This is approximately 600% funnier than the entire Scary Movie franchise put together, and also a sweet recreation of minimally-budgeted schlock c. 1981 (or 1976ish). The frame is a table read by a credibly jaded gang of porn filmmakers who have decided to branch out into grindhouse horror in the wake of the success of Friday the 13th (which was made by folks with adult industry experience) and Halloween. By 1981, even basic slash-in-the-woods pics were getting healthy budgets and looking good – The Burning, Campsite Massacre and Just Before Dawn are beautifully shot and full of soon-to-be name actors – but the film this crowd make is more on a level with makeshift, scrappy-crappy-looking, rambling off-off-off Hollywood efforts like Don’t Go in the Woods, Shriek of the Mutilated or Savage Weekend. It revisits a key location where Tobe Hooper shot The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is on another level – it would have been more appropriate to return to the ranch where Leonard Kirtman shot Curse of the Headless Horseman.
Amy Letcher is particularly good as the one classically-trained actor joining in with the dim bulb 39-year-old teenagers who’ve been making smut – she plays the mousy final girl, and the last reel actually gives her an enormous acting workout in which she’s properly hilarious. A bunch of young folks go to a rural camp retreat which has a bad reputation and go through an authentic-for-the-genre hour or so of strained comedy and sex material as a killer in a beekeeper helmet stalks the place, apparently murdering folks who transgress square morality in even the smallest ways. The finale, however, brings in complicated backstory involving American Nazis (‘What’s Worse Than a Nazi Curse?’ asks a theme song), long-lasting family trauma, possible possession and contradictory explanations which don’t explain anything.
Writer-director, who also plays director ‘Michael Caime’, Alex Montilla doesn’t underline the jokes – occasionally, he cuts back to the table read and tears out pages of the script to the irritation of the writer (Eric Anderson) – but trusts us to laugh at terrible day for night scenes, the hairy arm of a supposed twin sister reaching into frame, plastic snakes, a corpse who can’t stay still, gratuitous product placement for Fierce Whiskers whiskey (who were obviously hoping to be the J&B of US slasher trash), irrelevant aerobic dance sequences, a missing reel which would have been the 3D sex scene in the jacuzzi, and the antics of stereotype obnoxious folk only a few degrees broader than the kids from dozens of low-grade horror pics of this vintage. Rob Zoppo, Bud Galloway, Amber Kellehan, David Arnold Rubin, Austin Jaye and Anna Bess are all cheerily wooden – some even have the smug look of 1970s porn stars (one or two did appear in horror pictures: Jamie Gillis in Night of the Zombies, Robert Kerman in Cannibal Holocaust).
That grainy 16mm filter on the I-phone gets a major workout – it’s been overused lately, but is perfect for this.