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STUDIO: Velocity/Thinkfilm
MSRP: $29.99
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 87 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Filmmaker Commentary
• Deleted Scene
• Trailer Gallery
The Pitch
“We’ve got a couple of weekends to kill, a film camera and access to Ron Jeremy. Let’s make a horror flick!”
Goddamned lawyers…
The Humans
Ron Jeremy (yes Ron Jeremy), April Billingsley, Maury Sterling, Heather Joy Budner, Justin Capaz, Faye Canada, Terry Mross, Elizabeth Mullins, Alan Fessenden.
Caption A: Hitchhiking success percentage: 100%
Caption B: "
I found you Ms. New BootyGet it together and bring it back to me
Hit the players club for about month or 2
Put a tan on it then see what it do."
– Bubba Sparxxx
The Nutshell
A demonic, welder’s mask-wearing butcher (that would be Ron Jeremy) with a penchant for eating his own scabs, fricasseeing his victims, condemning their souls and celebrating a good kill is on the hunt in Florida for a bunch of cheerleaders, escaped convicts, sheriff’s deputies and anything else that tastes good.
Hands down the greatest film credit ever.
The Lowdown
Omigod, where do I begin with this thing? Let me start by saying this is the stupidest, hilariously inane, gut-busting, no-script-having, sickest, fun-as-hell, deliberately shittily acted and directed, steaming pile of genius shit T & A smorgasbord I’ve ever reviewed. Also known as Dead Meat, there’s no way this was a serious attempt at a horror movie. My thinking is that somehow the filmmakers got their hands on our beloved Ron, for at least a short time, and structured a quickie slasher flick around him. Ole’ Andre is a hodgepodge of Leatherface, Jason and some as-yet unnamed knife wielder in a welding mask. The set up is straight out of Texas Chainsaw in that four cheerleaders (two hot girls, a fat chick and a surfer dude), crash in the middle of nowhere when one of the girls, Jasmine (Billingsley) is blowing the guy, Levi (Capaz). So they have to hoof it to a solitary house in the boondocks.
I think it’s safe to say that hazing is getting a little out of hand…
While that’s going on, there’s some random shenanigans going on with some escaped convicts, including Hoss (Sterling), an ex-priest and Tober (Fessenden), a dimwitted pervert. Andre opens the show by taking out a deputy and another convict, and he had a previous run-in with another deputy and left him half the man he used to be, literally. The deal with that deputy though, is that he repeatedly asks for someone to kill him (one of several running gags of the picture). Another deputy, Hollingsworth (Canada), a jive talkin’ sistah with attitude also appears on the scene at a fortuitous moment for Levi. To keep the story rolling along, there’s also an Uncle Jesse-type narrator (Gene Nash) with a naughty candy striping assistant (Renee).
We’ve probably all felt this way about Donald Rumsfeld at one time or another…
Andre is absent for a good part of the middle of the flick, indicative of the limited time the producers had Ron Jeremy for, and the cheerleaders spend a lot of that time being naked, making out in a bedroom, sucking chili off of each other (Spoiler, it ain’t chili), giving cocktail wienie sausage sexual innuendo jokes and tossing us a little lesbian action (always welcome by the way). But Andre does make appearances here and there, eliminating the players one by one, usually in bloody fashion. The way he lures the fat chick (to be fair, she’s not like Mo’Nique fat, more like Countess Vaughan fat…although she’s white) with a donut on a string is priceless.
Although a highly accomplished serial killer, still Andre yearned for his dream job of NFL referee…
Some random supernatural shit is tossed in, mostly in that Andre’s not really a butcher, but a demon who’s harvesting sinners’ souls and chowing down on the meat by-products. He’s able to sow his arm back on after getting it blown off (another running gag) and pretty much absorbs bullets like a certain Voorhees we all know and love. There’s also a not so subtle Buffy reference thrown in when the last surviving cheerleader, Cookie (Budner) a Jesus freak incidentally, goes one-on-one with Andre in a graveyard scene that’s really more House of the Dead finale than anything Slayeresque.
Florida’s new tourism billboard…
The story (so to speak) is completely haphazard shit, make no mistake about that. But here’s the thing, the movie is so self aware and tongue-in-cheek, that it’s meant to be that way. And that’s what makes it unusual. I’ve seen movies that had more budget but even less coherence (Dracula 3000), and other low-budget flicks that tried the straight horror thing but failed (Season of the Hunted). Andre the Butcher is definitely unique. I’d say that you’re going to come out of viewing it in one of two ways: you’re either going to appreciate the self-aware irreverence of the movie and enjoy the fairly impressive gore (and definitely the T&A), or you’re not going to be able to get past the (deliberately?) horrid writing and caricature-heavy acting. Me? Well I can roll with low budget nudity, slaughter and laughs if it’s done well, and considering I was laughing out loud at times, I guess it was.
(Sex)ual innuendo…weed…snack food…cheerleaders. My wet dream displayed to the world…
The Package
The film looks decent considering the lack of budget, and the audio is likewise pretty solid. The cover art is a bit deceptive, however, because Andre’s looking like Leatherface by way of Dr. Giggles when he’s really more Leatherface by way of Airplane. There’s one deleted scene involving Levi noticing the celebrity under the mask and a couple of trailers. But the real treat is the commentary from director Philip Cruz, producer James Hyde, Billingsley and boob double April Renee. There was supposedly wine flowing during the commentary and that always leads to better audio experiences. This one was a gas.