FrightFest review – Death Cycle

FrightFest review – Death Cycle

Journalist Luca Sullivan (Matthew Ninaber), estranged from his politically- and criminally-connected family, visits his sister Caterina (Sasha Ormond), who is traumatised by the recent deaths of her brother Eduardo (Matt Daciw) and cousin Ray (Justin Bott).  A motorcyclist vigilante in leathers and black crash helmet has been gruesomely despatching the family.  The death cyclist looks exactly like the stalkers of Terror Eyes/Night School (1981) and Nail Gun Massacre (1985), which might tip grindhouse obsessives off to a later plot development shared by all three films.

A prologue has established that drunken Eduardo knocked down two girls in the street one night and Caterina watched while he stomped on one victim’s head to finish her off – and that the Sullivan family pull has quashed any testimony surviving sister Abby (Kristen Kaster) might give.  So it’s pretty hard to give a shit that these awful people are being done away with.  Apparently liberal Luca approaches Abby pretending to be doing an objective piece on the case, and much of the film oddly unfolds during their testy interview – with cutaway flashbacks to the various killings.  It’s a broad strokes picture, with a cast who do their best to act and even look like crime comic caricatures of real people.

Director Gabriel Carrer (For the Sake of the Vicious) glues together set-pieces with a storyline so simple you kind of expect an extra twist or two down the line … but, no, this is just as simple as its pitch.  The Death Cyclist pursues the guilty and the guilty-adjacent and heads are crushed or literally roll.  Hey, it is what it is and it’s over with in eighty minutes.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.