The late Don Dohler brings us yet another one of his no budget gems in BLOOD MASSACRE. Don Dohler regular GEORGE STOVER stars as a crazed Vietnam vet named Charlie Rizo, a man with no friends & a bad attitude & who longs for the good old days of Vietnam to return, a time when he was truly happy killing the enemy, not that he has quit killing mind you, as he winds up butchering the owner of a bar & another patron for getting him thrown out & assaulted. Visiting his pals Paul, Monica & Jimmy, the group are hoping to score some serious cash & wind up robbing a video outlet in town, killing one of the visitors in the store, before hot footing it out of there in their get away car, unbeknowest to them however, a customer has gotten a hold of one of their guns & has shot a hole in the gas tank, causing the gas to leak out & leaves them stranded out in the middle of nowhere. As luck would have it, they run into a passerby named Liz, who lives nearby in an old farm house with her family. Holding her as hostage, they force her to take them to her home, where they then hold the family as hostage. However while the family should be afraid for their lives, the truth is, they oddly appear happy to have the group there in the home, however this being a horror film, do you think any of the characters find this a little unusual? of course not! as time goes on, the group quickly finds out that this is no ordinary family & soon they reveal their true selves as vicious cannibalistic psychopaths, whose love for human flesh knows no bounds. One by one the family butchers the hostage takers one by one, with Rizo attempting to escape such a horrible fate by using his Vietnam training to build weapons that can take down the predators, but he’s in for some very big surprises…
BLOOD MASSACRE is the one & only film (not counting his Time Warp Pictures Productions, which I’m still yet to see) in Don Dohlers collection of films that I haven’t seen, but due to the films utter obscurity, was unable to find. Eventually (as luck would have it) I did manage to find an old VHS version of the movie & decided to check it out & was it worth it? That all depends actually, if you’re a fan of Dohlers other works yes, on the other hand…The film’s plot although none to new to the genre, is fairly entertaining for what it is. Don Dohler’s direction is fairly decent, but the acting leaves a lot to be desired. The film also bears a cheesy & at times sleazy style (but oddly enough no on screen nudity) that actually works fairly well for the movie. The gore effects & kills are pretty well done for such a low budget film, as is the monster effects & the film has a fairly unique & completely off the wall twist ending that I must admit I never saw coming.
PLOT SPOILER!
The film’s climax reveals that the family are all flesh craving aliens! that resemble shambling rotting corpses that cannot be killed as proved when Rizo catches two of them in his crudely made booby traps. He is shocked into inaction when the badly mutilated family continue to live on & come after him in a pretty freakish nightmarish & brutal climax.
On the downside however, much like Dohler’s other no budget efforts, the film also tends to suffer from it’s no budget qualities. The film is very cheap & amateurish in both look & style & some sequences are very hard to see what is going on because the picture is so poorly lit. In an interesting bit of trivia (Revealed in BLOOD, BOOBS & BEAST, a documentary on Don Dohlers film career & a must see for fans of his movies!) The film itself has a very interesting & somewhat torturous history to it. Originally Dohler was hired by some investors to helm the movie as a shot on video production. When the investors seen the footage shot, they then changed their minds & asked him to shoot it on 16mm film. However the film wasn’t even completed when the investors took off with the film & seemingly dropped off the face of the earth until 1990, when they resurfaced with the film under a different title. After they had the film taken away from them, the distributor asked if Don wanted to finish filming the movie, but he refused because he “shot it twice already” thus they released the film as is, which explains why the film is somewhat uneven & looks unfinished in areas. As a result of the troubles he went through, BLOOD MASSACRE was the very film that made Don want to quit the film business completely & remained his last film for fourteen years, until 2001, when he returned to the micro budget film-making fold, forming Time Warp Pictures with no budget film-maker Joe Ripple, until his death in 2006.
All in all, this film (as already mentioned above) is strictly for fans who seen & enjoyed Don Dohler’s other films, but if you didn’t like his work than don’t bother with this one. Filmed in 1987 but sat unreleased until 1991. Remade in 2001 (with Dohler producing) as HARVESTERS.
