Slithering & Slaughtering: Kiss of The Serpent (1988)

Kiss of The Serpent (1988) (AKA 'Snake Island')

Rating: **1/2

Starring: Chris Moore, Murray McDougall, Jeff Greenman

The scene starts at 1979, with a father attending a snake cult ceremony and begging its members to release his son from a curse. This fellow is herpetologist Dr Waylan, who runs a local Serpentarium and is guilty of stealing the cult's sacred white snake for an experiment involving venom, creating some sort of miracle cure. The cult, however, claims that it is too late to release his boy, Michael, from their snake god's wrath even if he returns the serpent to them, so Waylan has another member of this cult, a Native American friend, promising to take care of his son should anything happen to him.

And, wouldn't you know it, one 4th of July night, a gaggle of loud and horny teenagers choose to celebrate the holiday by taunting Michael with fireworks, lighting them outside the Serpentarium where the boy's entire family resides. This gravely escalates into an accidental arson, killing Dr. Waylan, his wife and his daughter. Michael, strangely, is nowhere to be found...

Moving ahead eight years later, the same teenagers are now in their twenties and are, unsurprisingly, just as loud. And horny. They're celebrating 4th of July by taking a yacht out to open waters, unbeknownst to them that someone has sabotaged the ride, making sure it crashes near a small, isolated isle known as 'Snake Island' which is populated mostly by, what else, snakes. Upon arriving there, our sultry subjects opt to make the best of their predicament, as being marooned does little to sway them off sex and booze, unaware that whoever plotted their unconventional stay has set their fangs on killing them off one by one to appease a serpent god and finally rid them of a curse. 

As a slasher fan, nothing catches my interest faster than the word 'obscure' and, time to time, I do end up enjoying the obscurities I get to see. Yes, there were some duds (looking at you The Intruder (1975) and Shaman (1988)), but hunting down rare slashers did lead me to seeing some rough hidden gems like Bloodstream (1985), Arboy Day (1990), The Stoneman (2002) and even the original cut of A Night of Dismember (1983)! 

That said, Kiss of The Serpent (1988) (AKA 'Snake Island') may as well join my collection cheesy guilty finds; it's nowhere near being a good movie with its distractingly choppy editing and muffled audio mixing. Not to mention the inconstant acting chops and line delivery from our casts, working on a script that walks a fine line between sleazy and unintentional satire. But what it lacks in quality production, the movie makes up for it with its creativity and ambition to be a little more than your average hack 'n slasher, even if said execution can be laughable for how on-the-nose and hammy it can be.

Given how many cult-themes slashers are out there, Children of the Corn (1984) and Blood Cult (1985) just to set examples, the supernatural angle of Kiss of The Serpent (1988) would have been nothing too special, if it wasn't for the killer being dedicatedly on brand with their cult's snake themes when it comes to their murders. Stabbing and slashing a victim? They'll do it with what looks like a hand-puppet snake head with twin metal blades for fangs! Need to shoot someone dead? Our murderer happens to have arrows tipped with open-mouthed, decapitated snake heads that they can shoot with a crossbow! And the sheer ridiculousness doesn't stop there as, while the majority of the plot follows your typical revenge-against-the-guilty jig, the last act of the movie shifts into creature feature territory as our slasher, finally succumbing to the curse, slowly transforms into a giant snake to attack one last victim. It's unhinged, yes, and I wouldn't have it any other way, though I do wish the kills could have been gorier, if not bloodier at least.

From what I can gather, Kiss of The Serpent (1988) never had a North American release and, instead, went straight to VHS internationally, contributing greatly to its rare status which is either a shame or a relief depending on how well you can swallow bad slashers. Still, I enjoyed its craziness enough to give it a pass, and if you don't demand much from your low-grade slashers and love a good enough rarity, then this is a title worth looking into.

Bodycount:

1 male seen killed in a fire

1 female and 1 girl mentioned killed in a fire

1 female garroted with a thin wire

1 male had his throat stabbed with a bladed snake glove

1 female stabbed to death with a bladed snake glove

1 female pulled underwater, decapitated

1 male repeatedly shot with a snake-headed arrows

1 female buried up to her neck, head set on fire

1 male bitten to death by snakes

1 male locked inside a room with a python, later seen dead with a throat wound

1 female slashed across the face with a bladed snake glove

1 male had his head blown off with a shotgun

Total: 13

With A Cuddle And A Kiss: Basement Jack (2009)

Basement Jack (2009)

Rating: ***

Starring: Eric Peter-Kaiser, Sam Skoryna, Michele Morrow

A serial killer with a severe case of mommy issues, Jack Riley (Eric Peter-Kaiser), AKA 'Basement Jack' for his naughty little habit of hanging around in the basements of houses before slaughtering the families who own them, gets recently released after serving an eleven-year sentence and goes back to doing what he does best, leaving a nice trail of murdered households. All the while, Karen (Michele Morrow), the only survivor of Jack's last family hack 'n slash before he got locked up, is out tailing the madman in hopes of putting an end to his killing spree, doing her damnedest to warn everyone of the impending evil on two legs. (Yes, Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode rolled into one!)

The two end up prowling each other in a macabre cat-and-mouse game at the town of Downer's Grove, where Karen teams up with rookie cop Chris (Sam Skoryna) to try disentangling Jack's next move and targets, all the while Jack does his usual modus operandi of murdering families and creepily posing their corpses. As Chris and Karen get continuously chewed out for interfering with proper police work, thus ignoring their input on the investigation, we're also dealt with peppered flashbacks and hallucinations detailing what exactly caused Jack Riley to get this much loose screws in his head; long story simple, his mama (Lynn Lowry) loves to psychotically torture little boy Jack with 9-volt batteries and leaving him out chained to a pole during thunderstorms, so big boy Jack is warped in the head with a bloodlust for happy families. Particularly those with mums resembling his own.

Basement Jack (2009), in all honesty, didn’t really do anything new for the subgenre and it more or less suffers from common direct-to-video slasher pitfalls of overused CG effects, mediocre acting and oozing levels of fondue. It does, fortunately, approach its story with an interesting angle of making the killer a tad more fleshed out than your average masked psycho, generously focusing on his psychosis and the patterns to his madness which result to Jack being portrayed closer to how serial killers operate. There are times the movie almost feels like a character study for how much and often these little snippets of the killer's abused childhood get shown, only to share its limelight with the police work being done to capture our elusive serial slayer which does reduce a lot of the kills into offscreen massacres, the victims merely existing to be slain.

