The Hazing

Thank you! t.v. cable cheap channels that have the courage to air this direct to video horror cheese flicks! When there's nothing to do at midnight on the week, these flicks air and believe me it's a pleasure for me to watch as I'm a lover of the low budget.

"Butchered" follows the same plot as in "HellNight", "The Initiation", and many more slasher flicks from the early 80's. The problem is that this flick from the year 2003 doesn't offers anything you haven't seen.

The "killer" kind of reminds me of the Garth Manion monsters from "HellNight" but not as near as scary. Ugh. This is a flick to booth from the trash can!.

The flick has cheap gore effects, scares, and a dull direction even for a direct to video mess! Watch it if you're like me, a hardcore fan of low budget horror flicks.

Well, the story is nothing new here: two girls wish to join a sorority and are asked as their final pledge initiation test to stay in a house known to be haunted(after licking sandals with chocolate sauce and being spanked with a big paddle labeled Daddy). The girls who are testing them and their boyfriends go to the house later that evening to scare them. Trouble of course comes to all when a girl, with an inhuman build and deformed body, starts terrorizing all of them(plus the obligatory pizza guy and a homeless man). Butchered is a bad picture all the way: with actors with virtually no range, hokey special effects, crude plot devices shown on film such as vomiting, a grade z budget, and a story that has been done in some form or fashion many, many times. But the makers of this film weren't trying to do anything else but show a lot of bloodletting, smashed heads and faces, eye gouging, knife cuts and slashes, and the typical devices used in a film of this ilk. We also get a "ghost" with braces. I'm not a gore-hound by any means, but if seeing plastic heads repeatedly slashed at is your thing, then you will be in for a treat. None of the characters are compelling, the plot is threadbare, and there is virtually no humour. Usually a film like this makes fun of itself in some way. What does it have going for it? All of the female cast, except Rebecca and the redheaded ghost with the braces, are very easy on the eyes. Susan Smythe in particular is an eyeful. Only one of the female thespians disrobes so don't expect too much in that area either. The other big plus is that the film lasts only 76 minutes. And as a final plus, I can say that for a bad film, Butchered is at the very least watchable. I didn't have to fast-forward, but rest assured I will not invest another 76 minutes to ever see it again.

The best sequence in "Butchered" occurs early on, when two girls are spanked with paddles by two other girls and then are forced to do "squishy" push-ups (you'll see what that means), as part of a sorority initiation. I must admit I found all of this quite a turn-on. But when the action moves on to the "haunted" house, the film offers nothing but derivative plotting, overacting, screaming, wandering around, watery blood and fake/exaggerated gore. I will give it * out of 4 for the effort; it's obvious that the people who made it do love horror flicks (they even included a double homage to "Halloween" and "Psycho" at the start). That doesn't mean they had enough talent to make one though!

Susan Smythe is wonderful to watch. Incredibly talented and charismatic as hell! Joe Castro and his special effects made me cheer loudly...probably scaring the neighbors. Pretty incredible FX for a low budget film.

Although not an Oscar winner, it's definitely a movie that would have made Herschell Gordon Lewis smile!

Now firstly I have to say that bad acting and dodgy plots have never really bothered me but I do get very bored with films that have nudity in them just for the sake of a little T&A now I know there are a lot of guys out there who like that and thats OK its just not my thing. When I first started to watch this I thought that is what this was gonna be about as the first 30 or so mins concentrate mainly on the two girls going through a Hazing for a local Sorority House and breasts are beared and the girls undergo a little light spanking but when it came to the cream in the bra's I thought forget this its gonna be a T&A show. Luckily I did stick with it and boy does it get quite good once all the characters get to the haunted house and begin to get picked off one by one I was surprised also that you could not really pick out which characters were gonna survive as the girl I though was gonna be the final one was killed first. The gore content is very high and if like me you like that then you will be happy. All in all a good rental and if like me you like taking chances and buying films go for it I think you might like it.