Wedding Slashers (2006)

NOVEMBER 27, 2008

GENRE: COMEDIC, INDEPENDENT, SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

My friend Jib has recently been knocking on me a lot for my seeming obsession with incestuous overtones in the horror movies I see. It's not that I actually enjoy the idea, but look - some of these movies I can't even remember enough to write a review about them a couple hours later, because they are so bland and uninteresting. So if they throw in a line like Wedding Slashers' "That's my mother. She's also my sister", my interest gets piqued a bit. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Especially when it's played for laughs, like it is in this terrible yet sort of awesome movie. See, the heroine is supposed to marry her cousin (who is a bit peeved that her brother got her virginity), but she escapes her redneck family and gets engaged to a nice, normal guy. However, when the family shows up and starts killing everyone at the wedding, she seems pretty blase about the whole thing, as if it was commonplace. And writers John Howard and Robert Paul Medrano clearly play the entire concept for laughs, so kudos to them for making an intentionally funny movie based on such a horrendous and disgusting idea.

Unfortunately, the technical qualities and acting leave much to be desired. Had this been cast with good actors and directed more professionally, it would be the perfect bad movie, but too many great (poor taste) jokes fall flat due to the delivery of the non-actors. Maybe some of them didn't quite get that it was supposed to be funny, but either way it's a bit disheartening. The production value is also pretty atrocious; apparently, all you need to do is hang a cross on a wall and viola, you got a church! Or, what looks suspiciously like a dorm room with a cross thrown up before filming began.

Also, towards the end of the film, some of the rednecks begin what sounds a lot like improvised dialogue concerning the number of toes they have, the merits of Gorillas In The Mist, and other "huh?" topics. It's a bizarre but entertaining concept (imagine the Deliverance guys doing the "Royale With Cheese" scene in Pulp Fiction and you'll get the idea), and I wish it was part of the film throughout, not just in the final 7 or 8 minutes.

Finally, whoever was in charge of the setting titles needs a swift kick to the neck, because they ended up confusing me more than they helped me know where I was. The prologue seems to be set in the 40s, but no title is given. Then the title says "5 years ago", but that's in relation to the real time, not the scene we just saw, something that took me a few minutes to understand. I think there was "yesterday" thrown in there too. Christ.

The only extra is a handful of deleted scenes that go on too long, with the exception of the final one, in which Richard Lynch's character explains a bit more about how they found her (it involves a road trip to a funeral for a distant cousin and a newspaper - why cut this amazing footage?). Skip em.

One final note - the main chick is one Jessica Kinney, who was in Freaky Farley, another low-budget indie that revels in being kind of terrible. She has a niche!

What say you?