The last act of Basement Jack (2009) is where the absolute craziness kicks in, with Jack going further into slasher villain mode, donning himself a broken porcelain doll's mouth as a mask piece and wielding something best described as a wearable sword. By that point, we get a cop station massacre inspired by The Terminator (1984), littered with hilariously awful CG and some impossible yet outrageously fun kills, before going down on a brawl between Karen and Jack atop a hotel that's punctuated with a shot calling back to Halloween (1978) and an ending that reminds me of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). It's the kind of silliness that only a B-grade slasher can pull off and I love the fact that the film embraces its own shlock the further it goes down, even if some of it didn't exactly work. 

Not quite high art, but doable as a fun little timewaster that's a little more better than most video bin horror flicks!  

Bodycount:

1 female found beheaded

1 male found dying from his wounds

1 male repeatedly stabbed through with a knife

1 male found with half of his face missing

1 baby implied murdered

1 boy seen murdered

1 female found slaughtered

1 male stabbed in the gut with a machete

1 female found murdered

1 male gets a machete to the face

1 male and 1 female seen slaughtered with a machete

1 male gets stabbed though the gut with a machete, skewered unto a fuse box and electrocuted

1 male stabbed through the head with a machete

1 female stabbed through the gut with a machete

1 female seen slaughtered (flashback)

2 males double-scalped with a wearable sword

1 male killed with a wearable sword

1 male had an arm lopped off with a wearable sword, killed

1 male skewered through the gut with a wearable sword

1 female gutted with a wearable sword

1 female seen murdered

1 male seen murdered

Total: 24 

Mukhayam Alshaati Aldamawii: Camp (2008)

Camp (Egypt, 2008) (AKA "Kamb")

Rating: ***

Starring: Yasmen Abaza, Amr Abdelaziz, Amr Abdullatif

It's not very often we see a horror film straight out of Egypt due to the country's strict censorship, so the fact that we even got this teen slasher from them is no short of a miracle and a real ham of a treat for us bodycount fans. 

The scene starts at a luxurious birthday party of one Wael, who we see having a bit of a talk with his on-again-off-again fiancé Shirin before she has to leave on the account of a family emergency. Right about that time, the rather beautiful Shaky arrives with her date Gamal to join the festivities and then the story jumps ahead a year later. And Shaky is now dead.

After visiting her grave, Wael, Shirin, Gamel and the rest of their gang (plus Shirin's kid sister for some reason) drive to the titular camp, which is less of a camp and more of a nearly-barren hotel manned by its owner and his promiscuous wife, a trolley guy with a case of sticky fingers and a mute cleaning lady who eyes the guests suspiciously. The group's there to celebrate their graduation by having a great time at the beach, dining fine and dancing around a bonfire to some spicy salsa music. Trouble comes bickering when talk of romance, cheating and doing the nasty out of wedlock gets brought up within the group, but that would soon escalate to more dire problems like random fires down hallways, creepy shadows looming across windows and their cars' batteries going dead. 

Dire turns deadly when a killer resembling a pale ghoul shows up to terrorize the doomed partyers, stabbing and hacking people to death, stirring up a whole mess of accusations and suspicions as the victims try to uncover who's hunting them all down...

Focused more on building suspense and intrigue rather than a high kill count or a messy spot of gore, Camp (2008) works its way through the interpersonal problems and relations of its casts for a good bulk of the plot, building enough drama and red herrings for the eventual killing spree to make it as twisty in its turns as possible. It's an approach that would've functioned better if it wasn't for the bits of comedic outings that clash with the movie's more serious moments, not to mention the sudden amount of overacting and breakneck editing around the second half which knocks off any earnest sense of chill or fright from the murders. Still, the film is shot with a modest quality and there's an undeniable fun factor to be found so long as you don't mind a dose of cheese and what's practically a run-fest of victims fleeing all over the hotel while the killer either legs after them or show off their parkour skills. It doesn't always fly well, nor does it make sense, but it's gorgeous to look at and it surely does help not to overthink how quickly our killer can change in and out of their cosplay-level disguise, among many other things.

The kills aren't too graphic and are mostly implied offscreen to appease Egypt's censors, not quite that big of a problem personally since the scenes around the attacks work well enough entertainment-wise. The finale is, shall we say, up for the audience's interpretation: it would have been your standard unmasking and reveal with a flashback to compliment the twist, only made just that complicated and confusing by adding one little detail that simply doesn't make any lick of sense at all. The film just threw it at us at the near end and left it at that, but the very gist of the whole fiasco's basically one big revenge plot and so long as that's clear at least, I can roll with it.

Camp (2008) undoubtedly could have been better, but for what it is able to accomplish, I can appreciate. It has the look and feel of an 80s slasher done right, one that isn't too coy on hamming it a bit with its thrills and spills. A neat little bodycounter flick from a different culture!

Bodycount:

1 male hacked on the neck with a curved knife

1 female found dead from a cut throat

1 female hacked on the head with a curved knife

1 male stabbed in the back with a curved knife

1 female stabbed in the back with a curved knife

1 male found stabbed in the back with a curved knife

1 female killed offscreen, later found stabbed in the chest with a curved knife

1 male found stabbed on the back with a curved knife

Total: 9

#RUSHSLOTH: Slotherhouse (2023)

Slotherhouse (2023)

Rating: ***

Starring: Lisa Ambalavanar, Sydney Craven, Andrew Horton

We have slasher films featuring grizzly bears (i.e. Grizzly Park (2008)), wolves (i.e. Wolfen (1981)) and, heck, even sharks (i.e. Shark Night (2013)). Now, we welcome the newest addition to the killer animal sub-genre, one that is prowled by a deadly, dangerous, despicable, dastardly denizen of the Nicaraguan Jungle: a baby sloth.

