horror

The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)

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It’s very difficult for a horror movie to shock a modern, jaded audience, but The Babysitter 2: Killer Queen eventually did drop my jaw in astonishment. It wasn’t any of the film’s over-the-top gore gags or rug-pull cameos from the original cast that shocked me, but rather the name under the Directed By credit in the concluding scroll: McG. After suffering the stylistically flat, aggressively unfunny 140-minute eternity preceding that credit I was genuinely shocked to be informed it shared a director with its predecessor. If The Babysitter was helmed by the deliriously fun, bubblegum McG who directed the Charlie’s Angels movies, then Killer Queen was clearly the work of the flavorless-gruel McG who directed Terminator: Salvation. It was an appalling step backwards for a filmmaker whose sugary music video aesthetic had finally found its niche, only for it to be immediately abandoned.

Is there any point in recapping the plot, bloodshed, or aesthetic choices of this disposable novelty? Doubtful. The same overlit Burger King commercial visuals, empty nostalgia signifiers, and hack writers’ room humor that plagues all straight-to-Netflix trash is carried over here in the exact ways you’d expect, which is a shame since the first Babysitter film felt freshly exciting & playful in its own distinguishing details. The only standout aspect of Killer Queen is that it oddly feels nostalgic about its own predecessor, a fun-but-forgettable sugar rush with the cultural longevity of cotton candy in a rainstorm. Instead of pushing The Babysitter’s Satanic teen cult absurdities into new, undiscovered territory, Killer Queen merely retraces its steps to provide additional background info & throwaway gags for every returning character, no matter how inconsequential. It’s only been three years since the first Babysitter film—a frivolous diversion meant to be enjoyed & immediately forgotten—yet Killer Queen treats it with the glowing “Remember this?!” reverence of an I Love the 80s VH1 special.

I initially thought Killer Queen’s diminished returns were a result of the charisma vacuum left by Samara Weaving—you know, the titular babysitter—but even when she returns to the screen in a contractual act of charity here the result just feels like a waste of her valuable time. It’s also tempting to blame the film’s shortcomings on its four(!) credited screenwriters. The lack of imagination on how to expand or push the teen-cult premise forward in any way is damaging enough, but the joke writing is somehow even less inspired. The most consistent line of humor involves a middle-aged stoner who loves his hotrod more than his teenage daughter; but we all Get It because it’s a really cool car! That’s not a joke that becomes any funnier the second dozenth it’s repeated, but that writers’ room vapidity should never have been a factor in the first place. McG’s breakfast cereal commercial aesthetic should be beating you over the head with so much giddy, hyperactive inanity that there’s no time to notice minor concerns like plot, dialogue, or character development. Instead, you can practically hear him snoring in his La-Z-Boy director’s chair just outside of the frame.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #117 of The Swampflix Podcast: Zombi Child (2020) vs. The Zombie Diaspora

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Welcome to Episode #117 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss Bertrand Bonello’s new film Zombi Child (2020) and the ever-broadening zombie genre’s diasporic exodus away from its Haitian Vodou roots. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Britnee Lombas, James Cohn, and Brandon Ledet

The Pool (2020)

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I usually hate when a horror movie opens with a sneak preview of its own climactic violence, then rewinds the clock back to when everything to was peaceful just a few days before. It’s almost always a sign of the film not trusting its audience to be patient for the payoff, a cowardly reassurance that things will escalate if you hang around long enough. I’ll make an exception for the recent Thai creature feature The Pool, however, where that sneak preview serves an entirely different function. The film opens with its hero dazed & dehydrated at the bottom of a drained pool, fighting off a killer crocodile with only a bucket and few splintered furniture legs. In this case, the preview plays as a useful warning to the audience about the film’s budgetary restrictions. The CGI crocodile looks absurdly, unfathomably cheap, as if our sun-damaged hero is fighting a 2D photograph of a croc clipped out of a magazine. Instead of promising mayhem to come, the film is just being honest about the limits of what it can deliver, making sure the audience is on board with its bargain bin CGI upfront before wasting our time with less pressing concerns like dialogue, theme, or plot.

