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

God, remember when Jersey Shore was a thing?  Now you can relive those horrifying days with this tangibly related horror flick.  Oh, and by “tangibly related”, I mean because both have “Jersey Shore” in the title and the fact that it’s executive-produced by Jersey Shore cast member Jenni “JWOWW” Farley.

A bunch of Jersey girls head down the shore for a girls’ weekend.  When they learn their rental is double booked, they go to stay at a relative’s house in the spooky Pine Barrens.  Eventually, they are picked off one by one by an unseen menace.

The Jersey girls are thoroughly annoying, but that just means the actresses all did their job.  I can’t say you’ll root for any of them to make it out alive, but there is a sense of relief when one of them gets slaughtered.  The slaughtering, it should be said, is juicy.  We get throat slashing, death by tanning bed, a meat cleaver to the tiddy, double impalement via samurai sword, a dildo to the eye, some robust gut spilling, and in the film’s best scene, the killer uses an electric sander to sand away one juicehead’s chintzy tribal tattoos.

For most of the movie, you don’t know who is doing the killing.  Is it one of the inbred locals from the Pine Barrens?  Or is it the mythical Jersey Devil?  I wish the majority of the kills weren’t the work of an unseen killer from just offscreen.  Then again, I guess it doesn’t matter who the killer is as long as trashy Jersey Shore tourists get massacred. 

The movie is not without its faults.  A lot of the screen time is devoted to the girls hanging out on the beach, partying, and arguing.  There are also sequences from a film within a film (Fat Camp Massacre) that helps pad things out.  That said, it gives the viewer a reasonable amount of T & A and blood and guts (once the kill scenes finally occur), so I have to say, it was better than expected.  (It’s certainly more fun than watching an episode of Jersey Shore.)

Ron Jeremy has a cameo as a stoner landlord.

AKA:  Extra.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: HOMECOMING MASSACRE (2020) ** ½

When he was just a boy, Jonathan (Derrik Wynn) witnessed his mother being raped by her abusive boyfriend on Halloween night (which also happened to be Jonathan’s birthday… bummer), so he stabbed them both to death.  Ten years later, he’s released from a mental hospital into the care of his aunt and her family.  Has the painfully shy Jonathan truly been reformed, or is he merely biding his time until his next massacre?

Homecoming Massacre is a solid low budget effort that gets high marks for the better than average acting.  No one is going to be mistaken for Olivier here, but the performances are all better than the audience would expect (or even better than the movie probably deserves).  It’s almost a shame the paltry budget lets the cast down (especially near the end).  While writer/director Kenny White (who also wrote the decent Curse of the Snake Woman) gets a lot of mileage from the shoestring budget (it’s mostly a two-location film), the seams start to show as the flick approaches its climax.  The worst thing I can say for it is that some of the blue-tinted day for night scenes are hard to see.

Strangely enough, I liked the early scenes of the psycho kid trying (and ultimately failing) to reconnect with his family than I did the slasher-centric scenes in the second half.  In many ways, Homecoming Massacre is sort of a precursor to Halloween Ends as the film examines the repercussions of violence and how many are often doomed to repeat the cycle no matter what kind of interventions are tried.  The killer’s costume, which is a simple, but effective clown works too.  Sure, some of the kills are weak, but White delivers at least one memorable chainsaw death.  

Overall, Homecoming Massacre is a solid effort.  I just hope next time out, White has a budget befitting his vision.  Hopefully, he’ll keep the same stock of actors, as they were all believable and helped keep the movie afloat throughout most of the running time.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: HITCHHIKER MASSACRE (2017) ** ½

A killer is driving around the desert picking up sexy hitchhikers and selling their organs on the black market.  No one apparently told Sally (Ely LaMay) and she foolishly accepts a ride from a weirdo named Slim (John Blyth Barrymore).  Before long, Sally finds herself chained up in his basement with her vital organs ready to be put on an inventory list.

Usually, whenever some low budget filmmaker tries to ape the Grindhouse aesthetic, it comes off looking cheap.  Most of the time it resembles someone using an iPhone filter on the camera to recreate a scratchy print.  The opening scene of Hitchhiker Massacre is one of the best emulations of the Grindhouse look I have seen outside of Grindhouse.  They actually went through the trouble of making the lighting and camerawork match the old exploitation movies, so the illusion is near perfect.  If it wasn’t for the modern dress and cellphones, you’d swear this was a ‘70s flick.  They even use the “Missing Reel” gimmick to good effect and cap everything off with a great homage to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.

Too bad they drop the aesthetic after the opening credits as it looks like a “real” movie most of the time.  They do dabble in some various artistic flourishes.  During one gore scene, the film switches to black and white, which I guess was an homage to Kill Bill switching color palettes for the bloody sequences.  The rest of the flick is OK (there’s a decent impromptu surgery with an Exacto knife), but I just wish they kept up the old timey look throughout the entire running time.  As it is, they pretty much shoot their wad in the first ten minutes.