Obsessed with becoming the next Sigma Lambda Theta sorority president, Emily (Lisa Ambalavanar) would soon find herself talking to a friendly fella at a mall who claims to be selling a variety of pets, including exotic ones, suggesting that she should get herself a unique furry friend to boost her image and impress her sorority sisters. Unbeknownst to her, the guy is actually an animal trafficker, one who recently poached a baby sloth straight out of her home and would have the worst of luck when said sloth turns out to be psychotic. Very psychotic. Murderous, even. And yet, when Emily arrives to pick up the sloth, blissfully unaware of the freshly mutilated poacher, the two appear to have formed a bond and the bouncy sorority senior gets a big shot of popularity when she suggests making her new sloth, Alpha, the mascot of their house.

Thus the race to campus house presidency begins, with Emily butting heads against resident mean girl Brianna (Sydney Craven) and Alpha surprisingly adapting well to her new home, mastering mobile phones and laptops, hanging out with friends and even helping out Emily with her goal of winning the election. Through murders. Lots of murders. So much so that by the end of it all, the girls of Sigma Lambda Theta will have no choice but to fight back and survive Alpha's Slotherhouse~!

If you're gonna sit and watch Slotherhouse (2023) expecting deeply complex characters, underlying messages of the evils of animal poaching and heart-stopping intensity in its murders, I say you're off your rockers, luv! It's a campus slasher with a baby sloth for a killer, it's as silly as it sounds and when approached with a leap of faith and a popcorn B-flick mindset, it's surprisingly good! 

The premise is simply fun for its honest ridiculousness, mixing the dumb hilarity of a killer sloth situation with the known slasher trope of sorority girls-in-peril well enough to make the absurd story work as a comical twist on your usual teen bodycounter and animals-gone-bad carnage. Its writing has a tongue firmly pressed in a cheek and the characters are an okay bunch despite lingering near the typical stereotypes of goody girls and queen bitches, with a notable few managing to deliver some genuine quirk and personality within the ensemble, courtesy of a quippy script and pretty alright acting for a B-grade production. The pacing does hobble a bit whenever the story decides to focus on the sorority girl drama and college life capers, though this is balanced and remedied with the unapologetically gimmicky yet fun shlock that is Alpha's misadventures of mischief, murder and mayhem!

For sure, the diminutive sloth is undoubtedly the highlight of Slotherhouse (2023) as not only does the critter act less like an actual animal and more of an anthropomorphized fuzzy menace capable of doing a real number on the kill count, giving her a tad more character and a further reason for this whole thing to be amusingly ludicrous, but she also earns the film a score of points for taking the time to bring the slasher sloth to life via practical puppet effects. The prop looks stuffy, yes, but it adds an old school flavor to its already nonsensical charm and dish out a lot of outrageous visuals to boot, especially during the times Alpha unleashes her inner psycho at just about anyone she comes across in the Sigma Lambda Theta house. A lot of cheekiness is to be expected around these killing sprees in turn, though I do wish we got a little bit more onscreen slaughter to go along with it as a good run of the violence was done mostly off-screen.

Completely looney in the best and most charming ways, Slotherhouse (2023) is a popcorn flick with the enthusiasm of being so bad, it's good. Bewildering yet entertaining under the right mood, this movie can be a real blast of a watch!

Bodycount:

1 male mauled, clawed to death

1 female had her throat clawed out

1 female stuffed inside a sleeping bag, pushed off a bridge

1 female killed offscreen

1 female seen slaughtered

1 female beaten with a hair straightener

1 female killed, later seen with a Glasgow smile

1 female attacked, killed offscreen

1 female killed offscreen, later seen with a clawed neck

1 female killed with a mesh net ball

7 females electrocuted in a shower room with a live wire

1 female mauled to death

1 female dragged away, killed

1 female got clawed through the gut

Total: 20

I Dream A Dream of A Better Dream: Heebie Jeebies (2005)

Heebie Jeebies (2005) (AKA "The Oak Hill Picture Show")

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Alex Balestrieri, Deb Billing, Amy Booth

Whoa, wait, wait, wait, let me get the story straight here: a girl with clairvoyant dreams gets a nightmare of her old high school friends getting killed off, so she fakes an invitation for a reunion and have them meet up at an abandoned, dilapidated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in order to protect them. At a farmhouse. A dilapidated and abandoned farmhouse. In the middle of nowhere.

...This chick hadn't seen enough horror films to know that is the stupidest place to try and protect a bunch of people from a rampaging loon with a machete, had she?

Well, to no one's surprise, as day goes to night, our killer starts skulking around the farmhouse to prowl on them and hacking away their heads. (Mostly offscreen, but have a nice way of revealing the headless states of the victims, plus there's a fair dash of gore to be seen) There's supposed to be a big reveal as to who this mysterious slasher is but it's hard to miss the fact that we have that one shmuck missing during an entire slasher attack, even more so when you only have five characters to work with, so it's not hard to figure out who's headhunting that night.

Now, it would have been a relatively short straight-to-video movie if Heebie Jeebies (2005) was just a straight-up slasher, so it also took the liberty of treating us with intermittent segments focused on our lead girl's nightmares, making this film an oddball anthology pic with a prank involving a moron with a prop scissor stuck on his head gone horrible wrong, gargoyle-like critters that only comes to life when its pitch-black dark (quite convenient for a low-budget shlock like this, am I right?) and a hit-and-run accident that gets worse when a good Samaritan suddenly gets involved. None of these are any better to watch than the main plot as they're all tedious, horribly shot, barely coherent audio-wise and crappily acted. Interestingly, only two of these segments tie in to the slasher backdrop, leaving the remaining one quite out of place, only adding more strangeness to an already bizarre bodycounter.

The last act fortunately delivers well on the stalk-and-stab action, but with very little salvageable at that point, it barely matters. I'm sure it looked good on paper, a slasher film that sidelines as an anthology, but with a lack of structuring, solid direction and proper ingenuity to work along its minuscule budget, Heebie Jeebies (2005) is simply a frustrating mess of a movie. Hard to watch with its distractingly low quality. Hard to sit through with its clumsy writing. Unless you're a curious horror fanatic or a die-hard slasher completist like moi, I say don't bother with it. You can do better with that video rental money...

