Angelus-16

Make no mistake about it, any film called Bachelor Party Massacre is going be naff, but, surprisingly, it's not as crud as it probably should be. The title tells you all you need to know: four buddies gather in an abandoned bar to celebrate their friend Addison's last few days as single. They drink, order pizza, letch after some strippers and get stalked n' slashed by a poncho-clad schizo woman who is nothing more than your common-or-garden asylum escapee.

There's plenty of topless girls on show, fleshed out lapdancing sequences and watery blood-flowage. The effects budget obviously hindered some of the creativity and so a lot of the murders are off-screen or skewered by strange camera angles; one girl gets a stiletto in the head and a guy has a knife shoved in the worst possible place.

As a collector and general advocate of slasher films - this was the 416th I've seen by my count - I'll watch almost anything like this. Some suck, some are pretty good. I'd slot BPM towards the bottom of the stack, but it's not downright awful as, say, Carnage Road or The Slaughterhouse Massacre, which are almost entirely devoid of merit.

If you can believe it, *another* group of teens return to *another* lakeside cabin three years after *another* one of those fatal 'accidents' claimed one of their number. Low and behold, a psycho wearing a patterned hockey mask (a cheap papery one at that) turns up to waste them one by one. This mechanical 'Friday the 13th' knock off gained slight notoriety as one of the first digitally-shot features, but that's where the interesting facts end and all that remains is a predictable, amateur production with sub-par performances and a recurring boom-mic intrusion. A last-second twist does little to lift the spirits, and 'Memorial Day' is something best tossed in a lake and forgotten about. One for insane slasher collectors only.

Moderate Italian killer-fish saga concerning a genetically created shark-squid thing munching on various extras and the marine biologists who go after it. Not enough excitement to keep things afloat plus some bad continuity (watch for the scene where a fleeing woman is tripped by the creature and her handy axe flies overboard, in the next shot it's a couple of inches away from her...) Not the horrible mess it's been made out to be, but simply boring.