Gareth Jackson
You've heard of wearing your influences on your sleeve? This one has them tattooed on its forehead. Opening with Texas Chainsaw-style flashes of corpses and miscellaneous bloody body parts, accompanied by pilfered music from an Argento classic (Goblin's familiar main theme from DEEP RED), this backyard SOV amateur short from the UK is a valentine to all those films gore-loving, Fangoria-reading, video-store-horror-section-haunting 80s kids couldn't get enough of back in the day. Though primarily filmed in 1989, this had some later additional work done to it to create a "final 2013 remastered edit" and get it all spruced up for YouTube. And by spruce it up, I mean mostly adding text to provide something of a loose structure to tie all of the amateur gore scenes together. Obviously no one is gonna be watching this for the story. We're here instead to have a warm, nostalgic chuckle seeing the stuffing fly out of a papier-mâché severed head as someone kicks it, and other such assorted sights.
The year is 1988. The setting is a nameless small town in northwest England, where mutilated corpses left in "lonely places" have been turning up. A long-haired serial killer is busy at work and we get see him in action as he beats his latest victim with a rock, slices his face up with a utility knife, decapitates him with a saw and then stuffs a gasoline-soaked rag into the severed head's mouth and sets it ablaze. A posse of teenage locals wearing white hoods then hunt him down and stone him to death while the FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III disco music plays.
A year later, the killer emerges from his shallow grave in the woods as a skull-faced zombie looking for revenge. As snippets from Goblin's DAWN OF THE DEAD score play, he pushes his first victim's head down on a spike, which then pops out of his mouth. The next guy is chased down and gets his eyeballs poked out. The zombie then ventures on over to a house to gather some weapons, including a hatchet that he uses to chop up a sleeping teen right after he rips off his dick off with his bare hands and shoves it in his mouth (!) The boy's mother (played by Doreen Jackson, probably the director's real-life mother) finds his body, grabs a shotgun and prepares to get her own revenge.
Before mum can blast the bad guy, the zombie gets to slaughter a few other folks. A girl gets her throat cut with a knife as exaggerated amounts of blood pour from the wound. Her boyfriend has his tongue ripped out, is stabbed repeatedly and then has some internal organs yanked out. And, naturally saving the "best" for last, the killer attacks a young mother and her newborn baby. He power drills the babies eyeballs out, rips it in half and then uses its intestines to strangle the mother to death (!) So, I'll at least give this props for going places most other films would not back in 1989 (except maybe Troma), even if they didn't bother creating any fx baby and just used a regular ole baby doll instead.
Aside from not having much of a story, this also thankfully doesn't have much dialogue either. And good thing for that! You think Brit teens are difficult to understand without subtitles? Well, try Brit teens being recorded from too far away by a VHS camcorder's built-in microphone as stolen music blares on top of that. And while this has all of the technical ineptitude one may expect from a home movie, some of the camerawork, camera placements and editing choices are actually not too bad. The gore make-up (also done by the director) ranges from terrible to passable. Much of it is really no worse than what can be found in many of the Italian films this took inspiration from.
Other scores used include HALLOWEEN, THE FOG and TENEBRE, so even though the taste levels aren't too high overall, at least the taste in borrowed music is. How do you even rate something like this?
★★
