Murder Loves Killers Too

Big bad Stevie is celebrating a birthday and he's overjoyed to have a group of fun-loving teenagers stumble upon his house (which they think is vacant at first). Oh yes Stevie is going to have so much fun, the teens....not so much.

I really enjoyed this low-budget slasher film. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, but you can tell that writer/director Drew Barnhardt is definitely a fan of the genre. He hardly misses a beat in this one. The acting is much better than average (for a film of this type), the soundtrack is great, throw in a bit of nudity, gore & some honest to goodness tension later in the film and you have a winner on your hands. Fans of low-budget horror films usually have to wade through a whole lot of excrement in order to find a (too few) diamond in the rough. This movie is one of those diamonds. I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for Barnhardt's future endeavors.

Eye Candy: Mary LeGault gets topless

My Grade: A-

DVD Extras: a 7 minute making of; 'creating a killer' featurette (5 minutes); Director's notebook (9 minutes); 'Scoring the film' featurette (11 and a half minutes); Title madness (about 14 minutes on why they choose the title of this movie); photo and artwork gallery; & original trailer for the film

dunno why this has a low average score, it's a very decent low budget horror film, just the right length, an 80s vibe to it, and it's gotta be said the music and sound is ace...sometimes music makes a movie, and in this case it's very true...the same film with crap music and sound design would've been pants...there's a great little whistling motif tune running through the whole thing and giving it a cheeky slant... yep i can't really fault this film - for what it is it's a fantastic way to use up an hour and a half of your precious horror movie loving life, not too much preamble before the nastiness gets underway either - Cloverfield did the preamble really well but since then it seems that all the new big budget horror films spend a lot of time hanging about with really unlikeable characters for the first half of the movie before they start getting bumped off. Not so with Murder Loves Killers.... Overall, two severed thumbs up!

You know, I feel a bit guilty giving this a mark below my 'level of acceptance' (which is 6) since I did enjoy it. But there are a few small niggles, mostly related to unanswered questions about the killer's motivation and background, which stop me just short. It sets them up, drops a lot of hints... only to fail to follow through on them, so your average viewer will feel slightly confused as to why they were raised in the first place. A shame.

It starts off with five kids heading to a remote mountain lodge, along with a self-conscious narrator who successfully predicts they're destined for trouble. One of the number is an incredibly shrill girl who won't stop jumping around and yelling. After a few minutes of this, I wanted the slasher to turn her into shish kebab. Amazing... my prayers were answered. That's what I admire about Blood Cabin... it soon disposes of all the extraneous characters, leaving us free to concentrate on the main chase: which is between the owner of the building, and the only member of the group with any brains... a spunky brunette.

The murderer here is an everyday kinda guy... He sneaks around using secret passages, cleans up the rubbish his visitors leave lying about, stops to have a scoop or two of ice cream... before stabbing, disemboweling, clobbering his unwelcome guests. It's a great role for Allen Andrews, and the fact he treats each victim with studied nonchalance while ripping them to shreds just adds to the aura of fear around him. He's a family man, who regards slaying as just a normal occupation. As you do.

We also see tantalising clues as to why he's such a suppressed maniac. A 7th Birthday cake splattered with blood. An preoccupation with the sound of bees humming. An unfortunate perverted desire to dress up grown ladies as schoolgirls before doing... stuff to them. All these could have been meshed together to form a fascinating backstory... but nope, they're just hanging there will no rope to attach them together. Oh well. A near miss. 5/10

This movie is great if you are into the camp of the 80's slasher movies. It's got a humorous twist on the conventional form but is loaded with dialog that fits the genre as well as if it'd come out of an old Friday the 13th movie. The acting is very much in line with the bulk of 80's slashers but the lead girl is solid and has a great scream. The killer, hope that doesn't spoil anything, but there's a killer, pulls off the part with a funny deadpan take. The movie is scary in places, but the character keeps it pretty funny throughout. It's obviously a budget movie, but the camera work is sharp and there are some cool panning long takes and well orchestrated shots. Overall, I give it a 10 for the genre. Good entertainment.

Nothing to seek out or to avoid. A group of us made pretty much this same slasher flick back in 2004 as part of a 48-hour film competition; where we wrote, shot, and edited everything in just 48 hours. So I could relate the lameness; and I could realize just how fortunate it was that we did not have the time to put together a lot of embarrassing special features like the ones on this DVD. And I could be thankful that we had someone on the team who grasped that production design could be more than mixing up a lot of fake blood and a personalized birthday cake.

"Murder Loves Killers Too" (2009) demonstrates the old movie maker adage that you can't find a really good looking girl willing to take off her top in your movie, unless she is being paid. As the three unpaid females prance around early in the movie, it quickly becomes obvious that Lindy (Kat Szumski) is the keeper (the hot one with the great body), who should get the most screen time and should wear the least clothes; assuming the director has a clue about his target demographic. That Aggie (Christine Haeberman) fills out her jeans quite nicely and has an interesting face. And that Tamra (Mary LeGault) has a body that would benefit from more clothes and maybe a little liposuction. So guess who takes off her clothes? And guess who gets killed off almost immediately. And they wonder why these things can't find much of an audience.

There were two cool cuts to look for, one where Tamra lies down and the other where Stevie lies down; both of which then cut forward to the same shot, illustrating a passage of time without any sort of transition. Very nice.

The movie has good intentions and the cast and crew appear to have had a lot of fun making it, but it is student film quality without the strange quirks that make some of those films interesting. While the movie has some elements of obvious self-parody and is generally fun viewing, the overall production quality (from the staggeringly lame acting to the awkward and cheap staging) makes it hard to determine what is deliberate parody and what is just a mockfest moment.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.