You
might think a horror film that opens with a quote from Jonathan Swift might
have the potential for some for some smartly executed scares. Well, you would be wrong. Duane Graves & Justin Meeks’ Butcher Boys (trailer here) is that film and
it is a nasty piece of genre gristle, releasing today in select theaters and on
VOD.
Through
their unbelievably stupid actions, Sissy’s outrageously reckless and irresponsible
friends manage to antagonize a gang of cannibals or something. She was in the backseat, so she had nothing
to do with the death of their pooch. Of
course, that hardly matters. The pack of
urban savages chases the privileged kids into an ominous industrial park, where
they quickly dispatch her friends. Sissy
proves harder to kill, but not because she is especially intelligent or
resourceful. Instead, her tormentors are
simply reversing the course of evolution before our very eyes.
Ironically,
Butcher is the second release of the
week shot in and around San Antonio, which must have the absolute worst emergency
services of any large city to judge from this film. As Sissy, Ali Faulkner freaks out fairly
convincingly, perhaps out of genuine panic for what this cinematic outing might
mean for her career. However, the only
person that truly distinguished themselves on this production was the location
scout, who found some truly eerie demilitarized looking spots to shoot.
In
contrast, Butcher’s cinematography is
often incomprehensibly dark, but in this case that is more an observation than
a complaint. This really a gruesome film
that might even be scarring if there were any reasonably life like characters
to invest in. The assorted villains are an especially weak hodge-podge of American Psycho-esque himbos and circus
freaks.