In essence, The Pool is a bargain bin riff on The Shallows, in which a young couple is stranded in a drained swimming pool with a killer crocodile. Between The Shallows, Crawl, and 47 Meters Down, we’ve been gifted a few solid confined-space aquatic horrors in recent summers, which does put The Pool at a slight disadvantage considering the limited resources it’s competing with. It has no choice but to pave over its budgetary restrictions with a playful sense of humor, then, making sure the audience has a fun time even if not an extravagant one. In most of our hero’s attempts to escape the 6-meter concrete walls of his swimming pool prison, everything is just out of reach, amusingly so. A charger cord saves his phone from falling into the water just long enough for him to barely miss catching it; a Pizza Hut® delivery driver misses his calls for help because he’s briefly tethered to the drain by his wallet chain; a ladder lowered into the pool by strangers rolls away as he approaches it because it’s attached to a precarious stack of pipes. There are two major obstacles to survive in this picture: a cheaply rendered crocodile & an absurdist Rube Goldberg contraption designed specifically to keep him in place.

And then, just when you think The Pool is going to play everything for cheap laughs, it gets shockingly fucked up. Its flash-forward preview of the killer croc warns the audience of the film’s limited budget, but there’s no such accommodation for its wild shifts in tone. This is fun, upsetting trash that’s eager to push its limited scenario to its furthest extremes, alternating between slapstick gags & vicious cruelty without much notice. I will not spoil the shock value violence of its third act, so I’ll just report that I genuinely gasped once I got there. Weirdly, there’s also a thematic undertone to the film that suggests it might be Pro-Life propaganda. Otherwise goofball characters discuss in severe, worried tones about how “abortion is illegal, and also a sin”, and the killer croc herself only really lashes out to protect her eggs from being eaten by her fellow starved prisoners. I honestly don’t know what to make of that thematic swerve, nor do I know what to make of the film’s harsh shifts from broadly comedic schtick to nasty ultraviolence. All I can say is that I’m impressed that a film this cheap & this unassuming managed to surprise me at all, especially considering its reliance on a flash-forward prologue.

-Brandon Ledet

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

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It took me a long time to learn that it’s unnecessary to force yourself to care about every movie & filmmaker that’re widely deemed Important. What I’m working on learning now is that it’s also unnecessary to broadcast the fact that you don’t care; it’s okay to just stay out of the conversation when they come up. It turns out that second lesson is much more difficult, which is why I’m reviewing a Charlie Kaufman movie even though he’s not really My Thing. After finding both Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa incredibly frustrating (even if formally interesting), I should have known better than to indulge Kaufman’s latest 135-minute mind-flattener, I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Every one of his pretentious meta-crises has ecstatic defenders who find them to be the height of postmodern screenwriting and zealous buzzkills who find them to be morally repugnant drivel. By now it’s crystal clear that I’m not among either camp. Even just a few days after I’m Thinking of Ending Things premiered on Netflix, there’s already a sea of lengthy tomes praising its genius or its decrying its crimes against pop entertainment (or, more relatably, against the inner lives of women), but all I can really muster is a half-hearted “Meh.” I think that means it’s time to walk away from discussing this particular filmmaker, possibly forever.

To be totally honest, I already knew it was time to walk away. I was going to skip this film entirely until I read that Jessie Buckley (who still hasn’t earned sufficient accolades for her work in Beast) was starring in a trippy meta-horror about a psychological break with reality. That sounds like My Thing. I was on the hook for what I’m Thinking of Ending Things was up to for at least its first hour, wherein Buckley suffers a miserable, real-time road trip in a snowstorm to meet her boyfriend’s grotesquely annoying parents. The title is a refrain that Buckley repeats on loop in her constant internal monologue (hidden behind her trademark constant smirk), referring both to suicidal ideation and to her desire to break up with her pretentious asshole boyfriend (Jesse Plemons). Once they reach the horrifically awkward meet-the-parents dinner, the film shifts into an Exterminating Angel type existential crisis, where there’s no way to back out of the monogamous courtship ritual that led them there and all momentum is leading towards them aging into the same hideously uninteresting husks as the boyfriend’s parents (David Thewlis and Toni Collette). That is, until it stops caring about Buckley’s character entirely and goes all in on the pretentious asshole’s inner life instead – territory that Kaufman has covered all too extensively in his past work.

