THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: EASTER BUNNY MASSACRE (2021) **

A group of friends go out into the woods on Easter for a drug-fueled party.  The next morning, they all wake up covered in their dead friend’s blood.  Since none of them remember what happened the night before, they decide to ditch the body and cover up the murder.  One year later, they receive invitations from their dead friend to an Easter party where their mysterious host plays a series of games with them.  Is their friend really back from the dead and out to get revenge?  Or is someone else orchestrating the scheme on her behalf?

Easter Bunny Massacre is a British mix of ‘80s slashers like Slaughter High, ‘90s fare like I Know What You Did Last Summer, and your standard-issue holiday-themed horror flick.  The host makes the guests go on an Easter egg hunt for clues, has them solve riddles, and leaves mystery boxes in an attempt to make them confess their crime. Honestly, it all sort of works for the first half-hour or so. 

Sadly, things grind to a halt once the film turns into a half-assed version of Rashomon.  It’s here where the partygoers give differing accounts of what happened on the night of the murder, and the flashbacks really bog things down just when things should be getting juicy.  The finale is decent, but it’s just not good enough to overcome the second act doldrums.

The Easter Bunny mask the killer wears is ugly and bloody, but it’s not as cool as the suit featured in The Bunnyman Massacre.  The kills are sort of bland too.  The only novel touch comes when the Bunny throws scalding chocolate into a guy’s face before stabbing him to death.  I wish there were more Easter-themed murders here, but oh well.  Still, I can’t get too mad at any slasher movie in which the killer lines his victims up around the dinner table at the end. 

AKA:  Easter Killing.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: THE CLOWN CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2022) **

Dustin Ferguson’s The Clown Chainsaw Massacre begins with a riff on the opening crawl from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before moving on to a news report about creepy clown sightings.  (Remember when those were all the rage?)  Then, the plot begins.  And by “plot”, I mean a bunch of friends go to a Halloween party at a house where ten years earlier, a murderer who dressed like a clown, was killed by vigilante justice.  It doesn’t take a nuclear physicist to figure out what happens next.

There are scenes here that not only rip off The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Halloween (the early stalking scenes) and even A Nightmare on Elm Street (the vigilantes were the parents of the main characters) as well.  Even though it’s only forty-five minutes long, there’s still a lot of padding in the form of a gratuitous montage of two girls roaming the aisles of Spirit Halloween looking for a costume and long scenes of people dancing at the party.  Despite that, as far as Dustin Ferguson movies go, it’s not bad.  While we still get plenty of dumb moments (like when the clown shoves a lollipop up a guy’s ass and it comes out his zipper, and then… the killer sucks on it?), it’s not nearly enough to make or break it. 

Also, the skimpy running time is a bit of a mixed blessing.  By the time the killer finally gets around to knocking off the teens, it feels like Ferguson is rushing through the death scenes to get to the end.  They would’ve worked much better had they been given a little suspense or at least some sort of build-up before they’re killed.  Wait.  Did I just criticize a Dustin Ferguson movie for being too short?  I’m starting to lose it.

Scenes from this also turned up in Ferguson’s compilation, I Drip Blood on Your Grave (under the title Night of the Clown.)

AKA:  Night of the Clown.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: CHRISTMAS CRAFT FAIR MASSACRE (2022) **

Holding a Christmas craft fair at a high school that was built on top of an ancient Indian burial ground probably wasn’t the best idea in the world.  Hindsight is 20/20, I guess.  Anyway, two warring factions of Satanists are seeking a “pure soul” to sacrifice on Christmas.  It’s up to a ragtag group of mystics, priests, and uh… holiday crafters to save an innocent woman from being sacrificed. 

Christmas Craft Fair Massacre is mostly comprised of scenes of non-actors holding long phone conversations while obviously reading their dialogue off a laptop that’s just off camera.  All the actors speak the needlessly wordy dialogue in an overly stilted and wooden manner.  These dialogue scenes run on so long that you might start to doze off due to their rambling monotone conversations.  If you do, you just might miss some hilarious lines.

I’m not gonna lie.  Parts of this are a slog to get through.  The end is weak too as the heroes use half-assed astral projection to form a “circle of light” to defeat the villain.  That might sound cool, but it ultimately amounts to nothing more than the psychic equivalent to having a Zoom call.  I will say, there are some funny bits here to make your Christmas merry and bright.  (Or Halloween, as the case may be.)  The scene where the disfigured janitor wraps body parts as Christmas gifts is good for a laugh, and the completely random “punk rock” version of “Jingle Bells” is appropriately WTF.