Bodycount:

1 male decapitated with a garden shear offscreen, head later seen

1 female decapitated with a machete

2 males slaughtered offcamera, mangled bodies seen

1 male killed, scream heard

1 male decapitated

1 female bashed with a shovel, fed into a woodchipper

1 female head found

1 male gets a machete dropped into his face

1 female decapitated with a machete

1 female hit by a car

Total: 11

Kangaroos Loose In The Top Paddock: Safety In Numbers (2006)

Safety In Numbers (Australia, 2006)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Jessica Napier, Ben Tari, Henry Nixon

In this rare Aussie export, six former reality TV stars find themselves going to an island for what may have been a reunion show, only to find the place seemingly deserted and trashed. Unknown to these chuckleheads, a jealous ex-contestant who got booted from the show have been waiting for them to get there, biding their time for the perfect opportunity to murder the bunch, or at least have enough deadly traps set around the island for these wankers to walk into.  

Now, see, Safety In Numbers (2006) could have been a good enough slasher film with that premise alone. Not a great slasher per se, but at least entertaining enough to earn an occasional watch should one be looking for a casual island-set survival bodycounter to pass the time with. Sadly, the film simply fails to execute any form of genuine interest from this simple plot, not with its characters being as bland as stale bread and twice as dumb despite the actors themselves being competent in their roles, or the kills, though bloody, mostly done either offscreen or edited in a way that we only see the weapon or trap approaching before it smash-cuts to a scream. Camera work is as dull as the near-barren island setting, too, and there's not much drama, atmosphere or tension to speak of here since, again, the victims are too dim and cliched to feel invested in. 

The killer doesn't show up in the flesh until the third act were it suddenly goes full cat-and-mouse mode and, once more, it could have been a great deal of fun with the perp chasing down the obligatory final girl while more or less surviving at most four attempts on their lives, but this is soon tarnished by a clumsy twist reveal and finale where it hints the possibility of another loonie offing people, but never bothering to do anything of actual substance with it so we're not even sure if this is what they're suggesting! 

Bestrewed with a poor script, lackluster characters, tame kills and an infuriating ending, Safety In Numbers (2006) is a rarity that deserves its obscurity. An ocker mess of an uninteresting slasher, we'd be better off watching or even doing almost anything else...

Bodycount:

1 male bludgeoned on the head

1 male trips a spiked spring trap, impaled

1 female killed offscreen, later seen impaled in the mouth with a spear

1 female hit by a hurled log trap, killed

1 male found murdered in a pit

1 male found murdered in a pit

1 female shot with a harpoon

1 male missing, presumably killed

1 female killed offscreen, dismembered arm seen

Total: 9

Rave a Cave to The Grave: Bone Cave (2011)

Bone Cave (2011)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Justin Rose, Jeremy Jusek, Andrew Hartl

...Yeah, I'm not even gonna beat around the bush, this is just terrible.

Two college slackers named Mike and... T Rad... want to earn some good cash so they throw the mother of all raves inside a secluded cave for novelty's sake. Lights were set. Tunes were played. Stolen drugs were passed around as party favors. Things were going great - until it isn't. The cave just happens to be the lair of some face-painted creep who goes by Bones Magee and, for the lack of a better term, he has aspirations to be the next wise-cracking slasher villain. Like, he utters terrible one-liners before and/or after hacking someone to death with his assortment of bone-related weapons. So, yeah, Bones Magee soon crashes the party, forcing Mike, T Rad, some hot goth-punk chick named Annora and the few remaining partygoers to try and survive the Bone Cave.

Honestly, I wanted to like Bone Cave (2011). It has cheese factor, a stupidly entertaining villain and some of the kills were gruesome enough, but its pacing is atrocious, taking a very long while with us just watching two boring bozos trying to plan a rave before anything interesting happens, all in the meantime enduring acting chops that range from stiff to dull just to pour salt on the wound. The murder spree wouldn't takes place after almost an hour of lackluster plot building, and its insultingly done and over with no soon after, leaving the last fifteen minutes or so focused solely on Bones Magee hammily monologuing this movie's excuse of a twist, while our survivors equally cheese it out with responding banter. 

Throw in a couple of dated computer graphic effects here and there, plus an entire massacre that happened offscreen, implied only through blood splashes on prop rocks, looped audio of actors screaming and annoying heavy rock playing in the background, and you have one of the cheapest slashers to come out of celluloid. Seriously, Bone Cave (2011) earned its spot on the crusty bottom barrel of horrid horror lameness for not only how crappy the overall quality of it is, but also for how braindead boring it is. 

Avoid it.  

Bodycount:

1 male skewered with a pike

1 female impaled through the forehead with a pike

1 female had her face melted with acid

1 male bashed on the head with a skull-decorated pickaxe

1 male hacked on the side with a bone hatchet

1 female had her throat crushed

1 female hacked on the head with a bone hatchet

2 females slashed with a bone hatchet

A number of victims massacred with a skull-decorated pickaxe

1 victim seen crushed in a grenade-triggered cave-in

1 male had his head crushed with a stereo set, electrocuted

1 female hacked on the back with a bone hatchet

1 male hacked on the head with a skull-decorated pickaxe

1 male falls to his death

1 male dies from a bone hatchet hacked unto his back

Total: 15+

The Island of No Return: Slaughter Island (2010)

Slaughter Island (Jutou) (Japan, 2010)

Rating: ***

Starring: Tôru Amemiya, Noriko Ikemi, Serina Ogawa

In this low-budget, direct-to-video Japanese teen-kill offering, we get to see that minimalism, when done right, can lead to some worthy results.

Slaughter Island (2010) follows the usual story of lively teens enjoying themselves vacationing on a deserted island, doing nothing but fun and games of swimming around, playing in the beach and indulging on evening barbecues with spooky campfire tales to share. One of these tales is of a mysterious island where, legend has it, anybody who goes in never comes out. Word has it that the island they're at is the very one with this spooky reputation, though they all chalk it up to just a funny scare.

That is until the following morning comes; when two of the teens ventured into the woods, one came back splattered in blood and in complete hysterics, while the other is later found torn in half. Unsure of what to make of this, the rest of the gang decided to end the trip and go back to the mainland to get help, only to find the boat they used to get there is now missing and learn that none of them even bothered telling anyone where they were going, effectively stranding them in the island with something that's out to end them all...