There’s a lot to admire here, which is always true of Kaufman’s films to some extent and always makes them even more frustrating when considered in totality. I’m Thinking of Ending Things tackles a lot of the universally relatable indignities of romantic courtship & growing old in the most obscure, unrelatable ways possible. It has an chillingly effective way of shifting minor details like wardrobe, set design, and characters’ entire identities to disorient the audience within its nightmarishly Ordinary hellscape, which works in its favor when it’s aiming for a Lynchian horror mood (complete with closed captions that read “[wind howling]” for Twitter-ready screengrabs). I’ll even admit that I was amused by its self-hating pretentiousness at times, especially in its absurdly lengthy allusions to outside texts like poems, musicals, and Pauline Kael movie reviews. Still, as engaging as the film could be intellectually, I just couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to care about where it was going or what it was saying, especially once it left the hellish parental dinner of the second act.

This film is fine overall, I guess, but I personally got a lot more out of Vivarium‘s amused hatred of aging & monogamous courtship with nearly an hour less investment. It’s probably best that I walk away from the already excessively vast conversation surrounding I’m Thinking of Ending Things without saying more than that. I may not care much about what Charlie Kaufman is up to but, to quote his own screenplay (or maybe the film’s source-material novel), “It’s good to remind yourself that the world is bigger than inside your own head.” Hopefully by the next time he releases one of these self-indulgent meta-provocations I will have learned to leave the conversation to people who actually get something out of them, positive or negative.

-Brandon Ledet

Rapture in Blue (2020)

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It would be easy to dismiss Rapture in Blue outright for the blunt cheapness of its production values. Directed by an 18-year-old film nerd who just discovered David Lynch, it looks & feels like countless other D.I.Y. shorts that help pad out film fest schedules (and film festival rejection piles). However, to ignore the film’s merits based on its amateur quality alone calls into question who, exactly, is permitted to make movies in the first place. If Ryder Houston was the teenage progeny of an established millionaire filmmaker—like, say, Sofia Coppola, Oz Perkins, Brandon Cronenberg, or Jennifer Lynch—he might have the means to create something of “professional quality.” Instead, Rapture in Blue was partially funded through ad revenue from Houston’s own YouTube Channel and filmed on borrowed equipment. It’s incredibly cool that a teenager in Texas was able to complete a professionally distributed movie (recently picked up by the provocative queer media label Altered Innocence) outside the usual Industry channels of funding & production. To dismiss it outright based on its production values alone would only reinforce the financial gatekeeping that ensures this outsider-filmmaking miracle doesn’t happen more often.

In a way, Rapture in Blue‘s budgetary restrictions almost make its Lynch-on-the-cheap indulgences more bizarrely surreal – the very same quality that made last year’s Knives and Skin such a memorable oddity. This is a medium-length supernatural horror about the anxieties & pressures of being closeted. A straight-passing teenager becomes increasingly frayed as his girlfriend pressures him into having sex for the first time. Meanwhile, he finds himself hopelessly drawn to the bedside of a mysterious stranger who’s moved into his childhood home. Like in the unlikely queer cult classic Freddy’s Revenge, every near-sexual encounter he has with his girlfriend is punctuated by the emergence of a grotesque demon, a physical manifestation of his anxieties about being closeted. Likewise, his genuine attraction to the teenage enigma who occupies his childhood bedroom inevitably comes to its own violent crescendo, one of his own cowardly making. There’s a nightmarish menace to the story that’s constantly on the verge of breaking away from reality to fully commit to a supernatural phantasmagoria. Whether because of budgetary restrictions or first-film timidity, that full-bonkers payoff never really arrives, but the film’s off-kilter mood lingers despite that disappointment.

The most obvious signifiers that this was directed by a teenager is the film’s nostalgia for cultural touchstones Ryder was not even alive for: classic Lynch, 80s goth soundtrack cues, early 2000s flip phones, Polaroid cameras, a strategically placed Watcher in the Woods poster, etc. The overall effect is a 90s film festival mood presented in 2010s digi, which works in its favor in terms of its old-school genre payoffs and maybe works against it in its commitment to a traditional straight vs. gay binary in its exploration of closeted sexuality. The movie can feel a little rough around the edges and frustratingly inert, but there’s also something really exciting about its D.I.Y. arthouse horror tone. If this were a professionally crewed Hollywood production starring Andrew Garfield & Caleb Landry Jones as its sexually conflicted leads, people would be creaming their jeans over The New Face of Horror. Since that’s not the case, let’s at least hope that it does its job as a calling card for Ryder’s developing talents, leading to better funded and more fully bonkers queer horror oddities in the near future.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Housebound (2014)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the Kiwi haunted house comedy Housebound (2014) and how its third-act twist feels like a disruptor in the horror genre.

