DVD review: Slaughter Tales (2012)

5 short stories told by a stolen vhs tape. A man has a bad run in with an unknown liquid living in his cabinet, 2 friends are stalked by a metal masked killer with an itchy cleaver finger, an escaped metal patient proves he is the ultimate mama's boy by way of brutal murders, a filmmaker finds himself trapped in a satanist slug infested death house, and a bored kid get's possessed by a demon that carries out brutal acts of vengeance. Slaughter Tales is written and directed by the fourteen year old Johnny Dickie who is something of a jack of all trades in this, he plays several characters, handles the make-up department, animation, editing and has made some of the soundtrack. You have to admire what Johnny Dickie have managed to do with a budget that is even smaller than the so called microbudget features. Two years in the making, a budget of $65, using friends and family as crew and cast-members. The acting is very amateurish with plenty of intentional and unintentional humor. It´s shot on video, with a mix of static and point of view footage. The soundtrack is pretty decent. The pacing is pretty good with several surreal and graphic scenes. The gore, the make-up fx, are all practical and do look very low budget as can be expected. No T & A in this but I think you all already knew that.
This review is based upon the region 1 DVD release from Briarwood Entertainment, it´s a nice looking big box DVD/VHS combo.
Rating: 2½ out of 7. I actually find it very hard to rate Slaughter Tales fairly as it hard not to admire the dedication and enthusiasm shown by the young Johnny Dickie. It has lots of flaws but many of these flaws are more or less intentional and are quite funny and keep in mind that it´s made on a ridiculous low budget. And if he can pull something like this off on a $65 budget what will happen if you give him some proper money. Now that would be very interesting to see. Slaughter Tales is a fun and entertaining ride but if you ain´t a fan of the horror genre and shot on video flicks you probably should stay very far away from this. It will be very interesting to see more from Johnny Dickie.


/JL