Friday, 13 March 2020

The Summer of the Massacre (2011)



Director: Joe Castro
Screenplay: Joe Castro and Schroeder
Cast: Tim A. Cooley as Chris, Nick Principe as Lori Williams, Brinke Stevens as Mrs. Williams, Lisa M. Garcia as Kimberly Ann Williams, Tchia Casselle as Melanie, Scott Barrows as Mr. Boogens, Lauren Boehm as Lisa, Felipe Winslett as Vinnie, Chris Staviski as Bradley, London Hilton as Conrad, Justin Marchert as Carmen , Joe Mannetti as Richard Khan, Bahram Khosraviani as George Vic, Dan Lovell as Dax Malone

In my decision to explore the films of Joe Castro, which I will continue, the idea was to be as non -partisan in my opinions without turning the reviews into puff pieces. The main ideas was to see if a director in any field, if they make many films, can be an auteur at least in reoccurring obsessions and motifs, to which particularly in micro budget cinema a director might actually read the reviews and be angry at whatever opinion you have.

Opinions should be allowed, and it was a good thing that whilst grotesque and nasty, Terror Toons 3 (2015) was actually compelling to witness. That said, the idea I had revisiting Terror Toons (2002) about Castro being very misanthropic comes to haunt The Summer of the Massacre, which I sadly have to confess was one of the most worst viewing experiences emotionally I have had just because of its relentless stream of violence and nihilism without anything to gauge with. For me, "worst" now is a rare nightmare where it's the attitude that I find worse nowadays than technical quality. Thankfully, this is not Darren Aronofsky's mother! (2017) where a creator makes a tool out of themselves, but sadly a case of a director I have softened to making a one off creative decision I am not found of in the slightest, where The Summer of the Massacre is most well known for having broken the Guinness World Record for highest body count in a slasher film, at 155, but through the perspective of a nasty attitude and a serial killer fixation doesn't work for myself well at all.

The anthology is four stories intercut by book ends, the first warning you how idiosyncratic Castro's style became into the 2010s where you have a warehouse full of extras in digitally mangled and desecrated corpse forms like the cover of Slayer's Reign in Blood. The comparisons to what Castro's style is, still doing practical effects but heavily computer manipulated to extra hyper digitalisation and green screen, is the paper animation of Jan Svankmajer's Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010), where the Czech animator manipulated pictures, and the front covers of Carcass' Reek of Putrefaction (1988) and Symphonies of Sickness (1989) albums, their first two when they still were going "goregrind" and made collages from real medical photographs of death and disease to shock listeners. Joe Castro's style is gross and unforgettable in design but becomes too much, especially as I don't think he meant this to be as extreme as it is in this film but fun.

The anthology stories are also slim in content and long. The first, in which a guy is attacked whilst jogging and mutilated, leads to an endless stream of him killing extras as he has gone mad, picking off anyone in his rampage until he finds his assailants. Beyond the CGI, obviously fake but stylised to revel in all the gore and internal organs rendered onscreen, Castro's style is like many micro budget films if on a higher scale, a lot of location shooting in a very large cinema and casting ordinary folk off the street to star as part of the body count. It's an acquired taste, but it still continues because it has a charm, cast members regardless of acting quality you rarely get in Hollywood in terms of the variety of shapes and sizes getting a chance to scream and be killed, which I can respect. This segment, with barely any plot, however lasts too long.

The second story Lump is the most interesting of the lot because it has a story of a slasher film. A sister sick of her female sibling, an incredibly disabled and incapacitated girl with a pronounced lump and likely to die, pushes her off a cliff in the woods to the horror of her brother, even her boyfriend and friends who are actually against being part of this. The younger sister, the lump burst and somehow alive, wakes up and goes on a revenge spree against them all. It's not my thing, but it's an idea with a story. It is at least something of potential interest.

The third is where The Summer of the Massacre, alongside the book ending segments interspliced between the stories, show this is meant to be nihilistic on purpose, a really nasty tale of a father of a man, a bloated "bogeyman" who conceived him by raping his mother, coming back to torment and mutilate him when he is an adult. Here the edginess gets too much for me, also with a sense that with the interviews with fake serial killers that are spliced between segments of The Summer of the Massacre feels part of a period alien to me.

The film does have a view of "coolness" to its edginess, of grim horror and serial killers, Joe Castro someone old enough to have grown up figures who gained uncomfortable cult auras around them despite being mass murderers, still significant into the nineties with figures like John Wayne Gacy or individuals in jail like Jeffery Dahmer. It's a concept alien to me as an Englishman as, whilst we have tabloids go on about this, we've never developed this aura for our history of serial killers. Barring Jack the Ripper, there is very little chance of someone like the Yorkshire Ripper ever gaining such a reputation. For me as well, there is also the question of when was the last time a serial killer, as they sadly still exist, was talked about in pop culture a great deal. A part of me considers that since 9/11, and between terrorist attacks and spree shootings, a consciousness has come up that makes the notion of highlighting these figures distasteful.

Certainly The Summer of the Massacre feels of a tone I couldn't get into, and for me when you get to the end of the Bogeyman story, where the titular fiend massacres an entire hospital, Joe Castro unfortunately crosses a line of desensitisation that, like starting at the early Carcass LP covers for too long, just becomes dulling than shocking, oppressively so. This applies as well to the final story, about a group of campers being terrorised by a mutilated and burnt up fireman, which didn't linger once my senses had been burnt out entirely. The only thought that came by then, the one great interest, is that Joe Castro continues with LGBTQ content. There's another drag performer in the film, whilst sadly only briefly, and the fourth story surrounds two firemen who were in love, burnt to death, and the surviving one becoming a Jason Voorhees figure, still lurid and nasty but coming from a place of note1.

After this, the wraparound returns to the warehouse full of corpses, the serials killers interviewed (three of them) throughout the film hold up against the police with a cage full of people and inexplicably having acquired a nuclear bomb, turning in the end to a bleak post apocalypse where news broadcasters talk of Chernobyl for reference. Whatever Joe Castro was going through, a really bleak "fuck the world" mood and/or wanting to break a record of some sort, it's not a sombre nihilism but too much to digest at once. This opinion is not a condemnation of Castro's filmmaking, as Terror Toons 3 was a film you wanted to take a shower afterwards from but was also a bizarre film with a black humour to it. Instead, this was such an endless experience that I'd rather watch any Terror Toons film before it.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Nasty/Psychotronic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None


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1) One film of Castro's I'd like to see is not even a horror film, a rare tangent in his filmography called The Young, the Gay and the Restless (2006), meant to be a parody of American daytime soap operas with a likelihood of a few shirtless men throughout. If it worked even slightly, that'd be a film worth seeing.

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