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Mark “Boomer” Redmond & Brandon Ledet

The Beach House (2020)

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One of the pitfalls of regularly watching genre movies is that they start to blend together if you don’t diversify your diet. The way genre films can repeat and reshape the same story templates into thousands of uniquely meaningful variations is a beautiful thing. However, if you watch, say, five varying riffs on The Thing or Groundhog Day in a month the barriers that distinguish each individual film start to break down. All of that is to say that the modestly budgeted Lovecraftian horror The Beach House was very poorly timed, to no particular fault of the film itself. In a year where The Beach House has to compete for attention with fellow new releases Color Out of Space, Sea Fever, and The Rental—all of which cover nearly identical genre territory with much larger budgets & creative resources—it has almost no chance of standing out as its own distinct vision. Still, the benefit of working within the realm of genre is that these familiar templates have their own guaranteed entertainment payoffs baked into their recipes. It took me a while to warm up to The Beach House as a worthwhile, distinct product, but it does eventually get pretty gnarly while staging its climactic mayhem, conjuring a few memorably horrid images that will continue to haunt me despite the rest of the film’s overbearing familiarity.

(Like in Sea Fever), The Beach House features an aspiring scientist, who (like in The Rental) finds herself in a tense social situation while intoxicated with her boyfriend and a strange couple at vacation home, until (like in Color Out of Space) an extraterrestrial infection mutates the people & landscape around her into a grotesque Lovecraftian hellscape. It’s not just the familiarity with these archetypes & settings that makes the film difficult to sink into. The melodramatic CW Network-flavored acting style and the influence of drugs & alcohol also confuse what’s intentionally off in the protagonist’s surroundings and what’s just mistakenly inauthentic & cheesy. It’s impossible to fully get your footing in the film’s early goings, where it’s unclear whether there’s already something sinister in the air or if the dialogue is just being unevenly performed by the subprofessionals the modest budget could afford. Things quickly pick up once the parameters of the beachside Lovecraft horror become explicitly clear, though, and the hideous chaos of the back half more or less erases the tedium of its build-up. I’m not sure the film has anything more to say than “Don’t take edibles with strangers in an unfamiliar location” or “Never trust a fuckboy named Randall” but its pseudoscientific descent into primordial horror is well staged once it gets past those first-act speed bumps.

There are a few isolated, truly grotesque images in The Beach House that should perk up any horror nerds who make it past the doldrums of the film’s early stirrings. Whether seeking out those scattered nightmare visions for their own sake is enough to justify watching an entire movie is dependent on your own appetite for this kind of material. That’s especially true in a year where it’s bested in nearly every way by Color Out of Space in particular, which goes so much further in both its supernatural mayhem and its off-putting performances that The Beach House almost feels wholly redundant, if not just poorly timed. It might have fared better in a different year, but I can’t pretend that it registers as anything particularly memorable in our current context.

-Brandon Ledet

Host (2020)

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I’ve already spilled gallons of digital ink praising high-concept horror films about The Evils of The Internet and how technology is going to kill us all. I promise it’s not a bit. I’m genuinely enamored with movies that fully commit to an Online Horror gimmick, especially the ones that hone in on a specific app or social media platform for a temporal anchor (Skype in Unfriended, OnlyFans in Cam, CandyCrush in #horror, Snapchat in Sickhouse, Facebook timelines in Friend Request, etc.). The argument against the Online Horror gimmick is that it makes these films feel instantly dated, which I’d contend is more of a virtue than a fault. We spend so much of our modern lives online, navigating virtual spaces, that it feels outright dishonest that contemporary cinema would not reflect that digitized reality. Yet, it seems only gimmicky horror films are the ones brave enough to truthfully document & preserve our daily “lived” experience. They’re no more dated than Citizen Kane was for capturing the media mogul megalomania of contemporary figures like William Randolph Hearst or Casablanca was for reflecting America’s selfish isolationism in the earliest days of WWII. Evil Internet novelty horrors capture the moods & textures of our current era, where most of our lives play out in the eerie spaces beyond touchscreens & keyboards.

