This trio of indies vacillated between trying to be funny but not delivering, and trying not to be funny but making me laugh.
MURDERCISE (2023)
The first few minutes of a Murdercise bombard us with 80s neon, spandex, leg warmers, a synth score, and an aerobics class.
A few minutes later, a woman is killed in her home before we get to the focus of the plot…the making of an exercise video with a bunch of slutty babes and one uptight girl, our leading lady.
Murdercise is intentionally cheesy in its effort to give off an 80s female exploitation slasher vibe, but it doesn’t quite hit with its attempts at humor. The highlight is one bimbo with huge boobs. She absolutely steals the show when she throws a tantrum because horror bear Drew Marvick (sporting Daisy Dukes and a crop top) won’t look at or touch her tits. The rest of the movie really needed to live up to this level of silly comedy.
As for the slashing, it’s not your usual format. The goody-goody girl, becoming more and more furious at how sexualized the video shoot is, starts to kill off all the skanky girls. Unfortunately, there aren’t many kills, they aren’t designed to be scary, and only one delivers on some good gore, with practical effects!
However, the film has a side story—there have already been a series of murders around town, and the cops are on the beat. When they show up at the studio, shit suddenly gets wild, with the girls working together to take down the other killer. Practical gore effects abound, and a chainsaw even gets in on the action. We even get an appearance by adult film royalty Ginger Lynn, plus some phobic jabs at the masculinity and heterosexuality of the cops, bringing old warm and fuzzy feelings of being a gay teen in the 80s flooding back.
But seriously, the final act rox, and I just wish the whole film had delivered this kind of midnight movie horror vibe.
SUMMERHOUSE SLAUGHTER (2023)
This cheerleader camp slasher film runs only an hour long yet still fails to fully develop the presence of its killer. Basically, “furry” slashers are all the rage these days, so this killer jumps on the bandwagon and puts on a panda suit. It has absolutely nothing to do with a mascot costume, which would make sense. And brace yourself…this is touted as a sequel to the 1988 classic Cheerleader Camp. Sigh.
The film sets us up for the perfect campy/sleazy slasher plot—after a sprinkler acid accident takes out a whole cheerleading team (it’s rather funny watching them all drop at once), a new team comes to cheerleading camp, and soon someone in a panda suit is killing them off. We even get the original young Jason Voorhees Ari Lehman as a pervy caretaker.
And yet, the pervy caretaker is barely in the movie and his red herring role isn’t exploited to give us peeps at showering cheerleaders or topless pillow fights. There’s also a young shirtless pretty boy on-site who makes a bizarre yet enticing entrance…and is then never seen again. WTF?
No nudity, no sexploitation, and as with many low budget indie films, it’s hard to tell if the movie is trying to be funny and mostly failing…or if the few scenes that give you a laugh were even meant to.
There are kills, and some of them are satisfying for a low budget film. For instance, there’s a nice killer POV moment leading up to an eye gouging scene, and a death by plunger scene in a tight shot in a tub with no score to fill the sound void is actually effective. But the kills stop rather quickly when the girls realize a killer is out there. And then…the movie comes to a screeching halt as the girls just sit around trying to figure out what they should do to survive. The pacing is also hurt by totally pointless interruptions by a horror hostess. Sigh.
The final girl gets a chase scene, but as is always the case, setting a horror scene to metal music kills any sense of tension or atmosphere. But the final fight with the panda gave me a chuckle. However, like I said above, I don’t know if that was the intent.
SLAUGHTER BEACH (2022)
I know what movie you watched last summer…and then used as inspiration to make an indie killer fisherman comedy duo movie.
The problem with the movie? The comedy duo. It was refreshing to see the two leads were a Black guy and an Asian dude, but somewhere along the line something went wrong. This pair has no charisma, there’s no chemistry between them, there’s no comedic talent on display. There’s not even any funny material for them to work with.
The real star here is the fisherman. He’s not hidden from view—we see his face right from the start. He also delivers one-liners like some sort of late 80s/early 90s slasher killer as he slices and dices up victims on the boardwalk.
Which leads to the other star of the film: the death scenes. This is all bloody, violent fun with practical effects. The fisherman even goes on a rampage during a murder montage at one point…set to rock music. Sigh. But I can overlook the choice of rock music because the kills…rock.
It’s unfortunate that our two main guys, a couple of jobless friends who decide they are going to protect the boardwalk from the killer and solve the case, play such an insignificant role in bolstering the fun of this movie.
