Splatter Farm

My fellow IMDb reprobates Woodyanders, Hey_Sweden, HumanoidOfFlesh, EVOL666, slayrrr666 and Tromafreak have already seen and commented on this shot-on-VHS gore-fest. I'm so late to the party, but glad I made it eventually: Splatter Farm is technically inept in every department, with some of the worst acting this side of a preschool nativity play, but it's clearly a labour of love by first time writers/directors John and Mark Polonia, and it doesn't hold back on the graphic filth and depravity. Good times!

The Polonias also star in this surprisingly squalid debut, as brothers Joseph and Alan, who are invited by their Aunt Lacey (Marion Costly) to spend the summer on her farm, the boys blissfully unaware of the perversion and violence that awaits them. Aunt Lacey is a twisted old dear whose barn is home to the rotting corpse of her husband Ray (who died in a freak 'axe-cident'). Ray's pecker has long since turned to dust, so lonely Aunt Lacey is only too happy to have two handsome, strapping young men* come to stay at her home, even if they are her nephews. Even more disturbed than incestuous Aunt Lacey is her handyman Jeremy (Todd Michael Smith), who murders passers-by, wears their skin Leatherface-style, and uses body parts to satisfy his sexual urges (in one scene, he uses a victim's severed head to give himself oral pleasure, beating Haute Tension to the punch by 16 years).

In the days that follow, the lads become increasingly suspicious about the bizarre behaviour of Aunt Lacey and Jeremy, and decide to investigate; meanwhile, one of the lads has a dream in which he craps out a carving knife while sat on the toilet (we've all had that one, right?). Aunt Lacey eventually 'roofies' and rapes Alan, which is most unsavoury, but the other brother gets it worse: after knocking Joseph unconscious and giving him a quick BJ, Jeremy ties the poor bloke up in the barn, wakes him up by urinating on him, flips him over, yanks down his pants, fists him, smears faeces on his face, pokes him with a pitchfork, and then buries him alive! Bearing in mind that this is a home-made shot-on-video film, this is staggeringly bold stuff, John Polonia even getting his meat and two veg out for the camera.

Clearly inspired by The Texas Chain Saw Massace, but without any of that film's class and style, Splatter Farm is micro-budgeted messed-up madness designed to shock, and as such, is unmissable viewing for fans of deliberately offensive z-grade trash. Ignore the movie's many obvious shortcomings - the crude direction, dreadful writing, diabolical editing, awful sound quality, and Marion Costly's all-time-worst performance - and have fun wallowing in the filth and cheapjack gore brought to you by the Polonias, who make up for their lack of film-making skills with sheer enthusiasm and gross-out excess (the film closes with a demented plot twist, a shot-gun blast to a head, and a full body explosion, ferchristsakes!)

A hard one to rate - it's a 1/10 in terms of technical proficiency, but 10/10 for lunacy. So a 5.5/10 seems fair (rounded up to 6 for IMDb).

*I jest, of course: the Polonias are the epitomy of nerdishness and I've seen more meat on a baby sparrow.

During my time living in the Netherlands-a country known for its broad cultural tolerance and often audacious programming choices-I encountered an experience that would forever alter my understanding of the grotesque and the marginal. One seemingly ordinary afternoon, while having lunch with Dutch colleagues, a local television channel-mainstream, not thematic or specialized in exploitation cinema-broadcast Splatter Farm (1987). There were no content warnings. No disclaimers. Just the raw intrusion of the abject, right between spoonfuls of erwtensoep.

Splatter Farm is, to be blunt, a cinematic anomaly. Shot on home video, featuring performances of near-archaeological ineptitude and a script that seems to have been regurgitated by a disturbed insomniac, the film operates in a state of decayed aesthetics that borders on snuff rather than traditional slasher. And yet, in its execution, there is an undeniable sincerity-an unfiltered commitment to the most scatological horror-that could almost be compared to Pasolini's provocations, if one is willing to descend deep enough into analytical depravity.

The plot-if it can be called that-revolves around two brothers visiting their aunt at a decrepit farm plagued by rot and violence. What follows is a grotesque parade of mutilation, necrophilia, cannibalism, and bodily fluids, all captured by a camera that never flinches. There is something almost pornographic here-not of desire, but of decay. One might interpret Splatter Farm as a visual essay on the decomposition of family bonds and the symbolic rot of post-Reagan rural America.

From an academic perspective, the film deserves a degree of attention for its value as a primitive artifact of extreme DIY cinema. Its brutalist aesthetic, rudimentary editing, and unapologetic dedication to excess make it a vital reference in the study of underground splatter and the history of amateur American video. But to witness it unintentionally, in daylight hours, surrounded by polite citizens watching it as calmly as one might a rerun of Baantjer, was a cultural trauma bordering on surreal.

Is it a good film? Hardly.

Is it an authentic cinematic experience? Absolutely.

There is a scene in "Splatter Farm" where, after making a ghastly discovery in a barn, one of our twin protagonists stumbles outside and vomits. He runs off, and a delighted cat runs over and we get an up-close scene of him happily lapping it up. He really digs in to them chunks of turnip! I could say that this sums up the debut film from the infamous Polonia brothers but I would be lying. Not when there are multiple scenes of dismemberment, some incest and torture to boot. All cheaply done, I may add, but very visceral. Which is not to say that "Splatter Farm" is a dismissible, straight-to-video exploitation film. On the contrary, it is quit the shocker, and is high on the creative energy of the Polonia brothers, who wrote the script, starred and directed along with their pal Todd Smith.

