Filmmaker Mike O’Mahony of Maniac Films, whose last movie Deadly Detour has been picked up for distribution, brings us his latest offering which is another crazy slasher gorefest with its sick and twisted moments.
Sloppy the Psychotic is about Mike, a young man with a job as a birthday clown named “Sloppy.” He loses his job after having an unfortunate misunderstanding with a parent at a kid’s party. Totally self-loathing, pissed, and resorting to alcohol to solve his problems, one day he decides enough is enough and he starts offing his enemies and other folks who do him wrong in various messy and gory ways. His homicidal crusade starts with a girl he picks up and then continues with some partygoers at the house of a nemesis who’s been a thorn in his side too long. Bodies pile up and it’s not long before he prepares a cake for a birthday party and turns the event upside down and the ultimate birthday party massacre takes place. Sloppy makes things sloppy, to say the least!
Deadly Detour was an over-the-top gorefest that paid tribute to ‘80s slashers. This one sort of combines the “individual pushed too far gets revenge” and “killer clown” subdivisions of the genre. It delivers the gory deaths (including poisonings, impalements, bodies hacked up with lawnmowers, children barbequed on grills, handicap people run down with cars, etc.) and it delivers the campy humor. While Deadly Detour took things a little bit further in the offensiveness factor, this one still has enough politically incorrect moments to make it enjoyable for folks who enjoy sick jokes here and there. Mike O’Mahony is a filmmaker with a ballsy let’s-get-to-the-point attitude, as was seen in Deadly Detour, and he shows it again with this one.
Continue reading ‘DVD Review: Sloppy the Psychotic (2012)’
After releasing his magnum opus Mutilation Mile last year, underground auteur Ron Atkins now gives us the release of his long awaited The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell, a story of two psychopaths who meet up in a post-apocalyptic world.
Eric Stanze has been one of the indie horror scene’s most prominent and influential filmmakers for at least 20 years. His production company Wicked Pixel Cinema has given us low budget wonders such as the 1994 shot-on-video demonic possession picture Savage Harvest, the 1998 Super 8 surreal, experimental art house horror film Ice From the Sun, one of the most disturbing and graphically brutal serial killer movies, Scrapbook, released in 2000 and introducing viewers to frequent Wicked Pixel leading lady Emily Haack, the Severed Head Network short films compilations, and the chilling psychological horror outing Deadwood Park in 2007.
Barry J. Gillis, the Toronto based indie filmmaker who brought us the micro budget 1989 Super 8 gorefest Things, which he starred in and was directed by his partner Andrew Jordan with whom he co-wrote and co-produced, has recently unleashed upon the world a project that has been in development for the last 20 years.
The latest release from Pittsburgh’s Michael Todd Schneider of MagGot Films (I Never Left the White Room, A Tribute to Sanity, …And Then I Helped, etc.) is this fun, psychedelic-styled horror anthology with an orangey VHS hue video quality and a “grindhouse” opening.
Ron Atkins, one of the most prominent underground filmmakers who specialize in extreme horror and sleaze, brings us his latest release, the ultimate crime/revenge film, Mutilation Mile.
Inspired by a true story that happened in 1993, Mutilation Mile is the vicious tale of the DeGrasso brothers Jimmy and Jack with deep ties to organized crime and drug operations and their crusade for revenge in Las Vegas as they seek out the scum who were responsible for the slaying of their Uncle Sal, whose bloody, mutilated corpse they found in a shower stall. Not just out to kill anybody, as Jack says, Uncle Sal said to “fucking kill everybody!” Jimmy and Jack embark on their brutal, horrific killing spree in the Vegas area, at their disposal using a 357 magnum, switch blade, straight razor, crowbar, etc. as they shoot, stab, bludgeon, torture, and mutilate their enemies, which include drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, and assorted street scum.
“Don’t bother locking your doors. He has the keys.” This is the tagline to the newest feature from Brian Weaver and Evan Makrogiannis of New York’s Hallows Eve Films, the duo that previously gave us The Turnpike Killer. This time, with the help of producer Alex Lugones of Noose Hill Entertainment, they bring us a story about another psychopath. This one is the superintendent of a New York City apartment building.
Florida FX artist and filmmaker Marcus Koch, who just previously had given us the splatterific clown-slasher gorefest 100 Tears, takes on a totally different type of film with his latest feature Fell.
Fell stars Jeff Dylan Graham as Bill, a young man with a variety of personal problems he tries to wash away with drugs and alcohol. Faced with memory loss after waking up to finding a dead woman’s body in his bathtub, he spends his hours alone eating, taking pills, drinking, and trying to regain his memory and figure out how to rectify his situation.
