A film crew descends on a small Australian resort town to shoot a rock video at a lake. They rent a couple of houseboats, dock them at the shore, and begin rocking out. Little do they know there’s a hideously burned killer lurking in the woods who’s just itching to hack them up.
Houseboat Horror is a no-budget Australian shot on video slasher flick. Aussies has been cranking out Ozploitation movies for years, so it’s no surprise they would wet their beak in this sort of thing. It’s uneven as hell, but it’s really no better or worse than countless similar slashers found on stateside video store shelves at the time. At least the shot-on-video cinematography is a lot better than most of the stuff you’d see in America.
The thick accents and poor sound make it hard to hear/understand some of the dialogue and the scenes of the crew members and bandmates dicking around on the boat are kind of hard to sit through. Also, the shots of the various houseboats out on the water feel like padding. A lot of screen time is devoted to shots of the killer’s boots as he traipses around the woods too. All this makes for an awfully sluggish start.
On the plus side, the skin quotient is decent, and the body count is relatively high, which makes up for some of the film’s more irritating aspects. Although there are a lot of offscreen kills, the gore still manages to be kind of fun. We get a stake through the neck, an axe to the head, throat slashing, a horseshoe to the face, a speargun to the stomach, and a pipe through the chest, along with some other assorted stabbings and hackings. The highlight is a cool scene where a head is split down the middle with a machete.
The centerpiece music video is appropriately cheesy. It just falls short of being one of those “so bad it’s good” deals. The same can be said for the movie. It is pretty random though. I mean nothing quite captures the excess of the rock n’ roll lifestyle like… (checks notes) a houseboat.
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