Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill! (DVD)
Starring Sara Malakul Lane, Richard Grieco, Demetrius Stear, Laura Parkinson, the voice of Dave Mustaine
Written and Directed by Jared Cohn
At first I thought I was watching the wrong movie. You don’t expect a film titled Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill! to open in the Middle East with American soldiers in combat against Islamic terrorists. This unexpected war movie opening sequence does set the stage for what’s to come – sort of.
Back in California, years later, a predominantly female punk band named Kill, Pussy, Kill! wastes no time making some of the biggest mistakes anyone can ever make in a horror movie.
Hold on a sec. First of all, if you’re a small time rock band trying to make it big and your vehicle breaks down while on a road trip you might as well accept that you’re going to die very shortly. Someone’s gonna kill you. It’s just how the world works. I’ve seen enough movies. I know this to be true.
And if you breakdown in the dead of night – on Halloween, no less – at a seemingly abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere and are immediately greeted by a white trash weirdo offering you a ride up the road to be reunited with a member of your group who has already gone missing, you might as well just go ahead and kill yourselves.
Actually, that’s kind of what ends up happening – sort of.
The band quickly find themselves taken captive inside the Honeymoon Saw Suite and forced to face their fears as they partake in a game of life or death orchestrated by an unseen madman referred to as The Mastermind, voiced by Megadeath frontman Dave Mustaine. Talk about 99 way to die…
The Mastermind is a mummy-wrapped, wheelchair-bound, psychotic ex-soldier who got his face chopped off by ISIS in the opening and now wheels around California looking and sounding like the deranged bastard lovechild of Darkman and Jigsaw with just a dash of Batman nemesis The Scarecrow. The Mastermind wants to teach you a lesson about appreciating your life and freedom or something like that. His negative reinforcement musings are so nonsensically loopy that with a little bit of tweaking to the script The Mastermind’s rants could have functioned as a sly parody of the santimonious empty moralizing that constitutes much of Jigsaw’s allegedly life-enriching torments.
I also don’t know why this band needed to be tortured into killing one another because given how quickly they’re ready to turn on each other it’s apparent they were destined to kill each other eventually, regardless. Wanna get out of this trap-filled room? One member of the band has to find a gun and shoot another. There’s not a ton of hesitation when she finds that firearm. This is record time for characters that are not complete strangers to turn on one another in a horror movie.
Heck; before they even get taken captive they’re giving one of their male bandmates the boot after he attempts to rape another. That guy comes back into the picture later on and displays such a sadistic streak of his own The Mastermind really should have just put him on the payroll.
Hard to get invested in any of these band members or feels much by way of suspense because none of them have any real personality. Two of them are lesbian lovers, that one guy I mentioned seems well on his way to being a sociopath as is, and another guy has big hair. That’s about the extent of their characterizations. I can’t even recall any of their names.
Nobody in the cast really stands out except for killers. Oh,how I really wish Cohn had focused more on The Mastermind and his family than his victims. The Mastermind has a wife attired in the cheesiest, most generic Halloween witch costume imaginable and they have a special needs daughter. When trick or treaters show up at their hovel in the middle of nowhere they murder them, too, in rather hilarious fashion. Nothing about them is every delved into. This is just who they are and what they do.
Then there’s Richard Grieco as the gas station attendant whose ties to the Mastermind are also never really explained. Is he a relative? A friend? On the payroll? Who is this guy and why is he part of this? Nor is it explained why he seems to be almost impervious to pain — and death! Or, for that matter, why he does most of what he does during the last third of the film. The focus shifts from The Mastermind’s game and more to whatever Grieco’s character feel like doing at that very moment, whether its playing his own mind games, getting in on the killing, or just just feeling rapey. It’s here that this train wreck of a movie finally derails and, believe me, it was already on the verge of jumping the tracks for much of its running time.
For all its fault, and there are many, I really was modestly entertained by Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill! until the third act when the bandmates-in-peril storyline mostly takes a powder in favor of a new set of even less likeable victims, and Grieco’s weirdo actively enters the trap rooms for no discernible reason.
“For no discernible reason” also summarizes most of why anything happens in this movie, taking one of the worst cues from Rob Zombie’s 31, thankfully minus that film’s smug sense of satisfaction believing itself to be far cooler than it actually was. Cohn’s microbudget production lacks the slickness of Zombie’s but isn’t afraid to revel in the sleaze of it all, somehow making it a bit more palatable in my eyes.
Why am I for the most part giving Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill! a pass? For mostly the same reason everything that happens in the movie occurs — for no discernible reason.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
