Las Vegas Bloodbath (1989)

 

Director: David Schwartz

Screenplay: David Schwartz

Cast: Ari Levin as Sam Butler; Rebecca Gandara as Wet & Wild Wendy; Barbara Bell as Barbara; Susanne Ciddio as Suzanne; Tiffany Heisler as Tuff Tiff; Leah Luchette as Bambi; Jennifer Quinn as Cherry Blossom; Elizabeth Anderson as Ruth Butler

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) # 239

 

Ruth loved oil wrestling!

I advise caution with Las Vegas Bloodbath. Even for those who love micro and no-budget films, especially seen in the uncut version, this is a film that can be a very unpleasant experience. If it was not for the amateurish edge, this would be even scuzzier to experience, as was the case when I first saw the film and felt a really negative view of it originally. For those tolerant to this, well this is definitely a curious case, as never was there a film that was memorable as it was, as well as likely to make you wish to have a shower afterwards.

Shot in video, looking like homemade porn from the eighties, your initial set up is a yuppie about to return home to tell his wife Ruth about his recent success. Said wife, dressed with a Bonnie Tylor approved blond wig, which looks like an animal on her head, is having it on with a police officer, and he snaps and kills them both. Set to what sounds like 8-bit role playing video game music, this is a tale of a fragile male psyche as this one moment turns him into a psychopathic misogynist, driving around real Las Vegas locations at first causing mayhem. Carrying around Ruth's head, as depicted with a mannequin's wearing the same wig, the film is legitimately scuzzy in tone especially if you witness it through a low-resolution VHS copy, as it zigzagged between legitimately distasteful to being ridiculous. Distasteful when, despite hearing how much of a misogynist he is, a paid sex worker still goes into his car, only to end up murdered and having her leg ripped off being tied to his red sports car. Absurd when Ari Levin, playing the killer, decided to go to eleven in shouting acting. That and he is an erratic killer. He will randomly walk into a bar with Ruth's head, than immediately shoot the male bar keeper. One man raises a middle finger from his driver's seat in another car at him only to have it shot off.

Beyond this passage of madness though, this is a very sleazy film, but also one which has a lot of padding. It is what this micro-genre filmmaking can be as much as the gore or the films which innovate, a lot of working around and extending the length in this case as he drives around Las Vegas in the daytime, strangely a good time capsule in the midst of a transgressive splatter film, until he eventually encounters B.L.O.W., the "Beautiful Ladies of Oil Wrestling". This reminds you of the era this was made in as it is a reference of G.L.O.W., the "Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling" promotion which many will know in the 2010s for the fictional reinterpretation as a television series. This means a lot of amateur performances where the female oil wrestlers hang out eating pizza, watching their show, and adding to the misanthropy of the film's tone by showing a complete lack of empathy of Barbara, a member (played by an actual pregnant woman) who they make jives at out of earshot about who the father is.

After this, you have a film, when I first saw it and still feel, is uncomfortable even if completely ridiculous. Simply because it is a series of scenes of the killer, despite there being enough of them to be able to subdue him, taking each of the women and murdering them in their own home in a hostage situation. Even if it is gnarly and cheesy - who calls nipples "silver dollars" for example - you are dealing with some pretty strong content. Very strong content as, with a tribute to their practical effects designer who passed, they did what they could with very limited means and made a very sick film. [Spoilers with Spoilers] Including a very fake doll baby being thrown against a wall and making a horrendous amount of fake blood mess. [Spoilers End]. It is, upon reflection, a ballsy film to have witnessed in how lurid and haphazard it is, actually even ending on something legitimately creepy as, alongside evil winning, a bathroom is revealed that matches the Leatherface family home of fake limb props and blood everywhere. It is also a grimy experience which is also frankly incompetent at times it is, possibly revealing a hypocrite in me but also a film which gets into a really bleak tone, affected by how stark the film looks contrasted by the moments where it is ridiculous.

If this had been a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie, which is really the best parallel, even his most extreme film The Gore-Gore Girls (1972), which has some really nasty content to match this, also had more colour and a tongue in cheek. There is humour, or stuff impossible to not find absurd, but the tone and the aesthetic, alongside this being a film mostly about a men torturing and killing women, is going to really put up a force for many to even be able to watch Las Vegas Bloodbath. Definitely, in context to this type of micro-budget genre cinema, it is a really strange film to witness, even among those few know of baring the hardcore aficionados, and this is absolutely a case even among this sub-genre where the term "acquired taste" really exists. I am not even really sure what I even think of Las Vegas Bloodbath. This time, when I absolutely feel miserable sitting through it the first viewing, I can find humour in Ari Levin's attempt at matching Nicolas Cage in hyper-action, the line quoted at the top of this review, even in among the later hostage and massacre passage showing this film is a deeply silly film which can be funny. Because of the content itself though, such as the uncomfortable amount of times "bitch" is used and gore, it is still a film probably time dirty, nasty and ramshackle for me to appreciate.

To find it a morbid curiosity to look at, probably the right way to explain what I feel about it.