FrightFest Halloween review – Brute 1986

Considering that he made Seed 2, a follow-up to an Uwe Boll film, Brute 1986 isn’t the most unneeded sequel on director Marcel Walz’s CV … but it’s difficult to warm up to this ten-years-later return to the world of Brute 1976, in which some models and photographers in the desert got killed by a found family who at least had a half-way unusual reason for acting like the clans from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes (which is more or less dropped in the sequel).  The first film is dedicated to Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven, but the aesthetic is more like Marcus Nispel – knowing retro-chic, dress-up fashions, all-over-the-place mixed signals about race and gender, Terrifier-style rubbery dismemberments with a genital emphasis, ham turns from psycho characters who could be auditioning for Rob Zombie and clunky attempts at Bicentennial significance.  Oh, it’s also long and – typically for edgy horror pix – a fucking downer.

Brute 1986 brings back hippie-ish model Raquel (Gigi Gustin), who has Stockholm Syndromed from victim to killer (a mirror image of Ruby from The Hills Have Eyes), and hinges on Sunshine (Sarah French, a Walz regular and pretty much the only reason for watching the films she’s in) getting disillusioned with all the murder as she comes to the conclusion audiences reached a while back that it’s all pretty pointless.  Why, when Raquel (who now calls herself Summer) and Sunshine are sat naked on top of a hair metal roadie stabbing him in a frenzy that covers their bodies in blood, Sunshine runs out of enthusiasm while Raquel stabs on and on and on.

Replacing the photoshoot of Brute 1976 is a rock video shoot, featuring a band called Leather Kobra who are like a lot less funny than Spinal Tap and get killed in a clump so the film can get on with its inter-clan bickering as Mama Birdy (Dazelle Yvette), an apocalypse prepper, is disappointed with the way things turn out.  A guy gets snakebit on the dick, aanother is chainsawed in two starting with the crotch, a gay couple are Bay of Blood/Friday 2/Camp Miasma skewered while making out, and one of the victims, a veteran roadie (Lew Temple), gives a performance which works well with French.  Daisy (Jed Rowen), introduced as ‘the nice one’, was a hugely retrograde spin on the trans psycho trope – wearer of a Buffalo Bill-style ‘waistcoat with tits’ – in 1976 and is even moreseo here.  Similarly, the fact that Mama Birdy and her favourite hulking masked killer Brutus (Bishop Ali Stevens) are black ought to mean a lot more than it does.

Otherwise, the good news is that its’ twenty minutes shorter than Brute 1976.  The IMDb lists five more Walz joints – including Scrooge: A Christmas Carol Horror – in the pipeline.  He’s also made beyond-or-rather-not-even-a-joke stuff for the Asylum: Insidious Possession, The Odyssey, Master of the Universe, The Anacondas and Jurassic Reborn.