Billy Club

Not horrible and not good. And nowhere near great or bad enough to be trashy campy treasure. Some nice use of 1990's nostalgic microfilm and a CD jukebox. Back before the internet murdered everything and made most things available in your home and at your fingertips instantly. A funny pizza delivery scene killing with the wrong suspect being arrested by cops and fleeing away in his Bryan Cranston tighty whiteys. Kudos to the ATV go-pro hallucination scene that came out of left field and was a home run. Most of the kills were professional and impressive.

To harsh to call the filmmakers "wannabes" or fugazi because their heart was in the right place. But if I watch one more formulaic clichéd flashback than I will bash myself in the head with a baseball bat full of rusty nails.

Nothing real original a Graduation Day (1981) / Some Guy Who Kills People (2011) ripoff played out with a baseball theme. And a crazy baseball horror movie called Catcher (1998) seemed to inspire a few scenes as well. Just passing my opinion to fellow movie lovers to skip this one like a rock and get your jolly ranchers elsewhere. Time available to watch our beloved films is so precious.

Nobody likes to trash somebody's art. These guys obviously love movies. Fanboys love them so much we all dream of making one or two. But at the end of the day some of us were just born to watch them.

Trevor Layne Movies & Candy

Wow I struggled with whether to go with a 5 or a 6 rating on this. Ultimately I decided to be slightly more generous because "Billy Club" was better than I expected a slasher film to be and the production values were quite good for low budget.

I was leaning towards the 5, however, because the characters were a special kind of dumb and it was frighteningly easy to figure out who the killer was. Starting with, like, the title?

Anyway, "Billy Club" is about a guy dressed as an umpire who wields a Swiss Army knife bat as his weapon of choice to kill off the now-grown kids who left him for dead after a punishment gone wrong after he blew a baseball game.

The good: Production values were impressive considering the budget. They made it look every bit as dollar-heavy as Jason or Freddy. The cinematography was excellent, even nighttime and inside scenes were clear and the audio was well maintained without me having to touch my remote once. The acting wasn't Oscar-worthy, but impressive considering I've never heard of anyone except for Mark Metcalf, who was in a brief flashback. The score was effective and appropriate, and the pacing was at a good clip and kept the film from getting too dull.

The bad: The script struggled to keep up with any common sense. Perhaps because they show their hand right off the bat (ba-dum-bum), working around so many plot holes became a minefield. As mentioned before, the dumb moves made by the characters were mind boggling. Of course, you expect stupidity in slasher films, so maybe I'm being too harsh. Then there's the also-expected Worst. Police. Ever. They're there, too. The explanation at the end seemed to take way too long, and the last scene concluded with a thud.

I don't generally care for slasher films, but I gave this one a chance because it had a higher than usual rating and instead of a suspicious overabundance of 10s, the reviews were more reasonable and informative. So if you're the same, maybe give it a shot. It's not a flash of brilliance, but considering the genre, it's not bad.

Most great indie horror films are a testament to hard work, a good script, and great cast in spite of lesser production values and a series of technical flaws. There's potential in them even if they need a fresh coat of paint. Billy Club is, surprisingly, the opposite.

Billy Club looks like a million bucks. There's no doubt the people behind this movie worked hard, long hours to make this movie look as professional and polished as its low budget would allow. Framing and angles are inventive and cinematic and most sound cues are crisp and well-mixed.

Billy Club should be a head above the rest of these low budget slasher flicks, but it's not. Despite the impressive glow up, this owes more to the no-budget absurd straight to video slashers of the early 2000s than any of the golden age classics like My Bloody Valentine or Prom Night.

As a concept, Billy Club seems promising. You see, in the early 80's, a few kids and their baseball coach were found murdered on the field and a crazy kid named Billy was sent away for it. Years later, he's let go from the nuthouse and starts taking out the rest of his surviving teammates because they once pulled a near-deadly prank on him. He's actually starting to make sense and I can understand his reasonings. These people are awful.

Billy Club suffers from that ever-present likability problem most post-2000 slasher flicks have. No one in this movie is worth caring about and, even if they are, they end up doing something incredibly stupid just seconds later. The amount of characters in this film who get out of a car in a secluded area and just start walking into the woods for seemingly no reason is staggering. You can feel the screenwriters realizing they desperately need to find a reason to get these characters alone, but this was the best they could come up with. And who can blame them? With characters as shallow as this, that probably was the thing that made the most sense for them at that point in the story.

What Billy Club does get right, it really gets right. The kill scenes are incredibly grisly and there are a few unforgettable images throughout the film. When the film's heroine comes across a macabre art installation of her friends at a secluded lake, you'll be hard pressed to not gasp in awe. It's a truly unforgettable image and any film is lucky to possess at least one of those, so you can't write Billy Club off completely.

It could have used another draft or two before production, but Billy Club does have its saving graces.

Impressively fair slasher.

Can someone tell me if this was inspired by another film with a similar plot?

There was another indie slasher that began with a group of cruel kids on a baseball field who teased another youngster. When the boy attempted to catch a fly ball hit out of the field, he was struck by a car. The movie (that looks similar to this one) is about these same cruel kids who are all grown up years later and are reunited at a bed and breakfast cabin and begin receiving strange threats from a mystery man who stalks them. Very scary and intensifying indie Thriller with a similar plot to "Billy Club".

The problem with this film is that it's scarce. I don't remember if it was part of a Horror Anthology or actual indie movie that possibly inspired Billy Club.

Can anyone remember this scarce film?

Not a great slasher movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it has enough different and unique elements to make it a worthwhile watch. None of the characters are very likable and some are downright monsters, but it's reasonably well shot for a low budget movie and I liked that it focused on adults and not teenagers.