Return to Splatter Farm

Whatever these people were paid to act in this, it was too much.

Thirty three years passed between Mark Polonia's SOV gore film Splatter Farm and this sequel, during which time he directed plenty of other films; you would think he would have improved a lot over the space of three decades, but judging by Return to Splatter Farm, he's actually lost what little skill he had in the first place.

A good slasher usually features attractive people being sliced and diced in creative and gory ways by an iconic killer. Polonia's film features ugly people being offed in lazy and unimaginative ways by a lame maniac (played by Polonia's co-director and writer of this garbage, Jeff Kirkendall), with some truly pathetic special make-up effects.

The film sees Bobbi (Danielle Donahue) and her friends visiting the titular farm, the young woman having recently inherited the place. While there, they are attacked one-by-one by Jeremy, the killer from the first film, who has been living on the farm, bumping off any passers-by.

The acting is diabolical, the direction is basic, and the editing is awful. In addition to the bargain basement gore, Polonia and Kirkendall get two of the 'actresses' to strip for the camera: Jennie Russo as big-breasted middle-aged nympho Gina, and Mel Heflin, who plays Liz, an overweight redhead with delusions that she is sexy (if her skin was green, she'd be Princess Fiona's less attractive sister).

Nowhere near as much fun as the original movie, which had more gore and a certain demented charm about it, Return to Splatter Farm is unforgivably dull and utterly inept (the scene in which lank-haired loser Gopher is hit by lightning being the worst moment).

1.5/10, rounded down to 1 for the terrible theme song.

If you have zero brain cells and want to lose more, then this is your film.

Only the cover of the film is worth looking at.

I think sometimes with horror films, we tend to forgive bad acting and a diabolical script as par for the course. We try and enjoy it for what it is. This however, is an exception to that rule. Painfully bad in absolutely every aspect, rendering it almost unwatchable. Another 90 minutes of my life goes sailing into the abyss that I'll never get back 🙄

Splatter Farm (1987), in strictly cinematic terms, is a work devoid of any real value: its narrative is rudimentary, its technical execution virtually non-existent, and its aesthetic approach borders on the repulsive. And yet, despite - or perhaps because of - its innumerable flaws, the film retains a singular power. There is in it a raw visceral quality, an unhealthy honesty that, while deeply disturbing, feels authentic. It is a product of its time and context, a primitive testament to the most extreme guerrilla filmmaking, impactful not because of its quality but due to its complete lack of restraint.

Return to Splatter Farm (2020), by contrast, is a very different case. This belated sequel, despite its clear technical improvements - better cinematography, intelligible sound, formal scene construction - is paradoxically even more of a failure. By adopting a self-conscious posture and attempting to replicate, with modern resources, the spirit of a film that was first and foremost an unrepeatable accident, it falls into the trap of becoming a hollow pastiche, stripped of any spontaneity.

The core issue lies not only in its execution, but in its very reason for existing: Return to Splatter Farm offers neither a new interpretation nor a revisionist take. It merely imitates the excesses of the original from an ironically sanitized perspective. By professionalizing what was once pure chaos, it completely loses the marginal and transgressive character that, in all its ineptitude, made Splatter Farm a unique artifact within American underground cinema.

In short, if the 1987 film was an anomaly - a brutal scream from the cultural periphery - this sequel is merely an empty echo, polished into sterility. Its attempt to resurrect the irrecoverable not only fails but relegates the grotesque to the realm of the predictable and trivial.