Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Kill the Scream Queen

This is the second and mercifully final film by Bill Zebub in the Tomb of Terrors set, the other being the delightful Rape is a Circle. By delightful, I of course mean that it was one of the worst movies in a pack filled with bad movies. This is just as bad, as he continues his proud streak of making some of the most inept, annoying, and tedious zero budget exploitation films of the past decade.

The film is an exercise in repetitiveness, as our main character (played by Zebub himself with the same care and effort that is typified by the rest of his filmmaking) lures young would-be actresses into some empty rock club under the guise of filming a horror movie, ties them up, and then sexually abuses and kills them while droning on in a dull monotone a whole ton of pretentious blather. The film is only 70 minutes long, and yet it’s so dull that it easily feels longer than Seven Samurai.

Further, considering both the subject matter, and how much Zebub seems to want to be viewed as shocking, it manages to be an incredibly tame film. Just about all the violence is off-camera, the only two exceptions being the opening woman whom he lightly whips for a brief time, and at the end where we once more get a little bit of blood, yet no visible wound. And just like in Rape is a Circle, the nudity is also really tame. All the girls get topless, and that’s as far as it goes. Now, far be it from me to constantly whine when my movies refuse to go full frontal, but when we straight up have a character monologue about how he’s now ripping off her panties and forcing himself inside of her, you probably shouldn’t pan the camera back far enough that we can see her panties are still on while he’s supposedly raping her. And you definitely shouldn’t be showing her corpse in the woods later, both with her panties still on, and without a single wound on her.

And just in case it wasn’t bad enough, it serves as a call-back to the terrible Jennifer Lopez film Enough (yes, I did indeed see it) by introducing each new girl with a title card like “Humiliation” or “Molestation”. Yes, the film is that bad.

Rating: ½ *

P.S. For those wondering, the half star is solely because two of the girls in it were pretty attractive. There is no other reason for this film to exist.


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