Misogyny I wanna Miss: Las Vegas Bloodbath (1989)

Las Vegas Bloodbath (1989)
Rating: *1/2
Starring: Ari Levin, Rebecca Gandara, Barbara Bell

A husband drives home one day to find his wife in bed with another man, goes crazy alarmingly quick and then proceeds to shoot his unfaithful spouse and her lover dead. He then embarks on a killing spree with a goal to rid off any woman he deems dirty, as well as the occasional random bystander who just happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now, I shouldn't have a problem with this movie as I can tell it's not meant to be taken seriously with it's casts being eye-rollingly horrendous with their equally inept scripting, as well as the fact that the low-budget shows on its editing, lighting and audio quality so much that the cheesy fondue was just begging to be laughed at. However, by having the villain be this misogynistic whiner and have the film focus purely on his bloody escapades in a pacing so dull and full of filler scenes, I'm quite surprised to discover that even I have standards.

Basically, Las Vegas Bloodbath is really nothing else but a collection of murder scenes committed in a span of a single day and this kind of plotting is usually a hit or miss depending if the central idea and/or character is either entertaining or interesting. Sadly (and fortunately for the sake of whatever soul I have left), I can't find myself to be fully drawn to the idea of a killing spree fueled by gender hate committed by a rather unimpressive looking whiny villain in a mullet as entertaining, especially if it meant sitting through a painfully cheesy tone and total lack of real identifiable characters contrasting horribly with the movie's many attempts to be grim and upsetting. I mean, yeah, I guess some folks will find the fact that the male deaths in this movie were quick and hardly given much thought while the female victims here were berated and gorily dispatched without giving them a valid fighting chance as z-grade tomfoolery meant for the shlock fans, but I can't help but feel this could have been handled better.

Now, if gore alone is all we will consider from this movie then I definitely have no quarrels with that. It's the only thing about Las Vegas Bloodbath that really shined the most as all the latex and corn syrup work looks disgustingly phenomenal despite one or two goofy executions. It's just too bad that the story that goes with it is so generically simple even for a slasher flick that it can easily be replaced with better similarly-plotted bodycounters like, I dunno, Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness (1986)?  (Come to think of it, Truth or Dare does have a murderous ex-husband and mainly consists of random killings, too. And that movie came out at last three years before Bloodbath. Does this mean...? (Insert Twilight Zone theme here))

Anywho, definitely skip this one unless you're into very bad splatter flicks or murderous ex-husbands in bad mullets.

Bodycount:
1 male and 1 female shot dead
1 female knifed in the mouth, had a leg torn off with a car
1 male shot on the head
1 male had his head pulped with a shovel
1 pregnant female disemboweled with a knife, fetus cut out
1 female lobotomized with a powerdrill
1 female shot
1 female shot on the head
1 female gets a hatchet buried into her gut
1 male knifed
1 female had her arms torn off
1 male decapitated with a kicked door
1 male shot
Total: 14