The film sees foul-mouthed brothers Alan and Joseph driving out in to the countryside to spend the summer at their Aunt's farm. She is a disgusting old pervert of a woman, who can't take her eyes off of these two young men, even though they are her nephews! Alan and Joseph are perturbed by the half-wit and creepy handyman that their auntie has plodding around the farm and lurking around the house. "What exactly does he do around here?" one of the brothers demands, in one of many hilarious outbursts. Well, when he isn't listlessly hacking weeds around the farm, Jeremy is exuberantly hacking people to pieces and making masks and ornaments out of their dead bodies (Such a blatant "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" rip-off but I'll let it slide). Pretty soon, the brothers find that they are on Jeremy's radar as well as their auntie's, and they'll be doing well to survive the week out here, let alone the entire summer.

Although the special effects are outrageously cheap, they are actually effective and I found some scenes stomach-churning. I believe the Polonia brothers were only about 19 when they made this, and you can see that they really had a flare for it and what they lacked in budget and experience, they more than made-up for when it came to visceral horror. The auntie is one of the most naturally terrifying and disgusting characters I've ever come across, so well done Marion Costly for that performance.

This is another scummy shot on video feature resurrected for DVD that plays on what other more marketable movies of the '80s were too afraid or weren't aloud to show due to moral crusaders at the MPAA. It's a simple film that doesn't have layers and since '87 the shock has been more effectively exploited. At the gory heart of it, "Splatter Farm" plays on taboos: thrill kills, mutilation of the dead, same sex acts with the dead, collecting dead parts, cannibalism, coprophilia, self-mutilation, animal slaughter, flagrant masturbation and, last but not least, incestuous overtones. As amateur and sometimes clumsily put together as it is, it's going to play on a viewer's nerves one way or another.

This truly is a DIY affair with only four main actors who did just about everything else behind the scenes also. Two of them are twins who are visiting their elderly aunt and late teens cousin on an isolated farm for their summer vacation. Their cousin is a make-up wearing sociopath who has no one to stop him from giving in to his sadistic urges. The movie started out pretty unsettling and strange with more focus on the demented cousin with too much time on his hands. As it progressed, it started to give the audience a break and lean towards the level-headed twins who are getting suspicious and attempting to put it all together. The aunt is caught in the middle and starts to make excuses either from blind motherly love or something of her own to hide.

As terrible as the production values go--including fake bodies that wouldn't fool the near-sighted even without their specs--this is unsettling in the dark ideas it brings to the chopping table. This gets right down to the nitty gritty of amoral without hesitation and with the help of the video quality makes you think there could be a case somewhere like this as out there as it is. Instead of lazily stomping on a synthesizer, the music helps stir up some mood by treating certain scenes with piano melodies and other abstract sounds. "Splatter Farm" had a number of flaws, but underneath the atrocious film quality this has what other underground and even mainstream horror films miss out on from time to time: a little bit of genuine creepiness. It could have faired better with a bigger budget and more time but all and all it's worth a single watch if that's your cup of bitter tea, otherwise the movie is more than likely going to be horrendous if you're only used to horror on a bigger scale. (Also submitted on http://fromblacktoredfilmreviews.blogspot.com/)

This movie clearly demonstrates why people shouldn't give other people their home-made movies.

The story, what little you can find of it, is that 2 twin brothers go to visit their aunt Lacy at her farm. The place is supposedly being kept in shape by Jeremy, but he's kinda busy killing people and using their corpses for sexual gratification. The twins begin finding body parts and grow weary of Jeremy. On top of this, Lucy has been alone too long and now finds herself lusting for one of her nephews. Eventually the twins decide enough's enough and try to get away. There's plenty of sick stuff going on, but the rest of the movie is so annoying, you'd be hard-pressed to even notice.

To my amazement, I actually found something not that bad in this movie. The guy playing Jeremy looked truly freakish and was doing a fairly decent job acting.

Absolutely everything else in the movie was undeniable crap though.

It was cut with a spoon, and put back together using chewing gum or something. You went from scene 1 with (extremely annoying) background music playing, to a silent shot of some scenery. No fading out the sounds here, instead they chop it off mid-tone. I lost count of the amount of times there was a crackle or pop when they put 2 scenes together.

The assembled corpses looked okay, but then someone would stand over one and work it over with an axe, getting blood sprayed into him from the side. Come on people, stuff like that isn't rocket science.

The lighting sucked in that oftentimes you couldn't see anything, but even more often everything was way, WAAY too bright, having the same end result.

The dialog, notably absent for the first 5 minutes of the film, was stupid and (st)uttered completely unconvincing. The redneck with Down's syndrome accents of the twins didn't help either.

This movie also has a rather large abundance of walking, sleeping, running, sitting doing nothing, reading the damn newspaper (and not noticing anything to help the story along), awkward silences and more, equally enjoyable filler.

The guy handling the camera seemed to be having Parkingsons disease or something. They couldn't even take a shot of the moon without shaking the camera!

To round it all off, they decided to add a (gasp) plot twist (!) at the end of the movie. If only the creative genius that dreamed that one up had been able to stay focused during the other 90 minutes of the film...

That this movie got a 3.7 here is a miracle in itself, and it's certainly undeserved. The fact that it's a home-movie doesn't excuse it from being the crap that it is.

This movie isn't fun, shocking, entertaining or gruesome. It's a dull, slow, boring, fake, cheap dog of a movie, and your time would be better spent watching paint dry.