Chubby Killer: The Anthology (2013)

Directed by:
"Bruno Renat" (Ruben Rox)

The latest release from the Oregon-based Bloody Valley Films is a loose anthology (running a little over an hour) featuring several short subjects and some gag coming attractions in between. The whole thing is so bizarrely structured and so incredibly disjointed that you'll either be entertained at the gleeful randomness of the events as they play out or irritated by the lack of explanation and its refusal to flesh out the plot or characters. I guess I felt a little of both at times, though this is overall a little more interesting than most other micro-budget horrors I've seen. The same actors play multiple parts in the different stories, parts are in color and in black-and-white, parts are in slow-motion, parts are repeated, parts are reversed and the footage appears to have been filmed using three or four different cameras; some is shot digitally and at other times videotaped.

After a brief preview of "Chubby Killer," our first story, "Rest Stop," begins. Photographer Lena (Lisa Armosino Morris), bikini model Libby (Catherine Franklin), text-a-holic Denise (Rachel Wise) and Vince (the director), who had a burrito that didn't agree with him, stop at a secluded rest area for a bathroom break. Lena wanders off into the woods to take photos, Libby decides to work on her tan, Vince takes a walk and Denise eventually has to try to round everyone up so they can leave. While she's out searching, Denise stumbles upon a grave with a red pipe sticking out of it... and then hears a female voice coming from inside. The voice tells her she was falsely accused of witchcraft and has been buried down there... ever since the early 18th Century! Denise brushes it off as a "redneck prank," but then very weird things begin happening. Many of those weird things seem to have no significance whatsoever. 

There's a teddy bear that starts one place and ends up somewhere else. Plants move behind people. Something (a bird? a ghost?) comes out of a birdhouse and scares one of the girls. Something passes by characters, they acknowledge whatever it is, it moves on and it's never revealed what or who it was. People run around all over the place and end up at the same spot. One girl falls, hits her head on a tombstone, (I think) dies, gets back up and seems to be a ghost from there on out. Another of the girls hears a man's deep voice calling her name. (What man... ?) Vince and Libby end up taking off in the car, just leaving the other two women (whose fates aren't quite made clear to either Vince or the audience) there. This ends anti-climatically, but that's only because the story continues again at a later juncture.

Next up is a brief faux preview for "Return of the Chubby Killer," which features a guy getting his face slammed into a cake. "Guardian of the Woods" - which appears to have been shot in the same locations as "Rest Stop" - follows. A TV news crew, including reporter Natasha McGrath (Franklin again), cameraman Wade (Kyle Cardenas) and crewman Olen (Rox again) show up in the woods to shoot some Halloween special. A couple of female joggers; Betsy (Cara Mattern) and DeeDee (Wise again), are also there. Some of them decide to throw their trash on the ground and then park caretaker Carl Ziegler (David Hoffmann), a man who seems to possess supernatural powers, decides to punish them. He then goes around killing off the offenders. A tree limb is stuck in a hand and through a head, part of a face is clawed off and someone's head is bashed against a tree.

Next up is a preview for "Chubby Killer III: Blood Shack." Afterward, we cut back to the "Guardian" segment (hey... I already told you this structure is bizarre!) with "The Séance: Guardian of the Woods 2: Natasha's Revenge," which is set a month after the other portion. Presumably Olen was the only one to survive the "guardian" (the fate of the male cameraman is left completely open). That is, until he's attacked and killed by reanimated videotape (?) before hopping in the shower. Natasha's brother Paul (Randy Robinson) has a séance to contact his sister's spirit to find out what happened to her. He ends up on the ground and is pulled backward [REC] style. The clock rolls back a few minutes and both Paul and Olen are back again and some of the same things happen again. A delusion? A dream? Reality? A mix of all three?

Next up we get footage from "Chubby Killer: The Uncut, Uncensored Collectors Edition" ("The version banned in 641 Countries!!!"), where a reporter (Lucien Eisenach) tells us about the legendary killer Henry Schilling, who murdered people simply because they were overweight. Henry - along with several other patients - has managed to escape from a nuthouse and is now on the prowl. One of the escapees, who thinks a piece of wood is a cell phone, gouges out a girl's eye with a stick and then smashes another girl on the back of the head with rocks and then runs off. Finally, "Rest Stop II" concludes the first segment with some Franklin bikini action and the Vince character going back to where the witch is buried to try to stop the curse.

This is all rather scattershot, some of the horror / action scenes are awkwardly choreographed and a few of the editing cuts seem rather abrupt, but the actors are mostly likable, the photography and appreciation for the outdoor scenery in some segments is nice and I wasn't bored watching it, although I was sometimes confused. What I perhaps liked best here is the fact that each of the three main segments boasts a genuinely good central idea. A low-budget franchise really could be spun from the concept of a serial killer targeting overweight people and it would be both fun and novel; sort of the antithesis of your usual slasher flick; a subgenre which almost exclusively casts young, thin people as the main targets. I'd like to see it expanded upon further than what you see here. Likewise, the "Rest Stop" and "Guardian" segments both center around good concepts rife with potential. The reanimated, still-buried witch speaking through a pipe in the former is something I've never seen before and the environmentally-conscious killer in the latter is a fine villain to focus a slasher flick around. The ideas are certainly here. However, they're not elaborated upon enough to realize their full potential. The penny-pinching surrealistic touches and playing around with the concepts of time, place and standard story structure maintain a certain level of interest throughout, but expansion upon the central themes, plot-lines and characters are needed to elevate the material to the next level.