Director Hisaaki Nagaota basically does everything you would expect from a teen-kill flick in Slaughter Island (2010), giving us a good dose of skin, scares and slaughtered bodies in a rather simplistic plot, all of which with little to no sets, limited special effects, a distinguishably small cast and a runtime of only an hour and five minutes. The minimalist production and direction may as well be this film's double-edge as those expecting strong exploitative thrills and novelties may find this movie rather lacking and cheap, though if one's looking for something thriving within the realms of nightmare logic and brooding atmosphere, then this movie fairly delivers.

Without giving away much, whatever it is that's killing the doomed teenagers works well enough to be this movie's more note-worthy element as its silent and stoic presence, paired with the fact that there's no actual reason as to why it does what it does nor are there any explanation given as to why or how it exists, builds a strong sense of eeriness and unnerving dread to the killings, even more so when it is made clear that there's hardly anything that can be done to stop it. This is where Slaughter Island (2010)'s limited resources get put to good use as they stylized the simple offscreen murders with blood splashes and gory after death effects which fit very nicely with the ambiguous nature of the murders, though occasionally the film do treat us with a couple of fair onscreen killings that are still done under a restrictive budget but quite effective nonetheless.

Albeit starting off like your typical B-flick gaggle of enthusiastic youths, the characters are a tolerable bunch with the teen casts playing them doing a genuinely okay job with their performances, giving off a candid feel that befits the movie's mood. The only qualm I can get from this is that none of the characters do stand out, even once the slaughtering starts and the group's stance switches from carefree and excited to serious and focused. Yes, a few did show a hint of development and even some depth, but most of it got flushed down in favor of using them as red herrings or the casual meat for murder.

Slaughter Island (2010) may not be the best example of a supernatural slasher with its overly unostentatious story and obviously minuscule funding, but to credit when credit is due, it is at least an original and entertaining effort, one that proves that sometimes you don't need extreme visuals or a big budget to make something worth watching. Give it a try!

Bodycount:

1 female slaughtered, blood splash seen

1 male torn in half

1 female slaughtered, gut seen split open

1 male killed offscreen, later found with his guts strewn out

1 male gets a tree branch shoved down his mouth

1 female killed offscreen, later found impaled on a tree branch

1 female killed, method unknown

1 male found slaughtered

1 female slaughtered, blood splash seen

1 male stabbed in the gut with a tree branch, arm torn off

1 female killed offscreen

Total: 11

A Feast Fit For A God: Yellow Dragon's Village (2021)

Yellow Dragon's Village (Japan, 2021)

Rating: ***

Starring: Yuni Akino, Itsuki Fujii, Wataru Ichinose

You all know this dance: After a night of being drunk and merry, a group of eight teens plan to go on a camping trip the following day, only for their travel to be cut a little short when their car blew a tire. Fortunately, there's a nearby village they can leg to and get help, although the grounds suspiciously appear to be mostly devoid of youth and the elders living there are acting a tad strange upon their arrival. 

Any worries from all of these, however, are temporarily put at ease when the village people have the kids stay at a lodge for dinner and rest. And then comes the day after; one of the teens is missing and another gets knifed in the back during breakfast. People in masks and shrine uniforms then arrive to crash the stay and it's soon revealed that the villagers have chosen their young visitors as sacrifices to a deity centered on cannibalism. Not wanting to be the main course as anybody would, a brief struggle have our hapless group escaping into the woods, where the insane villagers proceed to hunt them down one by one. You all know this dance...

Or do you?

Clocking only for about an hour and nine minutes, Yellow Dragon's Village (2021) may look like your classic backwoods slasher set-up, but, without spoiling a lot, there's more to the story than just dumb teens getting hunted down by a cult of cannibals; For its worth, the film's horror elements are steady and effective, creepily building on growing uncertainties and dread for its scares before eventually leading to murderous cannibalism and distressing cult behaviors as exploitative set-pieces. It is around the height of the plot's madness when the film throws a curveball at us, a twist that may put off those expecting the usual blood and gut stab-a-thon all the way, but those who are willing to keep an open mind and have a good sense of cinematic cheese, expect the second half to be an entirely different movie. One that's full of well-choreographed fights, a little bit of explosions and a lot of corny dialogue! 

From that point on, Yellow Dragon's Village (2021) becomes a revenge-driven action thriller as everyone who took part on the village's macabre traditions start paying dearly for their atrocities when their own past comes back to get even. The intense dread of horror is completely gone and the tone shifts to silly and fun, high flying kicks and swordfights clashing as heroes and villains duke it out while throwing hilariously smug banters at one another. It plays on this theme of criticizing blind devotions towards tradition and the enforcement of it towards the youth, it's an idea brought upon by our protagonists often as they lay waste on their enemies, though the execution of it leans more on the cheeky side thus not overly serious and still entertaining. 

The production's small budget limit can be sensed throughout the movie, particularly the minimal gore effects and use of CG for the story's more dynamic visuals, but that did little to nothing on making Yellow Dragon's Village (2021) less enjoyable as a fun B-grade horror-comedy action thriller mash-up. If you have the chance to catch this and you happen to be in the mood for a hammy romp, I say give it a try!

Bodycount:

1 male knifed on the back

1 female shot on the head with a shotgun

1 female shot on the head with a hunting rifle

1 male shot on the head with a shotgun

1 male killed offscreen
1 male shot with a shotgun
1 male shot with a shotgun
1 female had her neck snapped
1 victim shot with a shotgun
4 victims knocked out, implied killed later

6 victims seen killed, bodies piled up

8 victims seen strewn all over

7 victims knocked out, implied killed later

1 victims knocked out with a kick, implied killed later

2 victims seen killed

7 victims mentioned killed

1 victim had their neck broken

1 male shot with a shotgun

1 female shot with a shotgun

1 male blown apart with a grenade

Total: 48

Fool's Ball: The Third Saturday of October Parts I and V Review

The Third Saturday of October is the name given to an annual college football rivalry between University of Alabama's Crimson Tide and University of Tennessee's Volunteers, based on the fact that the games are traditionally played at such date mostly throughout the years. And now, thanks to writer, editor and director Jay Burleson, we can also associate this with 2022 indie slashers The Third Saturday of October and its sequel The Third Saturday of October V, which can be best described as a pair of callbacks to the horror subgenre's tropes and franchising, done away with varying degrees of "fun" where one is slightly better than the other. 