Sarah Featherstone delivers a sidesplitting turn as one of the sassy Satanic servants.  She gets a particularly great moment where she wears a goat mask in a shopping mall.  (“They told me not to, but I did it anyway”.)  Sadly, she’s the only performer that comes close to nailing the right tone.  The movie overall is kind of a bore, but when she’s on screen she brings joy to the world. 

This probably won’t usurp Elves, Jack Frost, or Silent Night, Deadly Night as one of my yearly go-to Christmas horror flicks, but I can conceivably see myself showing some unsuspecting Christmas guests highlights from this one.  That’s kind of a half-assed recommendation.  Then again, it’s better than no recommendation at all.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: CAMP MASSACRE (2014) * ½

A bunch of morbidly obese chuckleheads congregate in the woods to appear on a weight loss reality show called By the Pound.  Before long they are stalked and killed by a heavy breathing murderer who wears a fried chicken bucket over his head.  As the contestants are cut down to size (see what I did there?), the list of suspects gets slimmer and slimmer (ZING!).

The first thing you should know about Camp Massacre is that porn star Bree Olson takes a shower in it.  Sadly, that happens in the first five minutes as she gets Janet Leigh’ed before the opening credits have a chance to roll.  Bummer.

The second thing you should know is that it is one-hundred-and-twenty-nine minutes long.  I’ve watched some long movies with the word “Massacre” in the title this month, but this is the longest so far.   Do editors ever look at the time code when they make these things?  I mean, don’t you think the filmmakers would want to… you know… cut some of the fat (POW!) off the running time?

Adding to the length is a dumb animated opening credits sequence, way too many useless subplots, and a helluva lot of unnecessary characters.  You’ve got the whole reality show segments.  Then there’s the behind-the-scenes drama between the contestants.  Not to mention the romance that blooms between the husky hero and the show’s nurse.  Unfortunately, the horror stuff is a distant fourth on the filmmakers’ list of priorities.

I guess they were trying to flip the script by having a bunch of overweight dudes getting killed off in a camp in the woods rather than a bunch of hot coeds.  (Although there are a few here, just not enough to make much of an impact.)  This might’ve been okay I guess if the majority of the male characters weren’t obnoxious slobs.

 

The kills aren’t bad.  It just takes an eternity to get to them.  There’s death by shower head, some nominal gut ripping, a turkey leg down the throat, a guy’s face gets deep-fried, and a head winds up in a lawnmower. 

The cast is OK for the most part.  In addition to Olson, we also have wrestler Al Snow on hand as the head (if you're a fan of his wrestling persona, you'll know this is another pun) of security.  He tries to breathe a little life into the movie, but he isn’t given a whole lot to work with.  Halloween 2’a Dick Warlock also appears as the show’s producer.  You might remember co-star (and co-director) Daniel Emery Taylor as the little kid in Return of Swamp Thing.

AKA:  Fat Chance.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: BURIAL GROUND MASSACRE (2021) *

Burial Ground Massacre begins with Michael Madsen spouting a lot of Native American mumbo jumbo.  Then, a killer in a Native American mask runs around killing big-breasted women using tomahawks and bows and arrows.  Right then and there I thought we had a winner on our hands.  Sadly, it all goes downhill after that. 

A rich kid named Chase (Blaise Serra) lives in a manor nestled on an Indian burial ground that doubles as a Native American museum.  When his parents go out of town, he invites a bunch of friends over for a party.  Little does he know the psycho in the mask comes to the museum looking for a Native American ring with supposed magic powers, and he’s all too ready to kill anyone who stands in his way. 

Even though Madsen is top-billed, he more or less just voices the killer.  If you’re familiar with his ever-expanding frame, seeing his voice coming out of a scrawny guy in a mask looks and sounds ridiculous.  When Madsen finally takes the mask off and assumes the role in the end, his physique isn’t even close to what it looked like in the rest of the movie, which is kind of funny.  I guess that would amount to something if there were more unintentional laughs throughout the picture.  

Mostly, it’s just a bore.  It doesn’t help that Serra does a lot of shitty magic tricks, which eat up a lot of the running time.  This sort of thing might be okay, if it’s Terror Train and the magician in question is actually played by a real magician like David Copperfield.  As it is, these scenes are pretty painful to sit through.

Yes, this is another one of those hundred-minute-long slashers.  There’s just no justification for the overlength.  Other than the kills in the opening minutes, the murder scenes elsewhere in the picture are weak.  I mean, how can make a horror movie where there’s a bowling alley in the main character’s home and then not give us a scene where a head winds up in the ball return?  I’d ask for a refund if Tubi wasn’t free.

The film also takes a really weird turn in the last twenty minutes.  I’m not sure if they ran out of money or what.  It’s like they tried to leave things open for a sequel and it somehow went sideways.  Or maybe it was part of a partially filmed, but abandoned sequel.  Or maybe the first hour and twenty minutes were a pilot of a TV show that never got picked up, and the final minutes were just all the series’ cliffhangers that got tacked on at the end.  Or maybe it’s just a bunch of shit that was thrown in to piss the audience off.  Either way, it all amounts to a big waste of time. 

