"Partying, mayhem and gore...80's style."
So says the tag-line for "Porkchop", a micro-budget throwback to "kids are killed in the woods" slasher movies from the 80's. Maybe it's because I recently watched "Rabies", which managed to do something new with the backwoods slasher movie, but I found this to be a pretty bad movie all around.
The plot goes like this: Deborah (Ruby Larocca), Mike (Charles Sullivan), Chris (Chris Woodall), Ian (Brandon Raker), Courtney (Sierra Ferrell) and Rachael (Erin Russ) go to the woods for sex, drugs and good times. Also, they bring around a goofy talking robot named Elron (voiced by Danny Hicks of "Evil Dead II", "Darkman" and "The Intruder" fame.) Long story short, there's a hulking man wearing a pig-head mask known as Porkchop (Robert Cobb) that has murder on his mind, and you know what goes on from there.
While the killer is pretty bad-ass and the kills are gory as hell and usually inventive (with the gore and make-up effects actually looking pretty great), "Porkchop" is pretty bad. In some ways, it kind of reminded me of Drew Rosas' "Blood Junkie" in the fact that it wants so much to be like the slasher movies from the 80's, what with it's 80's fashions, bad hair, bad pop music, etc. However, "Blood Junkie" at least made me laugh. This movie was just annoying, with all of the jokes being deliberately bad. My problem with this is the fact that I hate it when a movie acknowledges that it isn't exactly a good movie, and just goes "f#@k it." Deliberately making bad jokes doesn't excuse anything. In fact, that just makes it worse.
In the process, everything else about the movie is just poorly done. Eamon Hardiman directs the whole thing as if it were his first motion picture, and that would be forgiving if it was (it's not.) The entire stretch before the kills start to occur is just a pain to sit through, with actors mugging for the camera and doing next to nothing interesting. Speaking of which, it takes way too long for the kills to start to happen, and by the time they do, you'll hardly be awake. This is a movie that, as I said, wants so much to capture the vibe of 80's slasher movies, but it lacks the most important element: fun. There's hardly anything in this movie that's remotely enjoyable. It just feels like a group of people goofing off with their home video equipment in the woods, and not like the tongue-in-cheek slasher fun-fest it wants to be.
If you want to see a fun, 80's style slasher movie-then go watch an actual 80's slasher movie like "The Prowler." It'd be a much better choice than watching a bunch of people play pretend for 92 minutes.
So says the tag-line for "Porkchop", a micro-budget throwback to "kids are killed in the woods" slasher movies from the 80's. Maybe it's because I recently watched "Rabies", which managed to do something new with the backwoods slasher movie, but I found this to be a pretty bad movie all around.
The plot goes like this: Deborah (Ruby Larocca), Mike (Charles Sullivan), Chris (Chris Woodall), Ian (Brandon Raker), Courtney (Sierra Ferrell) and Rachael (Erin Russ) go to the woods for sex, drugs and good times. Also, they bring around a goofy talking robot named Elron (voiced by Danny Hicks of "Evil Dead II", "Darkman" and "The Intruder" fame.) Long story short, there's a hulking man wearing a pig-head mask known as Porkchop (Robert Cobb) that has murder on his mind, and you know what goes on from there.
While the killer is pretty bad-ass and the kills are gory as hell and usually inventive (with the gore and make-up effects actually looking pretty great), "Porkchop" is pretty bad. In some ways, it kind of reminded me of Drew Rosas' "Blood Junkie" in the fact that it wants so much to be like the slasher movies from the 80's, what with it's 80's fashions, bad hair, bad pop music, etc. However, "Blood Junkie" at least made me laugh. This movie was just annoying, with all of the jokes being deliberately bad. My problem with this is the fact that I hate it when a movie acknowledges that it isn't exactly a good movie, and just goes "f#@k it." Deliberately making bad jokes doesn't excuse anything. In fact, that just makes it worse.
In the process, everything else about the movie is just poorly done. Eamon Hardiman directs the whole thing as if it were his first motion picture, and that would be forgiving if it was (it's not.) The entire stretch before the kills start to occur is just a pain to sit through, with actors mugging for the camera and doing next to nothing interesting. Speaking of which, it takes way too long for the kills to start to happen, and by the time they do, you'll hardly be awake. This is a movie that, as I said, wants so much to capture the vibe of 80's slasher movies, but it lacks the most important element: fun. There's hardly anything in this movie that's remotely enjoyable. It just feels like a group of people goofing off with their home video equipment in the woods, and not like the tongue-in-cheek slasher fun-fest it wants to be.
If you want to see a fun, 80's style slasher movie-then go watch an actual 80's slasher movie like "The Prowler." It'd be a much better choice than watching a bunch of people play pretend for 92 minutes.
