Bikini Bods In Peril: Pool Party Massacre (2017)

Pool Party Massacre (2017)

Rating: ***

Starring: Cameron Lee Vamp, LeeAnna Vamp, John Molinaro

A young, dumb and spoiled socialite is left to watch the family home (and the prized dog) while her parents fly out of town. She takes this opportunity to go wild and invites her equally bitchy friends over for a pool party, though it soon goes from poolside fun to murdered one-by-one when a random killer starts stalking the party and arming themselves with various tools from the garage workshop.

Shot within a single location and taking cues from the cheesier side of old school 80s slasher flicks, Pool Party Massacre (2017) is simple, nothing new and done through a noticeable low budget of only a few grands, though the intentionally cheesy, raunchy and over-the-top execution meant that it's never to be taken seriously and, if you're not asking much to begin with, that could make this bodycounter a worthwhile watch. 

For a bargain slasher, it has a decent bodycount and an impressive set of gore effects given how little was used to bank this production, plus the film sports a few decent camera work and the story is easy to digest seeing not a lot is going around its plot other than bikini-clad busty gals being, well, bikini-clad busty gals and the face-obscured maniac bumping them, the neighbors and a pizza guy dead with powertools. The only matter of a problem here is that most of its characters are obnoxiously unlikable and dumb, a range of personalities as deep as a flattened cardboard box, making some scenes annoyingly tedious to sit through. Very little do I find the dialogue genuinely hilarious, but very often I do find them hilariously bad and I guess that has to count for something.

There's a decently fun reveal in the near end regarding who the killer is and what their motives are. It is, again, nothing overly new, though the tongue-in-cheeck nature of their banter and a good dash of meta-humor do make it an interesting and waggish twist, even more so when the whole point of it basically boils down to the villain just wanting more attention to themselves.

All in all, Pool Party Massacre (2017) is a flawed but agreeable little slasher, a fair enough throwback to the simpler, paint-by-number campy horror days of naked girls and messy kills! 

Bodycount:

1 female had her throat cut with a tree limb cutter

1 male killed offscreen, later seen stabbed in the eye with a screwdriver

1 female gets a hammer claw to the jaw

1 elderly female hacked on the head with a pickaxe

1 female had her neck chopped with an axe

1 male hacked on the head with an axe

1 male eviscerated with a sabre saw

1 male powerdrilled through the back

1 female slaughtered with a weed whacker

1 female stabbed through with a machete

1 female hacked on the head with an axe

Total: 11