Don Dohler completed this film in 1987, and I'm stealing right from the IMDb trivia right now: "When filming on the movie almost completed, director Don Dohler sent what had been made up until that point to his investors (as a show of progress). The investors then requested that he re-shoot the entire movie on lower-quality film. When Dohler completed the film the second time, the investors took the master-print and disappeared. They (and the film) resurfaced years later, when they attempted to present the film with a different title (and poor-quality editing, as well as unnecessary padding). After that, the director begrudgingly released the film, and made no attempts to fix what the investors ruined; he said in an interview that he wasn't in the mood to, '...shoot the film a third time.'"
That sucks. So basically, some people tried to steal this film away from him. And I watch this, and I honestly really, really wonder why. Why the fuck would you try to steal this movie? Now, I loved my intro to Dohler. I watched The Galaxy Invader and I liked it for it's kooky weirdness and backwoods creativity. It was amateur but embraced it and the pacing was good. Nightbeast was even better, dialed up in cheesiness factor and bizarre qualities. The Alien Factor was fun and strange, his first movie. Fiend was slower and less engaging, a sort of quasi-thriller/mystery where neither of those elements existed and instead it was replaced by inept half ideas. Which leads to this film.
Blood Massacre sounds on paper like a decent idea. A group of petty criminals pull a robbery at a video store (?) that goes wrong and they escape. They hijack a woman on the road and force her to take them to her house. They hold her and her family hostage, but there's a surprise in store for these criminals! The family is actually all cannibals, and soon its a game of who's hunting who!
However, the problems with this are multiple. When it actually comes to intrigue and acting, these are not Dohler's strengths. Makeup, effects, and bizarre are Dohler's strengths. If you actually sit through this movie, you'll get the treat of a nice makeup shot in the very end, but other than that, it relies heavily on bad actors, an undeveloped script, and clunky pacing. Some might appreciate this, as it's the classic bad bad movie type thing, but I like my bad movies covered in cheese factor or weirdness or anything! I don't just want dimly lit, slightly out of focus, emotionless actors saying vague lines of dialogue.
The acting by some of the house cannibals is decent, and the end sequence of the last 20 minutes or so is okay. The movie is not even 90 minutes, so I would be lying to say I was bored. I wasn't bored, but I also was not entertained at all. It just sort of played out, and I watched, mostly out of a firm determination to get through it instead of anything else.
If I had seen this film of his first instead of one of the better ones, I might have chalked the whole of his filmography up as bad amateur Z-grade similar to Robert Emenegger. I'm glad I saw his better movies first, but I have to say, this one was pretty awful. I will give a star I guess. For the makeup and occasional riffability factor.
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