Hacked Horror Film Massacre – review

Director: Angus Simon

Release date: 2013*

Contains spoilers


*release date as suggested by Amazon Prime Video page, the film does not have an IMDb page at the time of writing the review.

It is somewhat difficult to know where to start with this. A portmanteau produced as a lower than low budget piece, I assume it is a self-parody and, with that in mind, it is more palatable than it would have been if they were serious.

The portmanteau piece is some piece of nonsense about a hack of horror films and has us see a woman access the films that have been stolen (and thus we watch them). The films range in quality from very low to low, several are vampire based, and at least one seemed a rather good facsimile of poor films from a bygone age.

Abdul R Dim as the vampire

The first film is Black Kiss and sees a couple of kids, Reggie (Ben Williams and Veronica (Hannah Boean), making out in a car. She’s nervous because of events in the neighbourhood but Reggie soon persuades her to ignore her common sense. Mist swirls and a vampire (Abdul R Dim) appears. He tackles Reggie, grabbing his fist and crushing it, and then bites Veronica and takes off with her. Reggie, once home, laments that he had a run in with a vampire and the vampire took his girl.

a bit of a bite

We see a montage as Veronica and the vampire rise from their (very misty) coffins and hunt the night – Veronica taking to her new life. Meanwhile Reggie trains. Eventually he faces the vampire again and fights him. I must admit I openly guffawed when Reggie exclaimed “My Kung Fu is no match for your Dracula strength”. Will Reggie prevail? Can veronica be saved? Does she want to be saved? Do you care… Suffice it to say that the short opens up to a sequel, suggested to be called Death Kiss, that doesn’t appear in the film.

Dracula goes for the jugular

There is a series of very short episodic films about the Frankenstein Monster (Eric Watkins), which includes an episode entitled Lust of Dracula. In it Dracula gets his freak on with a female victim only for Frankenstein’s Monster to waltz in and violently cock-block him and carry the woman off. Not a lot more to say about this part; this series of shorts seems to be there to introduce Princess Baby (Jill Brummer) who recurs quiet a bit in non-vampiric bits.

he's waiting for a girl like you

The next exclusively vampire piece is entitled To Dance for a Vampire and sees a vampire pick up a dancer from a lap dancing club and take her home. He recognises her as the soul reincarnated of his lost love. They sleep together and when she awakens she finds that he has bitten her – something she is not happy about and she isn’t overly happy about being kept in the house by the vampire.

biting

In fact she does gravitate towards the prtrait of her original incarnation but denies the connection – like she always does, he suggests, and it emerges that she has reincarnated several times but each time she dies rather than turns. This one dragged on a bit but truly felt like a piece of 80s romance leaning, straight-to-video vampire filmmaking. I thought there was a kernel of a good idea here but it outstayed its welcome.

Paola Agusti as Misty

The last vampire segment, entitled Blood Love, sees Misty (Paola Agusti), who has fang scars on her breast, praying for her vampire to come back to her. However when he does he seems a lot more reluctant than she to continue with their blood play… A particularly short piece that wears its Romeo and Juliet colours on its sleeve (or at least in the form of the camera lingering on a book of the play's script), it wouldn’t have been enough to draw you into this on its own.

very red blood

The fact that this seems to both parody and celebrate grade Z movies is interesting, but not enough so to make this a satisfying watch, I’m afraid. However the grade z-ness of it all allows the filmmakers to get away with a huge amount of zero budget sfx. I did like how red the blood was in the first piece as it really did summon up an earlier age of films. However, over all it only deserves 2.5 out of 10.