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?

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