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
==========
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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