But are they fun enough to reach the same cheesy hilarity yet horrific gruesomeness of other throwback slashers such as, let's say, Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015)? Well, let's find out and start this mess with...

~~~

The Third Saturday of October (2022)

Rating: ***

Starring: Darius Willis, K.J. Baker and Allison Shrum

Arguably the better of the pair, The Third Saturday of October (2022) sets itself in the late 70s and begins with the execution of a serial killer known as Jack Harding (Antonio Woodruff), whose death by electric chair is attended by the parents of some of the victims he claimed, Ricky Dean Logan (Darius Willis) and Vicki Newton (K.J. Baker), as well as an overly enthusiastic crowd gathered outside, eagerly waiting to see the maniac get fried and be driven out in a hearse. Shockingly (pun intended), Jack survives this attempt to end him and promptly revives in a graveyard where he slaughters those burying him. Ricky and Vicki, driving to the burial suspecting that Harding's brand of evil isn't gonna go down that easy, discovers the fresh massacre and makes the decision to go after Harding when the prison that done the execution refused to help.

Now returning to his old stomping ground town of Hackleburg, Alabama in a stolen hearse, Jack sets his murderous impulses on a group of out-of-towners visiting a friend's geriatric uncle to watch the annual college football game between Alabama and Tennessee. To be tied in this supposed fun night of football tradition is local waitress Heather Hill (Allison Shrum), who accepted the group's invitation to the watch party and more or less be the virtuous Final Girl in this horror show as she mostly keeps herself sane and level headed while everybody else around her get drunk, high and/or horny. As Ricky and Vicki eventually arrives in town and do their darnest to warn the town sheriff of a returning evil, it may be too late as Jack slays and mutilates one victim at a time this one third Saturday night in October and Heather may have no choice but to fend for herself against an unstoppable monster.

Taking cues from Halloween (1978), The Third Saturday of October (2022) slow burns its way to its massacre as about a half of the movie's runtime focused more on building its narratives, mainly Ricky Dean and Vicki's pursuit over Jack Harding, the out-of-towners' misadventures before the watch party, and Heather Hill's little Saturday night with a possible new group of friends, all the while our star slasher fills up the kill count with offscreen slayings and tame kills, harm random people by ripping parts of their scalps off or cutting them with a razor while they sleep, as well as boop a kitten's nose because, hey, sometimes a serial slayer just need a break from all the blood and guts and get in touch with their softer side, I guess. The direction lacks a consistent tone due to this multiple plot lines, leaving us with moments where we'll be watching a rather engaging duo of grieving parents share and bond over their histories of past traumas and hopes of moving on once all of this is over, only to be distracted next by the obnoxious ramblings of dope-smoking morons whose characters can be easily simplified as walking meat for the kills. That said, I do have to give credit to Darius Willis' and K.J. Baker's performances as Ricky Dean and Vicki respectively for being the most engaging players in the story and probably the film's strongest highlights, even more so with Willis' character for the little quirk of him exclusively calling Vicki in her full name throughout the movie, an oddity that help make Ricky Dean stand out a bit among the bland run of disposable meatbags here.

Still, the fact that majority of the casts fail to do more than be hollow caricatures also meant that you can feel the steady pacing more than it needed to be in some scenes, especially when it's just these people bumming out and doing various nonsense. These often draw out too much and end with minimal impact, as in we either seen the resulting shtick before or the scenes overburn themselves after overstaying their welcome. Thankfully, the ball got rolling nicely once the watch party starts and we see The Third Saturday of October (2022) flex their bloody streak on the kill effects despite the restrictions of a minimal budget, though I do wish for a more creative set of kills to make up for the wait. The last act stumbles on a clunky take, too, as it's simply an overplay of the killer's apparent invincibility, having him survive gunshots repeatedly and going after the Final Girl twice. It's mostly harmless fun, nothing too wild that we hadn't seen before from your typical cat-and-mouse between a killer and a survivor, but it does lose some points for how it just forced itself to end, lacking any real fanfare or even a proper conclusion to the whole gig.

Visually, The Third Saturday of October (2022) do look great with its color grading and wardrobe department, looking very much like the product of the time period it takes place at. In fact, I genuinely enjoyed this movie as a small and simple guilty pleasure of a throwback to 70s slasher, trailed along with enough ham, weirdness and violence to keep it engaging despite the missteps it made with its plot direction, pacing and fodder characters. It's nothing grand, but it's far from being completely bad either. It's solely an indie horror film that doesn't aim to be anything else than to be fun bodycounter and I can frankly value that.

Bodycount:

1 male found murdered

1 male found murdered with a shovel

1 male found murdered

1 male seen killed, method unknown

1 girl seen killed, method unknown

1 female seen dead from a throat cut

1 female had her neck broken, face flayed

1 male had his throat cut with a garden shear

1 male garroted with a belt

1 female slashed across the neck with a knife

1 female beaten to death with a hammer

1 male gets a chainsaw to the head

1 elderly female seen slaughtered

Total: 13

~~~

The Third Saturday of October Part V (2022)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Kansas Bowling, Poppy Cunningham and Taylor Smith

First of, no, there are no Part II to IV. The gimmick here is that the two movies are supposed to recreate the times one could go out and rent videos, only for the video rental to be missing copies of certain entries in a franchise you wanted to watch. Most of us have been there: somebody else rented all but one or two movie from a film series, worse even if the movies doesn't even follow one another back-to-back, but our young, enthusiastic inner-horror fan really wanted to see Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger cut up some teens that one Friday or weekend night, so we rent them anyway and we just have a blast watching the horror shows. Much to some slight confusion.

The Third Saturday of October Part V (2022), in all fairness and honesty, does succeed with what it's attempting to recapture, but as a slasher film on its own, I couldn't find much else to go with here.

Set in the 90s, Part V has the most standard plotting I've seen in a bodycounter as it's literally just teens watching a football game match between rival colleges, interjected with the usual slasher exploits of drinking, sex and burnt pizza, only for it all to be interrupted by the arrival of the franchise's star villain, the now-masked Jack Harding, who proceeds to chop, tear and stab down anybody he comes across.

