I think it’s safe to say RJ Bayley wasn’t overly keen on Acid Head…
It’s with a heavy heart I write this review. You may or may not remember, late last year, my review of Bikini Bloodbath Christmas. It was a film so vile and misogynistic I had to stop watching it before the horror even began.
Since then I’ve watched and reviewed the ultra low budget Memory Lane for Haddonfield Horror. While I made it all the way through that film, I still had to give it a dire review.
After Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter, I sincerely apologise to Memory Lane. This film is a sexist, racist nightmare.
It takes until around the 1 hour 45 minutes mark for Acid Head (for short) to start resembling anything like a horror, so if you’re looking for a fix of low budget blood and guts, this is not the film for you. Yes, the film is low budget, but the makers seem to have spent the meagre budget on embarrassingly awful post-production effects like blood splats and gunshots. Its all very rubbish.
Presumably to try and counteract the other low budgeted and badly crafted elements of the film, director and writer Tony Watt has imbued the movie with easily the most irritating stylistic effect I’ve ever seen in one.
You know how you can now shoot video on Instagram? Now I’ve never used it to shoot video, but I’m assuming you can add Instagram filters to your footage. This film looks like it has been entirely shot through an Instagram filter, and the most burned looking, colour sapping one at that. It’s just downright ugly and makes for a nauseating viewing experience – and if it’s not clear, not nauseating in the good way! Adding to this is the constant and incredibly irritating cutting. The cuts occur so quickly it becomes almost headache inducing. Adding to this is that almost every cut contains a barrage of poor quality tinny sound work. And by barrage, I mean barrage. The whole film is full of over the top sound effects, plenty lifted directly from properties like Star Trek. These sound effects combined with the Instagram filter are obviously some attempt to create some sort of cartoon acid trip of a feature, but the result is neither effective or enjoyable. For a film that already clocks in at a ludicrous 2+ hours, it makes the whole affair seem like 8.
The plot really isn’t worth getting into because it’s very, very surreal and barely comprehensible, with the killer goth girl killerappearing only towards the end of what has so far been a bizarre attempt at a comedy thriller. It’s simply stiflingly dull.
What is amazing about the film is how many naked women they’ve managed to get into it. Much like Bikini Bloodbath Christmas it truly confounds the mind as to how they’ve managed to get so many women to take their clothes off for scenes of full frontal nudity; especially given the ability of the the film makers and the clearly low pay. The film is also unbelievably sexist to the point it actually features a “10 minute beach sluts intermission” which is just a full 10 minutes of girls on a beach in bikinis. They’re hardly behaving like sluts either. The whole thing is violently distasteful and naff.
On the subject of -isms the film also has a fully racist sequence in which the black gardener is depicted by an actor crudely dressed up as a monkey.
And if that isn’t as damning a point to end a review on, I don’t know what is.
-10/10 (yes that’s a score of MINUS TEN)
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