Scott Swan, at the time known only in small circles mainly for being a co-writer of John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns and Pro-Life for Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” series and writer of the Skin and Bones episode of NBC’s “Fear Itself,” took the opportunity to direct his first feature in 2009 when he made the trip from Hollywood to Pittsburgh to co-direct the Toe Tag production of Maskhead with Fred Vogel. Having worked with a low budget extreme horror company like Toe Tag, he soon took it upon himself the next year to direct his own low budget horror effort under a production company he formed called EvilFlix. The result was Big Junior…
Brian Paulin and Morbid Vision Films, the underground gore fiends from Massachusetts who have given us low budget horror classics like At Dawn They Sleep, Dead Girl on Film, the gore-drenched zombie epic Bone Sickness and the uber-sick, gory and brutal Asian cyberpunk tribute film Fetus, bring us their latest gorefest, which is this post-apocalyptic horror story set in a future where surviving zombie attacks becomes the least of people’s worries.
One of the most recent offerings from Mad Angel Films, the independent production company that has given us Brackish and Star Cross’d, is this supernatural horror outing about a mother who takes her two daughters on a vacation up to a cabin in the woods where demonic possession had occurred years earlier. The family is introduced to the weird caretaker Mr. Phibes (a nice little horror classic reference) who shows them their way in.
Pretorious Productions presents us with Scarlet Frys Nightmare Alley, an anthology of seven ghoulish tales filmed in Grind-O-Scope and hosted by Scarlet Fry himself (director Walter Ruehter in a wizard costume).
This micro budget Tales from the Crypt and Creepshow-inspired anthology starts off with a Prelude which has a couple of metal heads talking about concerts who meet up with a homeless man who asks them for a cigarette and gives them a comic book entitled Nightmare Alley in return. The homeless man quickly turns out to be a psychopath who pulls out a knife and stabs the one guy to death and the other runs off with the comic until he stops at a dumpster and has his head removed from his shoulders by someone or something inside the dumpster, a scenario similar to a scene in the comic book he was just reading.
Pittsburghs Fred Vogel and Toe Tag Inc. (formerly Toe Tag Pictures) who have given us the August Underground trilogy, The Redsin Tower, Murder Collection V.1, and Maskhead, bring us their seventh film, Sella Turcica, which is a slight departure from their previous productions.
This low budget horror effort from Texas stars Matthew Carter as Jasper Hawkins, a rather disturbed individual who finds himself traveling on foot to Backroad, a small Texas community, while a memorial service for his recently deceased father is being held. Jasper has sex with a girl in a motel room and makes off with her money. While he at first appears as somebody being haunted by personal demons (including unpleasant memories of his father from childhood), soon real-life demons (in both the literal and figurative sense) come into play when Jasper is hitchhiking and picked up by a seemingly kind and accommodating salesman named Joseph Iblis (Greg Dean) in a black 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner. After pulling off the road when the salesman has some car trouble, Jasper kills him after he doesnt laugh properly at a joke he tells him. Jasper then steals his car (after its been fixed) and continues on his journey to Backroad. A girl he meets up with at one point is bound and gagged and placed in the trunk of the Plymouth. Satanic voices are spoken by Jasper in flashbacks (including one of the moment before his fathers death) and he hears the same demon voices in his head while hes traveling to his destination. Jaspers actions soon yield unpleasant consequences as whatever supernatural force hes encountered messes with his head, leading him to a truly unexpected fate.
From Texas filmmaker Kerry Beyer and Kerosene Films comes Spirit Camp, a delightfully entertaining slasher comedy highly respective of 80s horror.
A cheerleaders mom takes her and her friends out to a cheerleading camp for the summer. Coming along for the ride are some cute, flighty cheerleaders looking towards a summer of practice and the occasional drugs and alcohol to sneak behind the backs of their trainers. Also along for the ride is a sarcastic, anti-establishment troublemaker of a girl whos spent some time in a juvenile detention center and is going to the camp as part of her punishment. The local sheriff warns the girls that a maniac had escaped from a nearby asylum. Several characters come into play which of whom could possibly be this psycho, including a camp caretaker, a gas station attendant, and a whacky old dude. As nighttime nears, people soon start disappearing. It eventually becomes apparent that this psycho, whoever it may be, has begun his bloody axe and knife-wielding, cheerleading chopping spree and the remaining girls band together to try to reach authorities and find weapons to fight off the killer.
