The Summer Of The Massacre (2006)

JULY 23, 2012

GENRE: BREAKDOWN, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

There’s a movie called The Summer Of Massacre that supposedly has the world record for on-screen kills in a horror movie, and that’s what I thought I was renting. Instead, I got The Summer Of The Massacre, which adds a “The” but takes away about 150 deaths and, I can only hope, production value. Adding insult to injury, I actually OWN this damn movie already, as its included in the Decrepit Crypt set, which I “retired” due to the fact that the movies were all awful.

Unsurprisingly, Massacre is no exception. It’s laughably cheap, poorly directed/edited/acted/written, and is so blatant with its copying of Texas Chainsaw Massacre that it even copies some of its opening narration word for word from the mouth of John Larroquette. In fact I taped that part off the screen for your enjoyment (it goes very fast, might want to freeze frame so you can enjoy all of the typos and grammatical errors):

And that was as good as it got. Thus, same as it was for most of the other Decrepit Crypt movies I’ve watched, I spent most of the runtime wondering if I should just quit HMAD on the spot rather than finish it, because watching it served no purpose. I’ve already said everything I possibly can about this sort of crap, and now I even have people ragging on me for watching movies like this when I have so many titles on the recommendation thread I may never get to. So it’s not even worth watching for YOUR amusement!

For what it’s worth, the PRECISE reason this movie is a failure is the fact that it’s not really a movie, but a series of identical sequences strung together. Once our group of obnoxious young heroes go through the motions (traveling somewhere remote, getting lost, breaking down), there is no discernible difference to the rest of the movie – one of them goes off, encounters the killer (Hammer Head), runs around screaming as he grunts in pursuit, followed by a clumsily staged fight where every blow is off-screen, more running/screaming/grunting, followed – at long last – by their death. Then it starts over again. These scenes feature no dialogue beyond things like “NO!” and “Oh god!” or whatever, and the lack of any sort of actual prosthetic/makeup appliance means there’s never a good kill to at least make up for the tedium that preceded it. Hell after a while I began to wish that the director had opted for some cheap/bad CGI just to spice things up a little.

Also, the killer is the lamest in memory. He’s got a cheap mask on and wears a tie/shirt for some reason, and his weapon is a tiny little mallet that would fit in the top tray of your toolbox. His entire function in the movie is to run around grunting as he chased after his victims, all of whom manage to get away from him at least once (because if he did them in quickly, the movie would be even shorter than its 76 minute runtime), but that’s not even the main problem. If you notice, the Chainsaw films always have Leatherface as part of a family – that’s because by himself he’s boring, another generic mute killer. Apparently director Bryn Hammond didn’t pick up on that, so one of the few things he DOESN’T copy directly from Tobe Hooper (or Jeff Burr, or even Kim Henkel) ironically makes his movie even worse. Here he is getting stabbed by corn:

And here’s the kicker – this movie can be bought on its own for 15 dollars on Amazon. As shitty as it is, at least if it was confined solely to the Decrepit Crypt set I could shrug it off; the consumer is paying about 20 cents a movie, and thus the filmmakers are probably being compensated with pennies, identical to the ones they used to make their movies in the first place (as with others, this had no discernible budget – non-actors, consumer grade camera, sound seemingly recorded with the camera mic instead of separately, no sets, etc), and they should be happy that their movie got that much of a release. But as a consumer, I can’t condone the idea of slapping a professional cover on this nonsense and charging full price like it was a real movie – I can get a Blu-ray of The Dark Knight cheaper, in fact! You can and should watch better movies for free on Youtube.

In short, sorry for wasting your time by reviewing yet another terrible movie no one in their right mind would ever want to watch anyway.

What say you?


6 comments:

  1. I appreciate the amount of effort you put into your reviews of bad movies. I love horror movies, but there are, as we all know, too many directions you can be pulled into within the genre. I am easily able to tell what movies I should give a chance and what movies deserve the ole heave ho. You have put such careful effort in your writing that I can even get a feel if a film may just be of a different taste than mine, or vice versa. Tremendous job sir. I'll hate to see ya go

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  2. I appreciate the amount of effort you put into your reviews of bad movies. I love horror movies, but there are, as we all know, too many directions you can be pulled into within the genre. I am easily able to tell what movies I should give a chance and what movies deserve the ole heave ho. You have put such careful effort in your writing that I can even get a feel if a film may just be of a different taste than mine, or vice versa. Tremendous job sir. I'll hate to see ya go

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  3. I just checked your history with Decrepit Crypt and noticed that you never tried a Todd Sheets movie from the set! They're awful, of course, but they've at least got that 80s/90s shot-on-video charm and they were literally never meant to be released (so you can imagine what they must be like).

    That set also has Las Vegas Bloodbath, which has one of the most absurd moments I've ever seen in a movie.

    All that said, I still hope that doesn't convince you to un-retire it anytime soon. But maybe some day in the future...

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  4. I tried to post on the recommendation thread a few months ago, but I'm not sure if you got it or not, because my computer won't let me see anything posted after 2011. Just in case, I'll leave one for another movie here. It's called Nightmare at Noon. I rented it a while back. If nothing else, it's the good kind of bad. Brion James plays an albino mad scientist and Kimberly Beck turns into a kind of rage zombie.

    For what it's worth, I'm also the guy who posted on one of your other Decrepit Crypt reviews and warned you about the movie "Serial Killer." This isn't one of the other ones I watched, but based on your review and those clips, it doesn't look any better than the rest.

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  5. People should not confuse the two "summer of massacre" movies. This one has a dismal 1.7 rating on IMDb. The 2011 version - the one with the on-screen kills record - achieves a whooping 2.0.
    Here is the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilrQQdxPZuE

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  6. The 155 kills in The Summer of Massacre are all done with either the most godawful CG ever or by very crudely animating photographs. So, be prepared.

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