in today’s industry whose work I will follow without question. Brett Piper is one of those chosen few. Able to make fun, well-done, old-school horror films, Piper has never disappointed me in terms of delivering the goods. His stuff may not cost millions of dollars, but the effort and love put into them more than make up for it.

Drainiac was shot around 1996, released around 2000 and finally comes to DVD in 2008. Like many of Piper’s films, it has a long and complex history of trouble with studios. With this version, authorized by Piper, he has gone back and reworked some of the effects and editing. It’s a fairly simple plot, with a group of kids looking to restore an old house. Unfortunately for them, there’s an evil presence residing in the home’s drain pipes, and it comes up occasionally to off them (a particularly nasty death involves a guy who decides to urinate at the wrong moment).

It’s by-the-book plotting, but with Piper, it’s done right, with fair acting, directing and pacing, and it includes his always-fun stop-motion animation (Piper’s one of the few surviving bastions of this lost special effects art).

After all of his troubles with the original release, Piper got the rights back to the film, created a new edit of it and has released it through PopCinema’s Shock-O-Rama label. Piper and Michael Russo, PopCinema’s head guy, are on hand for a revealing running commentary. Outside of some trailers for other DVDs on the label, there really aren’t any extras. A booklet included with the disc goes into the history of the filming and the situation that arose afterwards.

Drainiac is Brett Piper at his best. Never groundbreaking, it remains fun and comfortably familiar to fans. I’m very glad to see him finally getting his due with PopCinema, and hopefully they can rescue some of his other films from obscurity as well. *coughThey Bitecough*

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