I will say the film is a good showcase for actress Chelsea Vale.  She reminded me a little bit of Audrina from The Hills and equips herself nicely in the Final Girl role.  She also produced this sucker, so she’s a double threat in front and behind the camera.  I wouldn’t mind watching her in something again.  I just hope her new projects are an improvement over this.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: THE BUNNYMAN MASSACRE (2014) * ½

The Bunnyman Massacre opens with a guy in a dingy bunny suit murdering a school bus full of children.  Isn’t that lovely?  Fortunately, he quickly pivots to killing big-breasted campers who are busy fornicating in the woods.  That’s shit’s more my speed.

These victims serve a purpose.  You see, the Bunnyman (Joshua Lang) kills people and then gives the bodies to his pal Joe (David Scott), a redneck who runs a grungy general store.  Joe, in turn, uses the flesh from the victims as the main ingredient for his homemade beef jerky.  When Joe kidnaps two sisters, the potential victims strike a bargain with their captors.  They’ll provide them with more jerky fodder if Joe and Bunnyman let them go. 

The Bunnyman Massacre isn’t exactly terrible, but the sheer overlength (one-hundred-and-four minutes) definitely takes a lot of wind out of the movie’s sails.  If the editor lost all the fast-motion shots of the moon and sun rising and setting (not to mention whittled down all the long walking scenes), this could’ve clocked in at eighty-nine (or heck, seventy-nine) minutes.  I’m not saying it would’ve saved the picture.  I’m just saying it would’ve got me onto watching my next shitty movie with the word “Massacre” in the title a whole lot quicker.

I will say the Bunnyman cuts a memorable image.  He looks like a hard-drinking version of Bugs Bunny.  Or maybe a mall Easter Bunny on meth.  It’s just a shame that Joe, a thoroughly generic redneck slasher if there ever was one, does much of the heavy lifting.  I did like the dinner scene between the two of them that kind of showed their day-in-the-life routine though. 

Look, I know characters are supposed to make stupid choices in horror movies, but these characters make some of the dumbest decisions I’ve seen in a long time.  Then again, if they made smart decisions, I wouldn’t have been able to talk about the gore.  Well, that isn’t exactly great either.  The only original death scene is when a girl’s eyeball is bored out with a drill press.  Other scenes blatantly rip off the sleeping bag kill from Friday the 13th Part 7 and the barrel sequence in Two Thousand Maniacs.  While some of this is appropriately bloody, I must admit I could’ve done without all the CGI blood splatters. 

Incidentally, this is a sequel to 2011’s Bunnyman (which I haven’t seen), which would explain the flashback scene. 

AKA:  The Bunnyman Resurrection.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: THE BUCKS COUNTY MASSACRE (2010) NO STARS

A group of friends gather at a house in the woods to celebrate their pal’s 25th birthday.  (He looks more like he’s 45.)  During the party, one of the girls wanders into the woods and disappears.  Her friends head out looking for her with video cameras in tow and discover there’s something in the forest that’s very hungry. 

The Bucks County Massacre is another tiring entry in the Found Footage sweepstakes.  According to the opening crawl, the footage is property of the Bucks County Police Department.  If it’s supposedly “evidence”, then why end the crawl with blood dripping down the camera?  And why add in a musical score?  And why are there random slow-motion shots?   And if this has been edited from the footage after the fact, why keep in the long scene of the annoying guy playing on the guitar?  Speaking of guitars, if the cops were using the video as evidence to find the killer, would you really keep the scenes of the partygoers playing Guitar Hero?  Or singing for what feels like forever into the camera?  And I know you have every right to film the police, but is it really necessary to keep the camera on the old cop’s crotch for minutes at a time?

Most of the partygoers are annoying to begin with.  They get even more abrasive as the night goes on and they become drunker and drunker.  Once the girl disappears, they start screaming at each other and get increasingly belligerent.  If this truly was a piece of police evidence, I would say my main suspect would be the cameraman because if it were me, I’d snap if I had to spend one more minute with these characters.  One thing is for sure:  After they saw the tape, no jury on Earth would convict me. 

This has got to be one of the worst movies the Found Footage genre has to offer.  It’s full of amateurish performers yelling at the top of their lungs, nauseating lime green night-vision, and scenes of people watching scenes we’ve already seen.  I’m not a drinking man, but if one was inclined to play a drinking game while watching The Bucks County Massacre and took a shot of their favorite libation every time someone yelled, “Rob!”, they would be (mercifully) dead of alcohol poisoning by the halfway point.