TheFranklyLegendarySleazegrinder

This movie is great. Starlet gets snuffed in the first two minutes. Alcoholic cop Lawrence Tierney was at the scene of the crime but was too boozed-up to remember what happened. He tries to piece it all together but everyone around him is a weirdo, liar, or a scuzzball. With Jayne Mansfield and John Carradine. Everybody's younger than I've ever seen them before. It's dark and fast and vicious. Killer grungy noir.

Right, so this LOW - go lower than that - budget slasher with a Most Dangerous Game twist does the most it can with what it's got, you gotta give it that much. Lack of funds result in some seriously risible Halloween Store moments, especially in the design of unstoppable, possibly non-human killer Havoc, but those can be overlooked if there's enough cheap thrills to go around. Having a plucky reporter interview the eccentric billionaire who created the murder park (really a clump of bare trees) that Havoc runs amuck in was a wily way to get the backstory told without having to pay for much, too. Said reporter is essayed by Emily Sweet, and she's iffy at best in this, kind of a completely charmless Samara Weaving. Anyway, she eventually teams up with a rogue cop that's wandering around shooting everybody. Robert Bronzi (with a dub job) is the cop and if you've never seen the dude before, the reports are true - he's an astonishing deadringer for late 60's era Charles Bronson. I mean, it's wild. So the vigilante and the Final Girl take on the kooky billionaire and the undead killer and it basically goes how you think it might. It would've been nice to have a more Bronzi-centric story, as he is by far the most intriguing aspect of this whole operation, but I'll take what Bronzi I can get.

The script is loosy goosey and again, it's really cheap. But Bronzi is so weirdly compelling that it's worth it just to gaze upon him. As far as exploitation type kicks go, I can at least report that every female actor in the film under 50 shows their boobs and there are a few solid gore gags (top of head ripped off, jaw removal, manual drill through the throat, etc). Not a great film by any stretch, but if you squint just a little, it's got some good stuff.

Director Rene Perez - who churns this stuff out at an alarming pace - really did put every penny on the screen. It was only like 17 pennies, but still.