Sign up to add this to your collection
|
Sign up to add this to your favorites
|
|
45%
Overall Rating
|
|
Ranked #10,340
...out of 20,704 movies
|
Sign up to check in!
|
Two young twins are sent to spend time at their aunt's farm. What nobody knows is that the aunt's handyman is a psycho serial killer who dismembers his victims and stores their body parts in the barn.
--IMDb
|
|
Review by Chad
Added: June 29, 2007
Camp Motion Pictures is back with another long-lost slasher gem from the eighties, and what an offering it turned out to be. As some of you may recall, I wasn't overly fond of their last release (the Zombie Bloodbath trilogy), but this one more than made up for that disappointment. Foregoing the "traditional" elements of a great horror such as storyline, acting, or even remarkable special effects, Splatter Farm opts to instead repulse and shock the viewer by breaking damned near every taboo in the book.
When I said that the film forgoes presenting a storyline, I didn't quite mean that literally as there is a... well, I suppose "plot setup" may be more fitting than "storyline" in this case. It begins when two young brothers (Mark Polonia and John Polonia) decide to spend the summer with their lonely Aunt Lacy (Marion Costly) out on her farm. When they arrive, they realize two things: one, Lacy has a new man by the name of Jeremy (Todd Rimatti) hanging around the house, and two, things aren't quite as normal here as they remember them being. What they soon discover is that Jeremy is a serial killer who delights in using the severed limbs and bodily organs of his victims for sexual pleasure and that Lacy has her long-dead husband tucked away in the basement... and just like Jeremy, she's not against the idea of having sex with a corpse. This is just the beginning of the story, so trust me when I say that it gets sicker and more depraved as the film moves along.
I'm going to start with the positives here, as I think that's probably the best way to go in this particular case. Those of you who follow my reviews on this site may know that I'm a sucker for a good eighties slasher: low budget, bad production values, horrible acting, it's all good as long as we get plenty of the red stuff and some inventive death scenes. Splatter Farm follows that formula down to the letter, as the film may not be an award-winner in most categories, but when it comes to the kills and the mayhem, you get your money's worth.
When I said that this film breaks damned near every taboo in the book, I wasn't kidding. Throughout the hour-and-change that the film runs for, viewers will witness an incestuous sex scene between a sixty-plus year old woman and a high-school boy, cannibalism, watersports, gay anal fisting, gay rape, scat, animal cruelty, the after-effects of at least one child murder, necrophilia, and so much more that I don't particularly want to spoil here. Now, for the record, most of the "harder" stuff is implied: no animals were harmed during the making of the film, you don't actually see a man's fist going up another man's ass, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the scat scene made use of a lot of chocolate pudding, but it's all done in a fairly convincing fashion and will have fans of the disturbing howling with glee.
The only negative aspects of the film are the same things that can be said about most of the other cheesy eighties slashers that I hold so dear. Yes, the acting is atrocious: the grandmother had to have won some sort of award for "worst acting performance, ever" with her appearance here, the two "heroes" of the film weren't a whole lot better, the budget was likely next to nothing which resulted in some unbelievable effects here and there, and yes, there is some storyline padding to be found. However, you could say the same thing about most of the better slashers to come from the eighties, and in my humble opinion, it's all a part of the charm of this style of movie.
Once again, Camp has done an excellent job with the DVD release of this forgotten cult classic. Most other distributors would have probably thrown a shitty transfer of the film onto a disc with a couple of trailers for the latest mainstream releases (if you're lucky), but that was not the case here. You get a brand spanking new cut of the film that looks a whole lot better than it rightfully should, director commentaries, a "back to the farm" featurette in which the directors revisit the set of the film, and a handful of early 8mm short films from the directors. For an eighties slasher that had basically fallen off the radar for twenty years, that's a damned impressive lineup of features, but even without all of that, I'd still give the disc a recommendation based solely on the film. For low-budget slasher enthusiasts only, but if that's your cup of tea, you'll love every last minute of it. 8/10.
|
|
Rate Movie? 
