Ryan Nicholson shows us his GUTTERBALLS!! in a whacked out, balls-to-the-wall gore-crazed, 80’s-style Slasher with a plethora of big black balls and tricks n’ treats galore!
Read on for my quick DEN OF INIQUITY take and watch for the full review to go live soon.
Back in the early 80’s – before the franchising of FRIDAY THE 13th and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET – the slasher ouvre gave us dozens and dozens of fun little drive-in flicks with different scenarios and a pantheon of mad killers utilizing any number of everyday items for murder and mayhem – from mining picks and crossbows to kebabs and power drills. No one was safe except the one ‘virginal’ heroine who held out against the rampant horniness of 80’s teendom. The killer was shrouded in secrecy and the final moments that revealed him (or her) usually came with a breathless monologue explaining the entire film in retrospect and giving a perfectly reasonable reason for the rampage. Then, following the co-opting of the slasher flick by Hollywood with ELMS STREET, HALLOWEEN and the FRIDAY films, the fun, frolic and pubescent psychiatry of those stories seemed to be sucked away in favor of casts of young studio ingenues, workshops for budding studio directors and, more than anything, a quick buck for the studio brass. Gone were the days of truly maniacal films like MANIAC, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and THE HILLS HAVE EYES. Even the almighty TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was scooped up and bled dry.
In the past few years, following the theatrical success of remakes of those 70’s standbys, a new studio marketing ploy has labelled every third horror flick out of the gates as ‘the return of the old-school slasher!”. Yet films like HATCHET continue to dissapoint and completely miss the mark. Sure, they ape the basic formula – throw a bunch of teens into a closed environment and have them picked off one by one by a mysterious killer – but they fail to capture the magic of watching the real cheese, slice-and-dice flicks that used to line the betamax wall at the local Video Station.
Well kids, salvation may be at hand.
Ryan Nicholson’s GUTTERBALLS is a throwback to the heydey of SLUMBER PARTY BEACH GIRL SORORITY MASSACRE and, while not perfect, gave me that old rosy glow that I’d get as a kid, sneaking out of my room and staying up until 3AM on a Friday night to watch clandestine nudity and gratuitous gore on Superchannel or the Channel 8 Late Late Late Show.
You may remember that I pretty much savaged Nicholson’s last flick, LIVE FEED, but he was gentleman enough to forgive and forget and let me have a peek at GUTTERBALLS. He even sent it along with a package of goodies, including a couple of pins and postcards with some of the great homage poster art for the film that reworks the classic posters for MANIAC, HALLOWEEN and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. I was excited by the scenario of an 80’s slasher set in a bowling alley, titillated by the posters and a little bit wary for having been burned by similar discs in recent years.
GUTTERBALLS is balls-out (repeat pun!) the closest thing I’ve seen to the glory days of the slasher film. Nicholson draws influence from those films and from the slasher roots of Italian Giallo (black-gloved killer, glimpsed but not revealed) and proto teens-locked-in flicks like DEMONS. He utilizes the stock characters of the genre (slutty girl, pretty friend, horny punk chick, cranky janitor, loudmouthed jock, obnoxious doofus, preppie douchebag, etc…) and mixes in a few surprises, namely a tranny and Ducky from PRETTY IN PINK. He follows the rules implicitly, killing off sinners one by one and in pairs while ‘in situ coitus’, and the killer is not revealed until the final moments where we get a big twist and a satisfying bloodletting. Set all of this to a dream-score of 80’s Canuck cheese-rock from Loverboy, April Wine, Chilliwack and the mighty Trooper, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a good old-fashioned slash-o-rama.
There are numerous problems with the historical accuracy of the 80’s period the movie is set in, phrases that didn’t exist, Loonies (Canadian $1 coins introduced in 1987, whereas this seems to best in the early-mid 80’s.) cell phone models from the mid-90’s… Also, the acting is cardboard city, with only Alastair Gamble as ferocious jock ‘Steve’ and Dan Ellis as the mysterious Janitor standing above the crowd. There are moments of hilarity with the rest of the cast, like the cackling goof AJ being mesmerized and then horribly mutilated by a ball-waxer, but they are most amusing because the characters themselves are so obnoxious that you can’t wit to see them die. Ellis has all the best material, grumbling and groaning, firing redneck put-downs at the snotty teens and *censored*ing under his breath. But stiff acting and innacuraccy go part and parcel with the lo-budget genre flick. These are expected and not only do they not detract from the film, they add that extra level of authenticity to the films GUTTERBALLS references.
The only real problem I found with the film that truly detracted from its charm was the protracted rape scene near the beginning which, while the catalyst for the story, seemed completely out of place in a movie that was, otherwise, so completely fun and humorous. The brutal, almost fetishized, rape scene almost had me hitting the reject button, but fair warning to ffw through that section may help you enjoy the film that much more. Once you get past the heavy and gutwrenching misery of that one scene, the rest of the movie comes on like the best slasher flick you never saw in 1983. Gore, girls and goofiness aplenty, with a real taste for buckets and buckets of the red. And that is a real good thing.
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