Blood Massacre

The most fun 71 minutes I've had in a long time! If anyone can ever get there hands on this one definitely give it a view.

A sleazy gang hides out at a remote country house.Unbeknowst for them the family which lives there turns out to be killer cannibals."Blood Massacre" by Don Dohler is an okay low-budget slasher/cannibal yarn.The acting is surprisingly passable and there are some original ideas to be found here,but the photography is weak and there is not enough gore for my liking.However the film manages to be both entertaining and sleazy,so I'm not complaining more.It also offers some nice twists and turns.Don Dohler actually reworked the film as "Harvesters" in 2001 with George Stover now playing the head of the family.So if you enjoyed "Fiend" or "Nightbeast" you can't go wrong with "Blood Massacre".6 out of 10.

First of all, what an amazing title. B-movie titles never really get subtle, but Don Dohler is playing in a whole different ballpark here. A blood massacre, that's the best kind there is!

Don Dohler is mainly known for making the same movie over and over again: an alien lands on Earth (usually a forest, as it is free to shoot there), gets into all kinds of PG-rated havoc, rednecks fire guns, the end. That synopsis fits "Alien Factor", "Nightbeast", "Galaxy Invader" and uhm... "Alien Factor 2". "Blood Massacre" however, is something completely different you don't exactly associate with Dohler. It's an ultra-violent horror movie where most of the cast members die horrible, gory deaths.

The plot is almost non-existent. A group of violent criminals (led by Dohler regular George Stover)goes from town to town robbing and occasionally murdering people. With the police (well, one inspector) hot on their trail they lay low in a farmhouse, but it's a horror movie so naturally the nice, friendly family inside turns out to be cannibals.

As limited a filmmaker as Don Dohler was, I've got to say this is one of his best movies. The suspense is actually build up pretty well, with the old farmhouse gradually revealing its secrets. It helps that Robin London (who, sure enough, only has one credit) gives a genuinely creepy performance as the family's insane daughter. Her bizarre sex scene with Stover is the highlight or the low point of this movie, I haven't decided yet. The minute you see her smirk at the main characters, you know they're in a heap of trouble.

The final act is obviously a battle between both groups, like "The Hills Have Eyes" with a budget of three dollars. Sadly, it's almost impossible to follow. For most of it the screen is almost completely dark, so you really have to squint to figure out which character you're looking at and whether or not they're being killed. The editing is also very confusing, most of the time you don't know when or where the action is supposedly happening. I do really like the random ending though, which borrows more than a few things from "Evil Dead".

Don Dohler wasn't very happy with this movie, which was released four years after shooting had wrapped up. He had to reshoot a lot of stuff at the distributors' request, which made him quit film-making altogether for nearly a decade. With that said, I really have a sweet spot for this movie in all it's micro-budget glory. It's a charming mom&pop-style slasher, just don't expect anything more than that.

Don by name, 'the Don' by nature, maverick-minded, luridly inventive, low budget horror impresario, Don Dohler, truly is the Grindhouse gift that just keeps on giving, and I have a powerful yen to express my boundless joy at experiencing his gruesome, George Stover-starring, wickedly gnarly sounding home invasion insanity, 'Blood Massacre' (1991), and such a tantalizingly blunt title could only mean one thing, the entirely welcome reality of yet another gob-smackingly gory instalment of deep backwoods-weirdness that only the diabolical dean of B-Movie delirium, Don Dohler can deliver!

Murderously misanthropic, foul-mouthed ex-Vietnam vet and full-time creep-master, Rizzo (George Stover) is the most vociferously distempered member of a disorganized, douchey crew of ghetto-grungy, unsophisticated freebooters whose last impromptu violent Video Store heist yielded little more gain than the tenacious, wholly unwanted attentions of Detective McGuire (Herb Otter Jr.) and a sudden desperate need for immediate sanctuary!

The far from fortuitous theft of a car, and subsequently bad mojo-inducing kidnapping of a young woman, lickety split leads this querulous, terminally trash-mouthing mob to her remote family home where fulminating tensions within the dismally dysfunctional gang are merely the foul-mouthed prelude to a cannibal-crazed, blissfully bad taste Blood Massacre! Huzzah!!! Even if venerated celluloid shock troopers Wes Craven, John Waters and Andy Milligan had combined their not inconsiderable horror-making idiosyncrasies they still might not have reached the exultant WTF apogee of low budget maestro Don Dohler's cheap-jack, adrenaline-jacked backwoods' skeezoid slasher classic, 'Blood Massacre'.

'Blood Massacre' is another hen's teeth elusive example wherein the conspicuous lack of funds, and rushed, expeditious 'look' of a 'seat-of-the pants approach' to gonzo filmmaking adds a fabulously frantic verisimilitude to the macabre Helter Skelter insanity of maestro, Don Dohler's idiosyncratic insanity, dude!!!

This long shelved ( filmed sometime in the mid 1980s ) shot-on-video horror begins with Cinemagic Visual Effects logo staying on screen seemingly endlessly, while mashing down random keys on a low quality synthesiser, before crummy 80s music from no-name bar band. Everything in this opening scene in the bar is filmed in close-up, and with a fog machine being used to simulate smoky atmosphere, making it difficult to follow what is going on, or to notice the cash register, which is seemingly left over from an old western from the 1940s. Lead guy then orders " Beer ". Not, for example, a Heineken ( my preference ) , he just orders a beer. I love it when a movie does this, as though there is only one single type of beer on Earth.

" 🍺 "

After drinking his * beer * , bar guy kills people, later meets up with a trio of thugs, they debate what to do next. " I don't give a f***, let's just do something! ". Indeed.

So, they rob a video store! While wearing their Kim Carnes '81 Tour shirts, with a Freddy Krueger standee watching, these morons rob a mom and pop video store, and kill one​ person in the process. The entire robbery sequence is silent, with more terrible, almost comical, music dubbed in.

Later, a witness by the name of Captain Obvious tells police, the killers are " gonna hurt somebody! " , after they've already committed murder.

The Last House On The Left plot elements kick in, as the quartet of killers hold up in farmhouse with a family held hostage, but the hostages turn out to be cannibalistic killers, more dangerous than the original quartet of killers, and the family hunts them down and kills them one by one, in slightly gory fashion.

Film then switches gears, and becomes a wilderness survival horror in final fifteen minutes, as the original killer bar guy is the only survivor, ( making the presence of the other three villain characters completely pointless ) and he must fight for his life in the woods, against this cannibal family.

This film then features one of the most baffling, " What the f***? " plot twists I've ever seen, as the cannibal family peels their flesh off, to reveal not only are they cannibalistic killers, but also unkillable skeletal aliens!

* speechless *