Short Shear Terror: Sliced in Cold Blood (1993)

Sliced In Coldblood (1993, Scary Tales Segment)
Rating: **
Starring: Al Darago, Ilene Zelechowski, Robert Zelechowski

Have you heard of the 1993 zero-budget DIY horror anthology film Scary Tales? No? Well, no worries! Me neither. I did saw, however, it's middle segment Sliced in Cold Blood posted at a video streaming site as a standalone short and my gods, it's friggin terrible but, yeah, I couldn't stop myself from watching and enjoying it!

In this short, a husband suspects his wife of cheating and, wouldn't you guess, he is right! Catching her snuggling with another man, hubby goes crazy and kills them both before going out to kill some random people under the same day because finding about infidelity-equals-immediate psychosis, apparently.

With the first of three segments of Scary Tales, Satan's Necklace, had something to do with a cursed necklace that transforms its wearer into a woman-eating demon, and the last, Level 21, was more of a Dungeons and Dragons LARP shot on video, Sliced in Cold Blood is the middle child of this trio and the simplest one in case of plotting, featuring nothing more a random guy's sudden killing spree.

If anything, this short isn't all that original as, by it's release, we already have movies like Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness (1986) and Las Vegas Bloodbath (1989) predating its plot, but I will commend Cold for keeping it quick and easy, packing it with enough insanely crazy zero-budget effects for the more graphic yet cartoonish killings. The whole thing is really just leading to the spree, just quick excuse to get a collection of gory murders out to satisfy the inner gorehounds in all of us, so much so that the movie simply just ends with the shot of our killer hubby looking back at us. It's not getting any deeper than that but it could have been so much worse.

It's little watchable drecks like this why I always give anthology movies a fighting chance to entertain me as you never know if they're keeping something surprisingly fun among its other segments. (Saying that said other segments failed to entertain me) They say that what is great about anthologies is that if you don't like one story, there's always another that's bound to cater to your taste and this is exactly the case I have with the forgettable Scary tales (1993) and Sliced in Cold Blood. Then again, I am only covering Sliced as a short film since that's how I first came upon it and, as that, it's pretty passable to say the least. It's everything you'd expect from a zero-budget horror movie from hilarious acting and hokey effects so I if you swing that way and is more forgiving than I am, then by all means go seek out Scary Tales and see this as well as the other two self-proclaimed "scary tales" for your viewing pleasure.

Bodycount:
1 male shot on the chest with an arrow
1 female had her throat slashed with a machete, hacked to death
1 male gets a machete ran through his head, exits to mouth
1 female killed with a machete
1 male had his head crushed until his eyes popped out
1 male had his head hacked with a machete, ripped apart
1 female stabbed through with a machete
1 male ran through and decapitated with a machete
Total: 8