Drifter (2016) 1h 26m

There's nothing worse than buckling in for what you think is going to be a wild ride only to have things just jump the tracks.  I sat down, started this up, had some orange juice with me, a cat on my lap, hit play, things started off great.  Then...well... let's get into it.

Drifter follows two brothers as they're attempting to track down the man that killed their father.  They're driving across the desert in hopes that they're on the trail of the murderer.  After a few tough run-ins one of the brothers needs medical attention and they stop at the first town-ish/trailer park thing they come across.  From there everything goes south.

This film has one of my greatest complaints which is unnecessary or unfinished plot points.  You can leave a plot point open ended if done well, but the first quarter to half of this film is focused on the brothers getting revenge.  About 10 minutes into them being in this town that plot line is completely abandoned.  I'm also not sure what the setting for this world is.  Everytime someone comes across them they ask how they have a working car.  Yet the person they're chasing is supposed to be in a car.  So is it just that in this desert region of nothing cars became scarce or is this some form of post apocalyptic world?  Finally, I assume that the one writer/director are a fan of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and House of 1000 Corpses because once the town "family" gets introduced then it's the crazy eccentric cannibals!  It's like you took the Firefly family from ...1000 Corpses and told them to be poorer quality versions of themselves.

The high points of this film are everything up to them arriving in the town and the score.  The score is simple but coated in a sense of pending danger.  It's louder than some scores but it doesn't overpower the scene.  The viewer has an auditory dread of "what's coming" while watching.

As I mentioned earlier, I wish that plot line A (revenge) would have tied into plot line B (the town) better.  Once B is wrapped up we're just left wandering that same wasteland of a desert without a decent sense of accomplishment for the characters or even just us.  It tries to make that jump that ...1000 Corpses does but it's not absurd enough.  They don't have the horror experience that Rob Zombie had at that time, and in the end, it set Drifter into a ditch to die.

I give Drifter 1.5 car pancakes out of 5:

Blood Valley: Seed's Revenge (a.k.a. Seed 2) (2014) 1h 18m

FUCCCCCKKKKK! It was too good to be true!  Such a strong start to this Cut and suddenly I'm faced with Blood Valley: Seed's Revenge.  I couldn't even find this film on IMDB until I did some research and found out that it's on there as Seed 2.  Is there a Seed 1?  I don't know.  I don't give a fuck.  Fuckin' baby's first horror movie here sucks hard enough for two!

BV:SR (which sounds much cooler in that format, like some anime with mechs) starts with the first huge ass credit being Uwe Boll!  If you're not familiar with him, he produced a bunch of terrible movies based on video game IPs with almost no fucking knowledge of the content of the games.  Blood Rayne, Alone in the Dark, Postal, House of the Dead, Far Cry... How did he make all of these?  He exploits a German tax credit so that if the film didn't recoup he gets to write off the film!  So he produced BV:SR.  Apparently he also did produce Seed which I just saw while looking up his IMDB.

BV:SR takes place in the Nevada desert where a bachelorette party gets stranded on their way back from Las Vegas.  They get attacked by rejects from The Hills Have Eyes and Taxes Chainsaw Massacre and it ends up the bride from the group betrayed them all from the start.  That's it.  Tons of fake blood, nudity, poor attempts at graphic shock, three uses of the same chest stab prosthetic, and every "violent" thing being a quick close-up shot of a wound following the initial action.

I wasn't kidding when I called this baby's first horror movie.  There's no style to it and a lot of the directing makes amateur mistakes while trying to prevent you from noticing other glaring problems.  It's also edited and put together out of sequence which makes it feel disjunct as opposed to thrilling or artistic.  Apparently BV:SR had a $1.2 million budget.  I don't know how unless they spent most of it on the RV because that shit was swank.  Seriously, 98% of this film takes place in the middle of the desert in fuck all USA.  I could've made this film with my cell phone, a couple of straws, two gallons of fake blood, and some pizzas to feed my friends while we fucked around in the desert.  I've taken shits that are more shocking and terrifying than this film could even imagine!