In that context, the new Shudder original Host is likely to remain one of the most vital, honest films released this year. Written, filmed, edited, and released in the months since the world went into lockdown for the current COVID-19 pandemic, Host is an instantly dated horror film and damn proud of it. Like the real-time Skype session gimmick of Unfriended (and plenty of other online found footage horrors besides), the film is staged as a fictional hour-long Zoom meeting. It’s a digital space many of us have had to become quickly acquainted with in recent months as working remotely has become more of a norm. Host smartly builds a lot of its scares around Zoom-specific quirks like the eeriness of lag time, the obscured view of pixilation, the uncanny-valley creepiness of artificial backgrounds & facial-recognition filters, and the feedback echo of a user logging into the same meeting on two separate devices. Its end credits are even scrolled through as a Zoom Participants list, which is a wonderfully thorough commitment to the premise. Other COVID-era details like a character scrambling to put on a face mask before fleeing out of their apartment or a young couple in quarantine becoming increasingly frustrated with each other’s constant presence drives home the nowness of the film even further for a shockingly unnerving experience. A decade from now (assuming we’re all alive a decade from now), this will be a priceless cultural time capsule of what life has been like this incredibly bizarre year. Of course, watching it while those wounds are still fresh only makes it more perversely fun & horrific in the interim.

Story-wise, there’s not much going on here that hasn’t already been accomplished in Unfriended (or Unfriended 2: Dark Web or Searching or The Den or so on). If anything, this is basically just a kinder, gentler Unfriended with genuinely likeable characters. That doesn’t necessarily make it an improvement on the formula, but it at least opens it up to a different flavor palate. A group of college-age women gather in a Zoom meeting for an online séance led by a spiritual guide who becomes disconnected mid-call, leaving them vulnerable to whatever ghosts or demons they may have conjured in the process. They’re generally likeable kids, and their only sin, really, is not taking the idea of an online séance very seriously (a sentiment likely shared by most of the film’s audience), which results in supernatural backlash from spirits on the other side of barrier between realms. Once the spirits start punishing these women for their careless indulgences in sarcasm & edgelord humor (they seem to be particularly miffed about a tasteless suicide joke), the movie mostly devolves into a series of haunted house gags where each Zoom participant is snuffed out one by one. The scares are impressively staged, combining practical & computerized effects to really stretch how much can be collaboratively achieved in a social-distance lockdown. And, honestly, it’s impressive that anything was achieved at all, considering how difficult it’s been to complete simple tasks and function as a human being in recent months.

Perhaps the most COVID-aware aspect of Host is that it’s only an hour long, which graciously accommodates how scattered & limited our attention spans have been since the world stopped in its tracks. Even if you’re not fully convinced that this kind of high-gimmick novelty horror about The Evils of The Internet is worthy of your attention, that hour-long commitment is such a small ask. It’s unlikely that we’ll see another feature film this year that so directly, accurately captures what life is like right now, and I’m honestly not shocked that my beloved Online Horror subgenre was the engine that got us there. It’s perfectly suited for that kind of of-the-moment documentation, with plenty of other entertaining payoffs besides.

-Brandon Ledet

Butt Boy (2020)

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I am saddened to report that the prestigious motion picture Butt Boy is the absolute worst new release I’ve seen so far this year. That’s right; the festival darling that’s been earning such accolades as “a constipated would-be cult comedy” & “a strained, clenched exercise in fanny fiction” didn’t turn out to be as worthwhile of an experience as I expected, by which I mean I felt like Michael Bluth opening a sandwich bag labeled “DEAD DOVE Do Not Eat!” It’s a shame too, because Butt Boy’s over-the-top premise could have easily been deployed for something delightfully, memorably absurd, only for that potential to be deflated by its lethal overdose of hipster irony & edgelord humor. Butt Boy has a great logline & title, which is a small consolation for the 100 minutes of poisonous tedium that follows that initial delight.

A desperately bored office drone finds a new, highly addictive joy in life: sticking increasingly risky objects up his butt – starting with bars of soap & television remotes and gradually escalating to entire human beings. This supernatural, rectal crime spree is disrupted when he is assigned to be the AA sponsor of an alcoholic police detective who improbably uncovers his evil supernatural deeds. It’s an unashamedly idiotic premise that the film plays straight, as if it were a very special episode of CSI: Uranus, which at least saves it from fully treading into Sharknado-infested “bad”-on-purpose waters. Still, the movie doesn’t have anything especially fresh or nuanced to say about addiction, prostate pleasure, or midlife ennui. Beyond the novelty of it functioning as a Macho counterpoint to the recent body horror chiller Swallow, the entire film is basically one joke repeated over & over again: “Isn’t it hilarious when cis men shove things up their ass?” Spoiler: it’s not.

