The Summer of Massacre

Starring: Brinke Stevens,Cleve Hall and Ted Alderman.

A JOE CASTRO Experience.

This film is a ride of Painful Proportions,Not because it's hard to watch ( Think of starting a Drinking Game for every death on screen ?) But,You almost feel bad for each victim,Over & Over again.

Let's breakdown the anthology segments.

RAMPAGE,Was first on DVD and can be summed up -An attack leads to another and another.

Some highlights( Wrong words?) would be the BINOCULAR shoving into skull and Blood & Guts spewing onto the camera lens (alot).

There is some very unique kills,Almost video game worthy and Let's see GRAND THEFT AUTO try the Auto-Shop scene anytime soon.

LUMP,Perhaps is alittle mean( Yeah,Even for this flick) and has the saving grace of BRINKE STEVENS getting to really act as the mother of a off-kilter familia.

SON OF THE BOOGIEMAN,A nannie ? dares some kids to go into a haunted house and is raped by the ogre within and spawns a child years later,that SHREK-like figure has been killing to see.

BURN, Has some nice fire effects and then a PLOT about two gay firemen allowed to burn to death while embraced and the revenge the disfigured mess brings to all fire starters for decades after.

Joe Castro,Steve Escobar and Schroeder have a product from Breaking Glass Pictures that will make Amazon very happy it carried this out of season (?) gore fest.

This movie was great I mean yes it is a lower budget film but it's amazing. The film had had the most kills in a slasher film and is even in Guinness Book of Records. Enjoy trying to count all of them or better yer several of us have made a drinking game out of this film. Every time a person dies you take a drink of beer. It's amazing! This true cinema on the lower budget end but really shows that anything is possible.

The Summer of Massacre immediately caught my attention upon learning that it was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records for having the highest body count ever recorded in a film. It's a great gimmick to get genre fans interested in a film that they likely would have never bothered with otherwise. Unfortunately, the world record is the only thing the movie has going for it.

The film is an anthology with eight killers in five different stories. Within the 98 minute run time, there is a body count of 155. (Other films technically have higher body counts, but these are all on-screen deaths.) For a record breaker, I was expecting something a bit more impressive. The kills employ a variety of instruments, but none of them are particularly memorable due to the poor effects. They are almost entirely computer generated, with cartoonish animation that looks like something out of Play Station 2 game. Writer/director Joe Castro (Tiny Toons) is a protégé of Herschell Gordon Lewis, but there is no way the Godfather of Gore would approve of this. The film should appear with an asterisk next to its name in the record book.

The first "chapter" is fittingly titled Rampage. A young man, Chris (Tim A. Colley), is out for a run when he is jumped and beat with a steel pipe. It seems like he will be the first victim, but when his body is found, he spurts back to life and goes on a plot less killing spree. Naturally, with this many deaths, there is virtually no character development and the acting is poor, but it hardly matters since most characters are only on screen for a few seconds before being demolished.

The second chapter is lovingly referred to as Lump. Laurie (Laid to Rest's Nick Principe in a role that some may consider offensive) is a deformed, mentally challenged paraplegic on experimental steroids in an effort to treat her spina bifida. She is on the brink of death, but her bitch of a sister, Kimberly Ann (Lisa M. Garcia), decides to speed up the process. While out in the woods with a group of friends, Kimberly pushes the Laurie's wheelchair off a cliff. The only problem is that Laurie won't die. In fact, she can walk now, and she wants revenge. Brinke Stevens (The Slumber Party Massacre) cameos as the girls' mother.

Son of the Boogeyman is the third chapter. In the past, a woman (Deanna Meske) went to investigate the local boogeyman, Mr. Boogens (Scott Barrows), only to be raped by the monstrous man. We learn all of this through a flashback as the byproduct of the rape, her son Jesse (Jerry G. Angelo), relays the horrific tale to his girlfriend on their first anniversary. After years of searching, the boogeyman returns to kill his now-full grown son.

The last chapter is called Burn. A group of friends decide to stay up late at a youth ministry camping retreat. Gathered around the campfire, one of them tells the local legend of Devon Hopper (J.T. Seaton) and Michael Rose (Joe Castro), a pair of gay firemen who were burned to death by their fellow firefighters. They later returned to kill of those who wronged them. Everyone seems to have a connection to crime, meaning that any of them could be the next victim.

The final scene is a brief one in which a trio of sadistic murderers are holed up in a Los Angeles warehouse while surrounded by police. This is something of a wrap-around story, as news coverage of the event opens and closes the film. Between each story is purported FBI tapes of various killers speaking candidly about their crimes. They are intended to be chilling, I presume, but the trite pieces are void of all emotion.

As much as I tried to block it from my mind, I must mention the annoying score. There is music running in the background of the entire movie, regardless of whether or not the scene would play better with natural sound. Even when music could enhance a segment, the generic score seems out of place. Also noteworthy is the homo-eroticism. The film features full-frontal nudity from multiple men, while none of the females shed an clothing - including an awkward scene in which a fully-clothed woman has sex with a nude man.

Castro seems to have bit off more than he could chew, having served as writer, director, producer, actor, makeup and visual effects. While I question the amount of effort that went into some of those aspects (he seems to use the term "experimental" as an excuse for having no story and bad effects), I have no doubt that an abundance of time was spent in post-production to accomplish all of the death scenes. But the movie needs a lot more than that to save it. It's an admirable attempt and it's nice that they got their small place in history with the world record, but otherwise The Summer of Massacre is just another bad movie.

I usually love low budget horror movies. In my opinion some are even better than the big budget blockbusters. Alas, thus is not one of them. When I read that this was made by one of the protégés of Hershel Gordon Lewis, the king if gore, and gad the highest body count if any movie, I told myself id check it out. Big mistake. If u live gore, you'll probably like this. If you lice gore and watch this, you'll be horribly let down by the terrible cgi gore effects. I mean, I've seen more realistic violence in kids shows. Most of the stories in this five story anthology revolve around an innocent person being murdered, n then running around (literaly in the first story) murdering other innocent people for no apparent reason. There's about one or two people murdered about every minute, and while there were some interesting death scenes ( a woman being murdered by being made to choke on her own hair,a man in a convenience store being suffocated by a bag of ice and then having his head bashed in with said bag if ice) they are ruined by the horrible cgi. If you have the chance to see this for free, its a good way to kill 98 minutes of your life. If not, don't waste your money buying this.

Years ago I told a friend that I would love to see a movie that was nothing but action. Guns, explosions, martial arts and fighting everywhere with no plot, no good guys or bad guys, no main characters, just non-stop action. I called it an exercise in "movie minimalism". It would get to the good stuff, cutting out the "pork" of drama, useless plot lines and bad acting. Truth be told, I would still like to see it.

But my desire for it is somewhat tempered now that I have seen this piece of work. The first 4th of the movie is exactly what I was talking about so long ago: Killing, sans everything else (including good special effects). And now that I have seen it, I confess that it was pretty useless in terms of entertainment.

But as for the rest of the film? It's garbage. I don't know what else to say. I could talk about it's developmental virtues, but it has none. And chances are if you've read this far you are getting bored with this review anyway.

So I want to just mention that this movie is designed to entertain people with gratuitous violence and murder, and not much else. You aren't supposed to watch it and cringe, you are supposed to empathize with the killers and let your evil side rise to the surface. You are supposed to laugh and glorify in the people getting ripped apart and hi-five the killers on the way out, assuring them that you really love their work.

For those of us without the ability to empathize with psychopaths, this film offers nothing.