I did like the fact that it co-starred lesser-known relatives of the Barrymore, Carradine, and Cronyn acting families.  That helps to keep the Grindhouse tradition going by trading in on nepotism.  Oh, and it was (posthumously) produced by Ivan Nagy (remember him?), which gives it a bit of cred too.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: GHOUL SCOUT ZOMBIE MASSACRE (2018) **

A mad scientist invents a formula to turn Emo band twinks into mindless gay porn stars.  In order to distribute formula, he gets his sister, the warden of girls’ reform school, to dress up the inmates as “Ghoul Scouts” and pass out drug-laced cookies to unsuspecting musicians.  Naturally, the cookies turn them into flesh hungry zombies, and the girls must band together to stop the impending zombie apocalypse.

Before we go any further, let me get this off my chest.  No movie with the words “Ghoul”, “Scout”, “Zombie”, and “Massacre” in the title should ever run one-hundred-and-eleven minutes.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s some good stuff here, but for every decent moment (like when the girls are “re-educated” by being forced to watch ‘50s housewife filmstrips) there’s one that flat-out doesn’t work (like when the doctor’s put-upon assistant stops the flick cold for an unnecessary musical number).  The set-up is long winded too, and the rock concert sequence eats up a lot of screen time.

It also takes forever to get the ball rolling.  I mean, did we really need to see every one of the Ghoul Scouts’ back stories?  Probably not.  Then again, since this sequence ends with the pregnant warden giving them a whipping, I guess it’s okay.  (This stretch also contains a solid Carrie homage.)  

The humor is hit and miss too.  Much of the stuff involving the mad scientist is borderline painful, and any scene with his assistant is even worse.  Fortunately, the parts with the Ghoul Scouts are sort of fun.  (The sex scene offers one of the biggest laughs.)  I mean, the zombie baby scene alone ensures this won’t get any lower than **.  If the running time was a good forty minutes shorter, the rating would’ve been much higher.

Oh, and be on the lookout for a cameo by Bloodsucking Freaks director, Joel M. Reed.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: GARDEN TOOL MASSACRE (1997) * ½

The plot for this shitty, no-budget, Shot on Video slasher is simple:  A man flips his wig and stabs his wife to death in her sleep. He gets sent away to the nuthouse but escapes years later to murder some teens having a party.

Parts of Garden Tool Massacre are hard to see due to the poor lighting and/or crummy video cameras the crew were using.  (The tape rolls get annoying after a while too.)  Parts are hard to hear too due to the shitty sound and the thick British accents.  It doesn’t help that it’s pretty slow moving in general and is filled with long scenes where nothing happens.  The attempts at suspense also fail spectacularly.  I mean, having not one, but two scenes where a guy takes a piss in a garden where he doesn’t get his junk cut off by a garden tool in a movie called Garden Tool Massacre is just lazy filmmaking if you ask me.  Sequences where guys wake up, put on their pants and shave don’t necessarily make for gripping cinema either.  Also, the party turns out to be a complete sausage fest, which is extremely disappointing.

The biggest gripe comes from the fact that the killer doesn’t take full advantage of the whole gardening tool aesthetic implied by the title.  Among the weapons of death are a knife, a corkscrew, and an axe.  The only real gardening tools that are utilized are garden shears and hedge clippers.  To be fair, in one scene he does crack a guy’s neck while wearing gardening gloves, so I guess that counts.

It's a shame because the opening murder is decent.  It’s obvious director David Hinds is a fan of John Carpenter as he apes Halloween every chance he gets.  Too bad the results are not very effective and kinda dull.  The poster is cool though.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: GARDEN PARTY MASSACRE (2017) ***

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THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: THE FUNHOUSE MASSACRE (2015) ***

Warden Robert Englund presides over a secret supermax prison that exclusively houses serial killers. There’s a jailbreak on Halloween night and the nutjobs take refuge in a nearby haunted house attraction based on their various crimes.   A group of friends then go to the park unaware that the “Scare Actors” have been replaced by the real McCoy. 

That’s a pretty neat idea for a movie.   It’s kind of like Slashers Meets Hell Fest.  It also helps that the cast is solid for this sort of thing.  In addition to Englund (whose role ultimately amounts to an extended cameo), we have Jere (Justified) Burns acting suitably tweaked as the ringleader of the group of killers.  Candice De Visser also makes a memorable impression as Burns’ clown-faced gal pal, who is basically a Harley Quinn clone, but is nevertheless fun to watch.  We also get Clint Howard as “The Taxidermist” who’s sort of like the Ed Gein of the group.  (Other killers are loosely based on Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter.)   The ’Burbs' Courtney Gains is also kind of funny as the owner of the haunted attraction, and Scottie Thompson makes for a fetching Final Girl as the sexy sheriff on the case.

The gore is great all around too.  There’s face ripping, gut ripping, death by coat hook, head bludgeoning via strongman mallet, plaque scraper in the ear, head ripping (multiple), and a face shoved in a hot dog grill.  The surprising thing about The Funhouse Massacre is that the humor is actually funny.  I liked the scene where the dim bulb girl thought her Marilyn Monroe outfit was a “Sexy Hilary Clinton costume”.  The bumbling deputy gets some laughs as he’s hopelessly out of his depth taking on a half dozen serial killers.  All in all, this is a fun time, and makes for perfect Spooky Season viewing.  It’s certainly much better than the similarly themed, but wildly overpraised, Haunt.