Movie Review: The Summer of Massacre (2011)

Directed by Joe Castro

Starring Brinke Stevens, Nick Principe and Cleve Hall

Of all the sub-genres of horror, the slasher film has always been one of the most popular. The problem with slasher films is the fact that there are so god damn many of them floating around out there and 99% of them are just plain horrible movies. Each one a copy-cat version of the last. I am sure from a film making standpoint, it would be quite a daunting task to come up with something fresh and original.

Buy The Summer of Massacre on Blu-ray or DVD

When I got The Summer of Massacre it came with a description sheet which included a nice list of awards this movie has racked up, apparently they managed to set a world record for most kills packed into one movie......and my mouth began to water. It had been a long time since I'd seen a great slasher movie and I was ready to be blown away.


The movie starts out with a guy who goes out for a late night jog and is mugged by a group of men. They slash his face open, gouge his eyeball out and leave him for dead. The following morning a woman jogger finds the guy lying face down and checks to see if he is ok. And that is when the mayhem clicks into gear, the one eyed jogger-dude destroys her and then sets out on foot, killing every person in his path. It is simply one kill scene after another, after another, after another. And were my eyes deceiving me or was that CGI blood I was seeing? Sweet Mother of God! Was that a CGI decapitation? My heart just sank, and I thought to myself, You have got to be fucking kidding me...

But it was true, every god damned kill scene in this movie is done in CGI, and not the Jurassic Park or Avatar kind of CGI but the low-end Si-Fi channel brand. The kind that insults your intelligence, and you know what I am talking about. The movie is split up into 5 seperate stories and they all got progressively worse as the movie went on. The only one that seemed to have any potential was the segment called The Lump. A story about a deformed and crippled woman (who is played by a man, which I did think was kind of funny) with a giant growth on her face who is taken to a desolate spot and dumped off a cliff in her wheelchair by a nasty relative. She somehow survives the 1000 foot fall only to be killed by her brother with a rock to the head after being convinced its the right thing to do by the nasty sister. The girl comes back from the dead and goes on a rampage, killing everyone in sight (basically the same take as the first story, only a little more build up to the massacre part) The kill scenes were so bad in this movie by the time it was half over I was secretly praying someone would bust through my door and shoot me in the face with a crossbow, anything to end the suffering.

I can understand and respect the director trying to do something a little different, I really can. But I was just not feeling anything for this movie but contempt. How can you in good conscience accept a record for most kills in a movie when all of the kills were produced with a computer program? This is horror movie sacrilege in my book, an unforgivable sin. Shame on you Joe Castro.

I am sure there are plenty of people out there who don't give two rat shits one way or another as to how the effects were done, and they will probably be amused and entertained by this movie. It has plenty of mindless slaughter, its cheesy and has bad acting that is so bad its actually good, which is a great quality. So I am not completely hating on this......I just felt robbed and disappointed by it, like having a girlfriend who promises you for years that she'll do a 3some and then when she finally does, she shows up with her brother ready to go.......What The Fuck?

I give it a 3.5 out of 10

Reviewed by KennyB