I give Blood Valley: Seed's Revenge (a.k.a. Seed 2) 0 copies of Iron Maiden's Powerslave out of 5:

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Carnage Park (2016) 1h 30m

I feel like the person that wrote the description for this film was given a couple of blurry .jpgs and told to "figure it out."  It made it seem like this was going to be a mix of vigilante justice and survival instincts.  The actual movie was more of a broken wish for grindhouse goodness and a clown's tear in the lonely desert.  You figure out what that means because it just came to mind when thinking about this.

Carnage Park's main protagonist is a woman kidnapped during a bank robbery.  After a very Tarantino/Reservoir Dogs intro where one robber is driving the car and the other is shot in the backseat yelling about how he is about to die, they both end up dead.  The former is killed by a crazy most-dangerous-game-esq sniper.  The sniper then sets up the kidnapped girl to hunt her in the fuck-all California desert.

I seriously thought this film was over at three different occasions before it actually ended.  I found myself wishing that each time it would have.  They drop the grindhouse flow by the end of the first quarter of the film with only smatterings of it coming back.  They have the Tarantino beginning but then end it very Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Add about an hour of just a woman wandering in the desert and that's all this film was.  I got up and dropped a deuce and just left the film playing because I knew I wouldn't missing anything of merit.

I give Carnage Park 0 Mr. Pinks out of 5:

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) 1h 30m

One of the things I've always liked about our iconic monsters was the fact that we were given a quick back-story but had the assumption that these characters were different and evil to begin with.  Jason had deformities.  He was picked on and eventually murdered at summer camp.  Freddy was a child molester and murderer that was then hunted down and burned alive.  Leatherface came from a bunch of weird rednecks that were cannibals and he was based on the killer Ed Gein.

At some point in the mid-to-late 00's horror films felt the need to humanize these characters more, to further develop their backstory.  It's something I feel was unnecessary because every gap we filled in with our imagination was most likely scarier than anything that ended up coming out.  I want my monsters to be monsters, not humans.

So why this rant?  TCH:TB gave what was probably the dumbest set of scenes to set up Leatherface's background.  It starts with a meat inspector in a slaughterhouse going into labor/dying on the work floor while newborn Leatherface climbs out of her lady parts.  The baby is ugly so he's wrapped in meat paper and then thrown in the dumpsters out back.  He's later found by Mama who is going through trash for raw meat scraps to eat.  She takes him home and they keep him.

That's it.  Ugly meat baby adopted from dumpster.

Anyway, our protagonists are two couples where one brother is reenlisting and the other is drafted for Vietnam.  They end up in a wreck while someone I can only describe as Sarah Connor chases them down to rob them.  Maybe the cow they hit was sent back by Skynet to stop Matt Bomer from reenlisting.  The "father" of the family, now posing as a police officer, comes upon them, kills Sarah Connor which sets up Doomsday since she can't give birth to Edward Furlong now.  You can guess what really happens.  It's not like this varies much from the formula.

Now, the Vietnam war lasted from about '54/'55 until '75.  This movie has the feeling of wanting to be set in the 70's but is very obviously being made in 2000's.  It's so bad that even with the period pieces I couldn't buy it wasn't modern.  Couple this with the shit-ass back story and this movie was a hot turd.  There are some shining moments in this film.  First, some of the gore is great.  One of the girls gets pulled out of a moving vehicle by Leatherface sticking a meat hook in her shoulder and yanking her out.  It was one of those scenes you tense because you can feel it as you see it.  There's also a post-kill with the chainsaw where our boy Leatherface just swings the chainsaw so the body on it slides off and thuds into a wall.  It sounds simple but the shot is great.

Overall, despite liking some of the reboots or remakes, I wish my monsters were still just monsters...  not dumpster fuglies.

I give The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning 2 dumpsters out of 5:

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