While the original movie took cues from Halloween (1978) by building its time to the slaughterfest and focusing a good chunk of the act within a variety of characters to establish some people to root for, The Third Saturday of October Part V chose to dish out bloodier and gorier kills on a more generous pacing, as well as taking a big knife swing lampooning at the tendencies for horror franchises to get sillier the further it goes down via showcasing a few outrageous slayings and cook up the plot with more ham and cheese. The drawback, however, is that the casts are cheapened into these boring, obnoxious and hollow bunch of walking victims-to-be that often chews the scenery a tad too much and too long, clearly an aim to let loose and be as outrageous as the slasher franchises it's poking fun at. But with a lot of the jokes and campiness missing than hitting, this unsurprisingly makes the whole movie feel shallow and empty with its forced nostalgia through intentional bad acting, diminished writing quality and lazy direction, resigning us to a whole lot of nothing to move the plot forward or deem it more interesting than what it's letting it out to be, something that its collection of gory kills and bloody torture couldn't polish over.

Unless, that is, you are looking for nothing else but gory kills and bloody torture. That said, The Third Saturday of October Part V (2022) would work if you're not asking for a lot. Like, a whole lot. If you're simply hounding to see a silly slasher with just good gore and an attempt to be campy, regardless of how obvious the low budget seems are or how bland the story is, then this movie is a fair candidate for a watch. Aside from that, it hardly amounted to anything but a nostalgia-inducing gimmick and, sometimes, that's barely enough to make a film good.

Bodycount:

1 male got his throat slashed with a knife (stock footage)

1 female killed with garden shears (stock footage)

1 male gets brained with a tire iron (stock footage)

1 female attacked, presumably killed (stock footage)

1 female knifed in the head

1 male gutted with a knife, bled to death

1 male had his head ripped off

1 female bludgeoned with a decapitated head

1 male killed offscreen, later seen stabbed in the gut with a dagger 

1 male had his throat cut with a garden shear

1 female killed offscreen with a garden shear

1 female shoved inside an oven, burned to death

1 male gets a whistle shoved into his throat

1 female repeatedly knifed in the head

1 male repeatedly knifed in the groin

Total: 15

Secrets, Secrets, Who's got The Secrets?: Severed Lives (2006)

Severed Lives (2006)

Rating: **1/2

Starring: Mary Alice Watkins, Alexis Celeste Elliott, Cathy Baron

For their senior thesis project, a small group of film students decided to shoot a horror documentary on their campus' twenty year-old urban legend in which it's said that a killer once went on a co-ed killing spree back in the day. As these girls gather around one night to think of a script that isn't going to devolve into cheesy horror territories, they would soon find out that they're in a real life slasher flick as a masked maniac starts stalking and picking them off dead one by one, seemingly in order to keep this film from ever being made.

As far as slasher cheapies go, Severed Lives (2006) suffers from expected pitfalls commonly found in a do-it-yourself production, mainly an awful sound design, dipping picture quality and price tag-constrained special effects. But in its defense, there is a little more heart put into this film as writer, director and producer Jake Helgren (who would later work on tons of Lifetime Channel and Hallmark movies) fully understands the core enjoyment of a simple slasher flick and done their best to implement it while tightening the purse strings. 

Clocking just less than fifty minutes, the direction is fluidly paced and focused, there's a couple of inspired camera work and editing, as well as a workable script done away with possibly some of the more agreeable acting done in a micro budget slasher film. The bodycounter elements are also a decent bunch once you get past the budgetary restraints; most of the onscreen murders are coupled with fair cat-and-mouse sequences and punctuated with a good helping of blood and chunks. The killer's guise is striking with their red faced mask and long black stringy hair creeping up on their victims like ghoulish hag. Their motive for the killings to teeter between maniacally clever and cheesy dramatic, but it does work with the twist reveal Severed lives (2006) went with, tying up everything that's been set into motion quite nicely in the end.

A fun enough slasher hokum if you're not asking for much, Severed Lives (2006) delivers all the manic massacre goods on a very tightened belt and I find that admirable enough to at least earn a watch.

Bodycount:

1 female attacked inside a car, killed offscreen

1 female garroted with a belt

1 male attacked, later found stabbed to death

1 female knifed in the neck

1 female impaled with a javelin

1 female shot on the head

1 female knifed in the gut

Total: 7

Sinking Down The Soggy Trail: #FLOAT (2023)

#FLOAT (2023)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Kaya Coleman, Ophelia Lichtenstein and Kate Mayhew

Tell me if you heard this one before: a group of twenty-somethings travel to the woods to enjoy themselves, only to be picked off dead one-by-one. Yep, it's the old standardized blue print of a backwoods slasher and #FLOAT (2023) follow this route mostly in context, with Black Christmas (2019) executive producer-turned-debut director Zac Locke trying to shake things up a bit.

The resulting attempt is... an attempt.

Following the loss of a dear friend Chuy, vlogger Kali, her boyfriend Jackson and four of her buds opted to honor their departed comrade by partying down the same river trail Chuy drowned at. (Or overdosed, depending on who's telling the story) For about half of the film's running time, we watch these people be dramatic and vapid for the shallowest and problematic reasons, from experiencing the troubles of being young parents to whether or not it is required for one to subscribe to their friend's social media channel to prove their friendship. We also get ourselves shoved on the face with party montages of them getting drunk on beer before anything remotely horror-adjacent happens. By then, we get the old doomsayer rearing his freaky face around warning the twenty-somethings not to go down the river, only for him to be disregarded and, well, the shmucks find out real soon that it would have been wise to listen to him as there is indeed something in the river that wants them all dead.

Curiously, we never really get to see or know what this threat is and, quite frankly, it's one of the few bits that I find working for #FLOAT as it does bring into the table a decently enjoyable level of uncertainty and creepiness. Sadly, the fact that not a lot of the casts are likeable meant that the rest of the film can be a real drag to sit through despite only clocking a short 75 minutes, even more so when a few of the plot points simply exists for the sake of existing and a good deal of the kills featured aren't even that exciting. (Aesthetic-wise, they're fitting, but for a slasher? We demand more creativity!) This meant that there isn't any satisfying payoff after all that build-up within its plot and characters, making #FLOAT feel lacking in its last act and barely passable, if not clumsily executed overall. 

