Reviews

Intelligent zombies, nudity, gore, awesome Italian villa, terrible (dubbed) dialogue, creepy Oedipal man- child... So worth the $1 I spent to buy the DVD. If you have any appreciation for cheap Italian movies, this up your alley. Set-up is straight forward-Scientist poking around animates corpses, they attack him, then go after a pack of visiting couples who mostly have sex with each other or run from zombies. You owe it to yourself to find this movie, at as low a cost as possible, and dig deep into this flick with some friends and some drinks. And since IMDb thinks I haven't written enough, I'll compliment the film on the creative ways the living characters die, but dock the flick a couple points for an abrupt ending.

I recently acquired a copy of the James Balsamo flick, "I Spill Your Guts," via Crypticon KC 2013, and after having watched another of his movies, "Cool As Hell," I was expecting more low-budget shenanigans, "uneven" talent among the cast, and a story that was, at best, a reason to string together set pieces... Turns out I was right, but also very, very, wrong... Made in the style, intentionally or not, of a grindhouse slasher, "Guts" "tells" the "story" of Dennis (Balsamo) and Joe (Billy Walsh), best friends and soldiers. Dennis heroically "saves" Joe from (offscreen) "attackers." However, he is wounded in the throat, which destroys his voice, and leaves Joe to earn a medal that looks like it came from the Boy Scout Shop...

And, that medal is only one of the signs of the shortcuts taken in this movie... When one has limited budget, one MAY need to shape the script to fit... For instance, if one is to set the opening scenes in, say, a German hospital, it seems a good idea to make sure that no one will notice the "New Yorker" poster on the wall, or the lack of German iconography, (I can attest that the Germans tend to be tolerant of uneducated Americans, but not to the point of erasing all signs, warnings, labels, etc of their native language.), or the fact that only one person in the entire hospital speaks with anything resembling a German accent, or that Dennis will be spending his allegedly last moments in what is clearly a clinic exam room, complete with posters of medications and body diagrams on the wall... If your budget won't support a foreign "location," then set it in the US.

I could also spend significant time on other errors and what seems to be a lack of even rudimentary research into the US military, its operations, or how to make actors appear as if they've been in the service... Suffice it to say that these failures were so distracting as to make the movie a chore to watch. I rolled my eyes in exasperation often enough to risk them sticking up into my skull...

But, I want to focus for a moment on the murders in this film... As with any slasher, a significant number of the victims are women. I accept that as part of the nature of the the genre, as I do the uneven SFX, weak kills, and inconsistent motive, but one particular UNRELATED and unnecessary scene suggests a woman being stabbed repeatedly in the vagina with a knife... This is not one of the central revenge murders, but a flashback apparently meant to create a back story for one of the essentially irrelevant minor "characters"...

Like Balsamo's other flick, there is a generous helping of blood, and tons of GRATUITOUS nudity. But, I have the Internet, so I don't need to go to sleazy home videos to look at naked women... Also, like "Cool As Hell," this movie has frequent cameos from a variety of people who had two minutes free to swear at the camera , and music from a slate of bands longer than the cast list, most of whom are featured as a character makes the obligatory visit to a bar or club, or changes channels on TV... And like "Cool As Hell," I felt an obligation, nay a calling, to spare as many people as I could the pain and wasted time of this movie, because this film is not even, "So Bad It's Good," it's just bad... I wish it wasn't, because there's a seed of an interesting thriller here... But it never bears fruit...

I first learned of this movie when I attended Crypticon KC 2013, where the director/writer/star James Balsamo was a featured guest(?!). When I passed his table, he asked if I'd heard of the film, and then told me it featured Andrew WK, Tom Savini, David Naughton, and several other personalities, and he described the movie as "Bill & Ted meets Beetlejuice." After having seen the movie, I'd describe it as more like Jay & Silent Bob meets Weird Science, only without any trademark clever Smith dialogue, and if Kelly LeBrock was a bald green demon... And as for "featuring" the above mentioned celebrities... Their appearance in this movie is shorter than the time it takes to read this sentence. In most cases, the gag is that Balsamo's character bumps (literally) into one of them on the street, gets yelled at, then walks away... Savini actually gets to play a "Demon Slayer" for about a minute and a half in a sort of flashback...

Balsamo does voice-over OVER the action he's describing, lingers FOREVER on flashbacks of his character's sexual failures and various other GRATUITOUS nudity, and generally makes the film look like a junior high film project shot by a bunch of stoners, not a legitimate indie with a budget of $60K. I'm willing to overlook some technical weakness in an indie if the story or SOMETHING is engaging, but, this film is essentially weak fantasy for losers. In this piece they,through Balsamo, get to save the world, get the girl, hack zombies with a katana, ensure all the villains get their just deserts, all while getting high on pot from a super bong granted by a piece of talking snot... Yes, I really just wrote that... It sounds like it should be a blast to watch, sober, drunk, or high, and it was probably a lot of fun to make. But, it was not remotely enjoyable to watch...

The biggest touch of creativity is the Acid Bath prod. co. animated logo. And, on a final note... If my movie is called, "Cool As Hell," and one of the main characters is "Az the demon," I'd have called it, "Cool Az Hell."