I should have been wise enough to bail within the first ten minutes of Butt Boy. At the very least, an early scene where the titular antihero discovers the pleasures of anal play when a doctor aggressively assaults him during a prostate exam should have been a tip-off that this film was not coming from a good place. Its penchant for latent homophobia & edgelord provocation only worsens from there, as it takes cheap shots at such delightful topics as cerebral palsy, suicide, and child abduction for easy shock humor. Way to punch up, assholes. I could probably also get worked up over the way the film (unknowingly?) equates prostate play with pedophilia, considering how the protagonist moans in pleasure whenever inserting objects into himself—including multiple young boys—but fully taking offense would be giving the film more effort than it’s worth. It’s thinly considered in both its writing and its execution, so I guess my engagement with it should remain just as shallow.

Butt Boy stinks. I suppose I’m somewhat glad I watched it just to I confirm that I still have standards, as most reviews on this site tend to range from positive to ecstatic. Otherwise, it was the movie equivalent of being locked in a hot car with Dad Farts and rolled-up windows: an excruciating experience only a bully would put someone through.

-Brandon Ledet

Aquaslash (2020)

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Anyone who’s deathly allergic to “bad”-on-purpose, winking-at-the-camera horror novelties like Zombeavers, Sharknado, or Hobo with a Shotgun should beware this review, because I’m about to be a lot kinder to the genre than it likely deserves.

Aquaslash is a retro novelty slasher about a killer waterpark slide that’s rigged with giant blades to chop idiot teens into pieces. The film is built entirely around setting up & executing that singular gore gag, so it has to save all of its bloodbath payoffs for the final 20 minutes. It’s cheap, it’s mean, it’s silly and, at only 70min in length, it barely registers as an actual movie. I still found myself ultimately having a great time with it despite my better judgement, though, which mostly came down to the film’s one saving grace: its central waterslide kill gimmick. The movie may be embarrassingly thin, absurdly insincere, and entirely reliant on one idea, but that idea is so impressively stupid and well-executed that it’s somehow worth the effort it takes to get there.

The setup to this film feels like any other post-Asylum exercise in ironic camp horror, but the follow-through is refreshingly sleazy in that context. Recent graduates from the fictional Valley Hills High School celebrate with a wild party weekend at the (equally goofily named) Wet Valley Water Park. This celebration is explained to be a tradition dating back to the 1980s, which allows the film to play around with Totally 80s™ nostalgia clichés in its 50-minute lead up to the waterslide gore promised in the title. That sounds like a mood-ruiner in the abstract, and it sometimes is when it comes to forced nostalgia signifiers like an abysmally shitty rock cover of Cory Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night.” However, it at least fully embraces the inherent sleaze of 80s slasher in a way that feels shockingly out of place in this kind of winking-at-the-camera novelty.

This is maybe the most enthusiastically committed illustration of Straight Guy™ sexuality I’ve seen since the hair metal music video was king. Young women’s bikini-clad breasts are used as bouncing eye-distractors, cocaine-sniffing surfaces, and splash zones for blacklight neon splooge – anything (within reason) they can get away with doing to titties to fill time before it can pull the trigger on the last-minute gore. That indulgence would be offensive if it weren’t so cornily outdated in a way that felt genuinely retro. As is, it’s overtly sexist the way an old stack of Playboys can be: quaintly so.

Bikini Babes & inane teenage drama are plentiful here; the gore is something you have to work for. The killer waterslide gag itself is truly incredible, though, and I believe the movie is short & harmless enough to get away with the delay. More importantly, it genuinely commits to the grotesque sleaze of the era it’s nostalgic for, as opposed to the Asylum style of retro novelty filmmaking that would rather pave over those unpleasantries with referential jokes & Z-list celebrity stunt casting. The sex is actually vulgar; the practical-effects violence is grotesque. All in all, this might be the best possible version of this kind of “bad”-on-purpose novelty that gives away its one original idea in its trailer & poster. My only major complaint, really, is that it should have been titled Slaughterpark.

-Brandon Ledet