I do appreciate the fact this film tried a different angle to work an original slasher, honestly, but the lackluster direction for most parts and uninteresting characters simply didn't vibe well with me and that's all I can say for #FLOAT (2023).

Bodycount:

1 male killed, ashes seen in an urn

1 male impaled with a thrown branch

1 female pulled into the river, killed

1 female dragged into the river, killed

1 male disappears into the river

1 male had his head pulped with a rock

1 female mauled, bled to death from a torn arm

Total: 7

Hazing Hell: Frat House Massacre (2008)

Frat House Massacre (2008)

Rating: ***

Starring: Rane Jameson, Chris Prangley and Jon Fleming

So it's 1978 and the last thing Sean ever wanted to do is to scold his newly graduated high schooler brother Bobby for choosing to party with his friends instead of enjoying a swell celebratory dinner with him and their caretaker Miss Olivia, who have been raising them since the death of their parents. Feeling rebellious, Bobby went ahead and hanged out with his buddies anyways, only to end up comatose from a drunk driving incident later. 

After some time and with a broken heart, Sean leaves to enroll at Newcomb college where he is accepted by the Delta Iota Espilon fraternity, headed by a sadistic chad-type named Mark. Now, the thing about this fraternity is that they take hazing to an extreme level; new pledges are beaten, humiliated, forced to fight one another among many things, but at the end of it and I guess depending on Mark's mood, the frat boys kill the pledges by forcing them to commit suicide or just straight out murdering them before feeding the bodies to pigs at a nearby farm. Why, you ask? Not sure, the film never bothered to explain why Mark and his goons do this. Probably just being cruel for cruelty's sake and that's that.

Sean, not being the bloodthirsty-type and feeling iffy by all of this, decided to try legging out of the fraternity, but the brotherhood doesn't take his leaving very kindly so they have him snuffed out. At the same time, Bobby awakens from his coma seemingly from supernatural means and, after a year, enrolls to the same college as well as attends his late-brother's fraternity. It isn't too long then that the members of the fraternity and some girlfriends start to die one by one, raising suspicions among one another with talks of sabotage and climbing up the ranks, all of this building up to a disco party where our killer contends to put a real deal of a bodycount to the table.

Made by the same people who brought us the overly ambitious yet cheap time-loop slasher Camp Slaughter (2005) (AKA "Camp Daze"), Frat House Massacre (2008) is a decent enough bodycounter that bows down to outlandishly crazy concepts, tossing away any conventions of logic for a feisty fondue of gruesome entertainment and neatly wrapping it all up with a faux throwback to 70s grindhouse exploitation cinema. For a good while, it more or less lingers around as a campus horror thriller featuring frat boys who seem to have no trouble getting away with drug use, murder and rape, an exaggeratedly dark twist on fraternity culture and mentality that's as awesomely hilarious as it is unsettling and atrocious to see onscreen, considering the gaggle of misogynistic perverts and cold-blooded murderers here are all punctuated with hammy scripts, cheeky bad acting and horrendous fashion choices. It's pretty much a low budget work of black humor littered with depraved horror scenes of suicides, deadly tortures and violent assaults, not to mention an abundance of homoerotic undertones with a lot of the evil frat boys beef caking themselves in nothing but tighty-whities (can't say I'm surprised. The production company behind this is called Screamkings), all of it garishly risible fun in that absurdly shabby and ghastly B-flick horror way and it continues to do so once the plot transitions into a revenge-driven slasher.

As a bodycounter, Frat House Massacre (2008) does take its fair strides along the classic slasher build of stalking and slaying victims, even adding a couple of makeshift traps out of rope and sharp barnyard tools for a small taste of variety, though it's around the third act wherein our frat boys throw a disco party that things got real messy in a semi-good way; from there, looking past the cringey dance moves and cotton-candy lighting, it's deathporn galore as our mostly unseen killer hacks and stabs their way through random party-goers, shrieking disco queens and the good ole' Delta Iota Espilon boys, gradually filling every scene with a nice balance of offscreen murders and onscreen carnage, living up to the titular massacre with as much blood, gore and strewn corpses as possible that it's over the top and deliriously campy. A few good points here include a lovely tribute to a kill seen in The Hitcher (1986) and the plot finding a way to keep the killer's identity not too unambiguous which is always a good move, though what kinda nicked the experience here is that there isn't really that much likable characters to root for, not much explanation was given to the supernatural plot device that came out of nowhere and the kills can get a tad repetitive after a while, especially considering the film runs a lengthy cut of almost two hours! Thankfully, these do very little to dent what's basically an absurd story to begin with, thus barely hindering the entertainment factor of the film, if not adding to the zaniness of it all.

Donning a groovy late 70s look and a tone matching the crazy days of grindhouse cinema, I cannot deny a good fright film when I see one and Frat House Massacre (2008) certainly fits the bill despite being a tad rocky at some parts. Qualms aside, this is a good example of a throwback slasher rife with exploitative charm, a decent revenge set-up and a generous serving of the warm red, just a hell of a fun ride if you're looking for a cheesy campus bloodbath! 

Bodycount:

1 male had his wrist and throat cut with a razor

1 male shot in the mouth

1 male forcefed with water, drowned

2 males inhale poisoned vapors

1 female knifed in the mouth

1 male had his head impaled against a room heater

1 male dropped head-first unto a pitchfork

1 male impaled on a sickle blade

1 male brained with a brick

1 female beaten to death

1 male knifed in the gut

1 male seen with throat wound

1 female knifed

1 male seen dying from knife wound

1 male seen dead

1 male seen with throat cut

1 female seen dead

1 victim seen dead

1 victim seen dead

1 male gutted with a knife

2 females impaled on a thrown machete

1 female hacked on the throat with an axe

1 male hacked to death with an axe

2 males and 2 female seen dead

1 male seen dead from stab wounds

1 male knifed to death

1 male tied between cars, torn in half

2 males found dead

1 male knifed in the jaw, bled to death

7 victims seen dead

1 male had his eye gouged, knifed to death

1 female knifed in the gut

1 male had his throat cut with a knife

1 male knifed in the back, throat crushed

1 female killed with an axe offscreen

Total: 47