★★1/2

La muerte del chacal (1984)

... aka: Death of the Jackal, The

Directed by:
Pedro Galindo III

For the 80s slasher fan who thinks they've seen it all, I cannot stress this enough: you haven't. There are a lot more of these things than you and I probably realize. I keep discovering new ones all the time I'd never even heard of before. For every Jason or Freddy flick, every Prom Night or The Burning, there are five more of these things from various places around the globe. Now seeking these titles out does require one's willingness to read subtitles or go without them altogether. If you're one of those people who refuses to do so, I really don't know what to tell you. Sucks to be you and miss out, I guess. For everyone else, take a trip outside the U.S. and you'll find many, many more of these things. Some are as good as the popular, well-known ones, some are bad and the majority are just kind of mediocre. As much as I miss the whole video store experience, being a horror nut in this day and age certainly has its perks. One of the big ones is movie availability. Films that were previously unavailable in certain countries are suddenly just a click away, and fans have even taken it upon themselves to create English subtitles for many of these. La muerte de chacal ("The Death of the Jackal") was high up on my list of films to view because it was made by Mexican director Pedro Galindo III. Galindo had also made the above average late-80s slasher Trampa Infernal (released here as HELL'S TRAP), which I enjoyed, and the fun Vacations of Terror (and its sequel). He has other genre films on his resume, such as 1989's Panico en la montana ("Panic on the Mountain"), which looks like a lot of fun itself. I'm still trying to hunt down some of these.

Jackal begins with a good 10-minute-long pre-credits sequence where four people; two longshoremen and a pair of strippers they've picked up at a bar, decide to go aboard a huge, old abandoned ship to drink beer and fool around. Instead of having a good time, they end up falling prey to a fedora sporting, trench coat wearing psycho (seen in shadow only) with a blade hidden his cane, as well as his vicious pet Doberman Pinschers. Immediately afterward, the killer leaves the ship, heads into town and knifes a blonde prostitute hanging around outside at a hotel. That woman is the third (known) female victim whose body has turned up thus far. Now with a handful of mutilated corpses (each having been stabbed through the throat), as well as even more people reported missing, Sheriff Bob (Mario Almada) quickly tries to get to the bottom of things before the press can cause a panic in the small town. He enlists the aid of his brother Roy (Fernando Almada), a fitness fanatic and boat captain, to help him. Since many of the victims worked as either prostitutes or strippers, Bob must start hanging around some seedy joints. Being the professional law enforcement agent he is, he smokes on a cigar, orders a bourbon and sits down to watch the strip acts while another stripper is being murdered right upstairs. Another man is killed there and thrown through a window right onto the stage, where he collides with one of the dancers.

Following a lead about a man named Jack who uses a cane and lives on a boat, Bob and Roy end up in a high speed boat chase, which ends in Jack getting killed when he crashes the boat and it explodes. To help get some professional advice on serial killers, Bob and his wife Joan (Cristina Molina) host a dinner party and invite Dr. Milan (Ruben Benavides) and his wife Nancy over. There, bachelor Roy meets Joan's attractive single model friend Sally (Olivia Collins). Sally insists on going down to the port, goes aboard the old ship, finds the corpses of the victims killed in the first scene strung up on hooks and ends up becoming the latest victim. In an effort to bait the killer, Bob has one of female deputies, Sergeant Garcia (Lizzeta Romo), dress provocatively and start hanging around the port posing as a hooker. She ends up coming face to face with the psycho, but the cops show up just in time to shoot him and save her. Not killed by the gunshot, the killer is sent to a mental asylum. U.S. authorities want him extradited because of some similar murders he committed in San Diego years earlier, but because of his mental state, that doesn't happen.

 

Five months pass, and the psycho proves to be more than the hospital staff can handle. He refuses to eat and has to get all of his nourishment intravenously, proves to be incredibly strong and manages to break out of his straight jacket and shackles. He cracks an orderlies neck, kills a guard who's sitting with his back turned away from the prison bars so the killer can just reach through and grab him (and the keys), and escapes. Now he wants revenge against all of those who helped to capture him. First up, is Garcia. He slashes her mother's throat and then stabs her hand before sinking a huge butcher knife into her neck. And then, Roy and Joan become the main targets. He kidnaps Joan and uses her to lure Bob to the old ship for the big finale. Even though I skirted around the issue, the identity of the psycho is revealed midway through the film, and when it is, it's actually somewhat of a surprise, so I won't reveal it here.

This isn't very original and, like most slashers, has some incredibly stupid moments sprinkled throughout. I had a hard time believing a bunch of people could just disappear near the port and no one would even think about looking on the old abandoned ship. Five months after the killer is apprehended, half a dozen bodies (including Sally's) are still there hanging up on hooks looking no worse for wear as when they were first killed. The dogs are still there, as well. I'm not sure who was feeding them all that time the killer was locked up. If you can overlook stuff like that, this is watchable. The acting is OK, there's some gore and nudity and a high body count. Some of the camerawork is good, too, including very fast POV shots of the dogs running up the stairs and around in the hallways. It was filmed in Brownsville, Texas (note the license plates and several visible American flags); the southernmost city in Texas.

The film leaves off with an open ending but according to IMDb there was a sequel (which was filmed as La muerte del chacal 2 but released as Carceria de un criminal) shot the same year, which also featured the Almada Brothers and Molina reprising the same roles. Neither of these were released in America. The one I viewed was a Mexican VHS release on the Condor label.

★★