Well, we’ve finally made it. We’ve come to the end of the year-long Tubi Continued… column. I don't want to pat myself on the back, but watching 365 movies on Tubi in 365 days is nothing to sneeze at. Because of that, I wanted to finish out the series with a bang, so I picked a movie that I thought couldn’t miss, the third film in the CarousHELL saga, CarousH3LL. I was wrong.
A rabbit carousel animal crashes an Easter party and kills everyone. Meanwhile, Duke the killer unicorn carousel horse (the voice of Steve Rimpici) is trying to reconnect with his half-human half-horse son, Robbie. A one-eyed killer (director Steve Rudzinski) with a grudge against Duke enters the fray and makes an uneasy alliance with the rabbit to take Duke down.
I was a fan of the first film and, to a lesser extent, Part 2. This one was a bit of a disappointment, but the first ten minutes are pure CarousHELL gold. There’s a three-way sex scene where the killer rabbit and a couple go to town on each other that goes on for a long time. (Note: That’s not a criticism.) This scene is made all the better since Jessa Flux looks smoking hot in and out of her sexy bunny cosplay. Folks, this will probably go down as the sex scene of the year. Too bad it’s all downhill from there.
The big misstep is the sidelining of Duke for much of the action in favor of director’s eye patch-wearing character. When Duke is front and center, it’s moderately fun. When Rudzinski takes center stage, the film sinks. Also, some long, dialogue-heavy flashback scenes are repeated twice for some reason. (Most likely to pad out the running time.) The switch away from carousel animals to sports team mascot types of characters late in the film feels like an attempt to capture the furry market too. There’s also a random wrestling scene that’s just sort of there.
The kills this time around include decapitations, scythes entering various locations of the body, eye gouging, heart ripping, face chopping, and unicorn horn impalement. Nothing cuts as deep as the onslaught of bad puns though.
AKA: CarousHELL 3.
I thought this one was still pretty fun overall and i'm a sucker for puns so that didn't bother me.
ReplyDeleteI just brought up the time code and the only dialog scenes that are repeated are a minute 30 seconds, the second is less than a minute before the fight. If those dialog scenes were not repeated that would result in less than 3 minutes of a shorter run time.
ReplyDeleteBut it also definitely wasn't done to pad out any run time, I regularly release features ranging from 45-50 minutes. It was done to really help the audience understand that the A story and B story was occurring at the same time to emulate and homage similar stories being told with repeated scenes, such as the original Resident Evil 2, and to give completely new context to the same scene except now from the perspective of the other protagonist.
It's totally fine if it didn't work for you, but the intended result is to be conflicted the second time we get to Joe v. Duke. I knew it would be divisive and not hit for everyone, but fortunately most seem to jive with that intent.
The switch to the mascots isn't any sort of attempt at anything, it's been planned since the first film. Given that Cowboy Cool was very much set up during that entire story in 2016 with promises of explanation as to what Cowboy Cool even was in the sequel. We had a list of 26 members of MASCOT written down since we wrote CarousHELL 1!
As for Joe's forefront spot in the story, you can thank the fans who yelled at me for years between 2016 and 2021 that Joe needed to not be dead no matter what and even the ones who outright said CarousHELL 2 wasn't good because Joe wasn't in it.
3 was ALWAYS going to be about the consequences of Duke's terrible actions in the first film and dealing with the anger of a previous victim, but the co-lead being Joe instead of another character is entirely because of fan demand!
Thanks for the clarification, Steve. Happy New Year!
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