The Mutilator 2

 

If you're and avid 80's slasher fan like me, you've already seen the original Mutilator flick by now. Probably, most likely, more than once. I've sat through it two different times and I have to say that even the first entry is pretty okay considering it's contemporaries-it has a pretty sad and wicked plot involving the death of a boys' mother at the beginning of the film where he accidentally shoots her with one of his fathers' shotguns because he's cleaning it for him before he comes home from work or wherever the hell he was at, and it sets him off about twenty something years later wanting to 'mutilate' his own son and his friends when they party at his dad's beach house. It encompasses some nasty kills with a giant fish hook among other things, and it has become a pretty solid cult classic of sorts among horror fans these days, especially after Arrow Video put it on blu-ray. Before I ended up selling about 95% of my horror collection fairly recently, I myself had a copy of it on blu-ray and I did enjoy it for what it was. I always liked the whole thing with the Fall Break opening as opposed to just the regular Mutilator one and it presented itself almost as some kind of a lost 80's sitcom or something that needed to be preserved for all time. Look-if you've been here for awhile and have read most of (if not all) my bullshit on this website, you already know that I always try to seek some kind of a balance with any sort of horror flick (hell, just movies in general) where I don't even care if all of the girls are hot or cute, there needs to be a decent story to keep things going. If the movie is fucking boring as all hell, at least garner some gore or solid kills to have something for the audience to grab onto. Because I'm here to let you know right here and right now that The Mutilator 2 is fucking abysmal. It doesn't have any of the energy, any of the flair or any of the staying power that the original had. It just fucking doesn't. And quite frankly, what did I expect? I actually received pretty much what I was expecting-a selfish, meta, re-tread of the first film with no garnish and no extra ketchup. The Mutilator 2 is a giant basket of hand cut french fries that are under cooked, lazily chopped and half seasoned. There was absolutely no reason for Buddy Cooper himself to attempt making a comeback with this hog snot, and he would have just been better off either wallowing in his 80's horror obscurity or just directing and writing something completely new for the fans of his that he's lassoed in after all of these years with the original. What is the biggest, cardinal sin that this new movie of his commits? I already mentioned it, but it's so damn boring. It's a drag fest, and I'm not meaning an actual drag show with dudes dressing up as chicks-I mean this thing just has no substance and no character. The actors Chaney Morrow and Anna Clary from the film Late Checkout are both here as main people, and I would be hard pressed to find out if they starred here for anything more than their paychecks. Also (and I didn't even realize this until the very last time you see him) the horror film collector and reviewer on Youtube named Pizowell makes a cameo here too, and I honestly thought that was pretty cool. I always enjoy seeing implements in these pictures like that. But none of that makes up for how manically laggy The Mutilator 2 ended up being. With all of that being pointed out, the kills are pretty good special effects wise and they are for the most part pretty brutal-but it still just isn't good enough. You do see most of the cute girls' boobs at some point peppered throughout here-but it just isn't worth it. It just isn't. So if you're a bigger fan of the first Mutilator film than most and were and or are still excited to watch this 'sequel' if you will, I warned you. I fucking warned you. If you even make it half way just to see what happens, I'll applaud you. You'll never know it, but I'll clap in pure jeer just for you. And you'll probably never want to watch this ever again.   

Las Vegas Bloodbath

 

I was paroozing Youtube and beyond this afternoon to try to stumble upon something shitty to ingest because I was in the mood for some junk food film, when all of a sudden a gem fell into my lap that I had never heard of or seen before-Las Vegas Bloodbath. I won't lie here zits and zombies-I was about to just skip beyond it because how entertaining could an S.O.V. from 1989 with that generic of a title possibly be? Well, there's plenty that have bland titles who end up being glorious mantle pieces which end up on display to sicken our family and friends, and now that I've sat through Las Vegas Bloodbath, it's a new entry to join the crowd. It's actually been quite awhile since I've really dug my toes into something in this universe because I unfortunately don't have as much time as I used to (or as much as I would like to) indulge in searching for and discovering new ground in the do-it-yourself category of crappy horror flicks from the 80's and 90's because a lot has changed in the last 5-6 years, but that has nothing to do with my experience viewing Las Vegas Bloodbath. I'm going to state right off that bat here that this was wildly great, surprising and highly entertaining because it has a no nonsense attitude about it with our main man Sam flying off the handle after he finds out that his wife Ruth is cheating on him with some loser sheriff/cop dude that looks like a z-grade version of Iceman from Top Gun. Yeah. Also, Sam himself also looks like a hard mix of Nicolas Cage and Jerry Seinfeld if they were in their mid twenties and were partying together briefly after both of their careers took off around the same time. It's fucking hilarious. Want to know what else is hilarious that takes place in Las Vegas Bloodbath? There's a scene where Sam is driving the red sports car he bought for Ruth through town after he brutally murders her and sheriff boy, and some random asshole drives up to him with his middle finger out of the window saying "hey asshole, why don't you get off the road, you don't know how to drive!" to which Sam responds by shooting the dickheads finger off and yelling "try picking your nose with that!" Jesus, this shit is hilarious-I literally almost fell off the edge of the couch when this scene first happened because I was laughing so hard. I rewound it and watched it a second time, which for me is a rarity these days. There's also a scene that happens before the middle finger incident where Sam has a prostitute with him in his car in the middle of the day (he calls them "daytime whores") to which he stops the car in a random alley that has some kind of piping on the side of the building and he ties her up to it. This is also the first time that we see that he has Ruth's severed head in a bag with him throughout the rest of the film-but he gets Ruth's head out of the bag, sets it next to the street girl and ties only one of her legs to the back bumper of the car. He then picks up Ruth's head, puts it back in the bag and into the trunk, only to start driving away while yelling "are you keeping up?" as the woman's leg gets torn off and gets drug down the street. Sounds brutal, but when you see how it is in the movie in real time, it's everything hilarious and nothing gruesome in the slightest. All of this crap takes up basically the first half of Las Vegas Bloodbath because the second half (this flick is 67 minutes by the way) is him figuring out where the Beautiful Ladies Of Oil Wrestling live or hang out or whatever this town house looking place is supposed to be-because he isn't done rampaging over what Ruth did to him yet. Oh no-there's more women to kill and more brutality to be had. I'm not going to go into supreme detail here zits and zombies if you've never seen this piece, but pretty much the rest of the last 30-something minutes comprises of Sam tying up said Beautiful Ladies and performing nasty things on them like cutting out the fetus of the pregnant woman's unborn baby and tossing it in the corner of her room or literally tearing one of their arms off as they stare at Ruth's head or him burying a claw hammer into the chest of one of them after he gets them into the bathtub. This film really does ramp up in the third act very quickly and by the time it's over the way the bathroom looks in this place is pretty much reminiscent of the cover art of a Cannibal Corpse album or something. If you're on the prowl for an S.O.V. from the late 80's that is sort of like the try-hard younger brother of Truth Or Dare?: A Critical Madness, you've found it. Just don't tell anyone that I told you to watch it. Actually, yeah, do that. Maybe I'll get more traffic here on my website if you do.