Woodyanders Review of The Butcher

The Butcher (2006)

A very lousy and hackneyed backwoods horror stinker

[2/10 · 21 March 2010]

Stop me if you've already heard this one before: Six extremely annoying and unappealing college kids -- sassy blonde Rachel (Catherine Wreford), obnoxious, insensitive, and spineless musclehead Mark (a supremely terrible and insufferable performance by Alan Ritchson), sexy libidinous lesbians Atlanta (cute blonde Ashley Hawkins) and Liz (foxy brunette Tiffany Kristensen, who at least bares her breasts prior to getting bumped off first), bumbling nice guy Adam (decently played by Tom Nagel), and token black Sophie (Myiea Coy) -- on a cross country road trip run afoul of a vicious family of deadly and demented hicks after they get a flat tire in the middle of some nowheresville sticks. Gee, isn't that a remarkably fresh and inspired premise for a fright flick? Of course not, man! Director Edward Gorsuch, working from a pitifully trite and by-the-numbers cookie cutter script by Michael Hurst, manages to maintain a fairly brisk pace and delivers a handy helping of nasty gore, but crucially fails to create any suspense or spooky atmosphere. Worse yet, the main protagonists are so uniformly cardboard, irritating, and underdeveloped that one simply doesn't care whether they live or die. April Lang as deranged hag Ms. Mayhew, Bill Jacobson as hulking disfigured brute Franklyn Mayhew, and Annie MacKay as tongueless daughter Angel are reasonably creepy, but they still aren't anywhere near as scary and disturbing as the cannibal clan in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (a horror classic that this crud shamelessly copies to the grating ninth degree). Dennis Smith's generic shivery'n'shuddery score, the headache-inducing blaring alternative soundtrack, the variable acting from an attractive, but charmless and unlikable cast, and one of those always unwelcome groan-worthy "it ain't over yet!" (non)endings all add further abject insult to already appalling injury. Hank Baumert, Jr.'s slick cinematography makes this schlock look much better than it deserves. A real dud.