Murder Loves Killers Too (2009) User Reviews

So close...

[natashabowiepinky · 5/10 · 23 March 2014]

You know, I feel a bit guilty giving this a mark below my 'level of acceptance' (which is 6) since I did enjoy it. But there are a few small niggles, mostly related to unanswered questions about the killer's motivation and background, which stop me just short. It sets them up, drops a lot of hints... only to fail to follow through on them, so your average viewer will feel slightly confused as to why they were raised in the first place. A shame.

It starts off with five kids heading to a remote mountain lodge, along with a self-conscious narrator who successfully predicts they're destined for trouble. One of the number is an incredibly shrill girl who won't stop jumping around and yelling. After a few minutes of this, I wanted the slasher to turn her into shish kebab. Amazing... my prayers were answered. That's what I admire about Blood Cabin... it soon disposes of all the extraneous characters, leaving us free to concentrate on the main chase: which is between the owner of the building, and the only member of the group with any brains... a spunky brunette.

The murderer here is an everyday kinda guy... He sneaks around using secret passages, cleans up the rubbish his visitors leave lying about, stops to have a scoop or two of ice cream... before stabbing, disemboweling, clobbering his unwelcome guests. It's a great role for Allen Andrews, and the fact he treats each victim with studied nonchalance while ripping them to shreds just adds to the aura of fear around him. He's a family man, who regards slaying as just a normal occupation. As you do.

We also see tantalising clues as to why he's such a suppressed maniac. A 7th Birthday cake splattered with blood. An preoccupation with the sound of bees humming. An unfortunate perverted desire to dress up grown ladies as schoolgirls before doing... stuff to them. All these could have been meshed together to form a fascinating backstory... but nope, they're just hanging there will no rope to attach them together. Oh well. A near miss. 5/10

It has a very nice twist on an average plot!

[mario_c · 5/10 · 4 March 2008]

It's a low cost production inserted in the Teen Slasher type, but it's not bad, especially if we take in consideration the clearly short resources. The plot is the one of a traditional slasher, including beautiful teen girls that just want to have fun and, on that purpose, go to a isolated house in the woods… typical and pretty average! However, when the viewer starts thinking that it's just an average slasher, with nothing new, a good and quite interesting twist happens in the plot! I won't tell what it is of course, but I can tell you that I appreciated it, and that's the reason why I'm scoring this movie with a 5/10! As I said, the production is really cheap, the acting could have been better (especially from the psycho guy, which I think was terrible) and the plot is nothing special, but the twist and the soundtrack (it's cheap but it's quite good!) make it worth a watch! If you like B-series movies, as an alternative to the (sometimes tedious…) blockbusters, give it a chance!

Blood cabin my review

[jeffreyc-32567 · 4/10 · 1 September 2019]

The film seemed a bit strange with the guy killing the people in various ways. But for three pounds it was fair

Really bad zero budget horror.

[poolandrews · 2/10 · 3 May 2010]

Murder Loves Killers Too starts as five teenage friends make their way to an isolated cabin in the middle of the woods that they have rented for the weekend. Once there Lindy (Kat Szumski) goes missing & soon after the other's start disappearing too, it seems that a overweight balding man named Stevie (Allen Andrews) is hiding in the cabin & killing the teens off one by one. Eventually only Aggie (Christine Haeberman) is left, Stevie manages to capture Aggie & plans to put glasses on her so she looks like his daughter & have sex with her as you would. Aggie has a negative reaction to this idea & tries to escape...

Written & directed by Drew Barnhardt I am not really sure what his intention with Murder Loves Kilelrs Too was but quite simply I thought it was awful in every aspect. First of all the title Murder Loves Killers Too makes no sense, it means nothing in context with the film itself & is maybe the most annoying title for a film ever. Right, the first fifty odd minutes of Murder Loves Killers Too is your standard teen slasher flick, a group of clichéd American teens arrive at an isolated cabin to enjoy a weekend of drink, drugs & sex as some maniac kills them off. The cabin only ever seems to have three rooms & the small proximity of the cabin makes any sort of tension impossible as no-one is ever more than six feet away from one another & the dumb scene of Stevie walking around the pool table that Aggie is hiding under is ridiculous, he would have been able to see her as he came up the stair let alone walk around. The first four teens are killed off very quickly before a lame sequence where Stevie stalk's Aggie (why doesn't she grab something to protect herself? Why doesn't she ever ask where her friends are?) before the final twenty minutes where Stevie returns to his normal life & Murder Loves Killers Too turns into a soap opera with affairs, unruly kids & money trouble taking center stage before what I suppose is considered a twist but it very obvious if you think about it. At only 74 minutes in length (including opening & closing credits) at least it's short but regardless of the duration it's still crap.

Stevie the middle aged fat killer is deliberately portrayed as a normal person which is where the final twenty banal minutes comes in I suppose rather than some superhuman undead killer but he comes across as really dull & totally stupid too, he never uses gloves & just who's cabin was it? Was he planning the whole thing? What does the fact it was his birthday have to do with anything? There's little to no motivation & the whole thing feels empty as Stevei is seen right away so there's no mystery about who is the murderer although there's plenty of mystery about why he's a murderer which is never clarified. There's a bit of blood splatter & someone gets their tongue ripped out but apart from some close-up shots of stabbings nothing else. There's a bit of nudity too but someone should tell the makers that for two people to have sex both need to take their clothes off & not just the girl. The production values are cheap, despite having all the woods to play with the makers never leave the confines of the cabin & at the end when Aggie jumps out of Stevies boot & attacks him it's open yet in the next shot it's closed so there's blatant continuity errors as well. The director even has a stab at a bit of pretentiousness as there's a strange shot of a dead Bee in a sink which Stevie stares at for ages & hears buzzing for no apparent reason & there's totally random narration at the start to set things up but then there's never any more.

Shot in California on what must have been a low, low budget Murder Loves Killers Too looks cheap & feels cheap with watery blood, nothing in the way of proper special effects & an unknown cast who bring next to nothing to their roles.

Murder Loves Killers Too is an awful film, it's a terrible teen slasher with little gore or tension & a totally banal climax that feels like it's edited from a totally different film. I am not keen on modern horror & this is just the type of film that showcases why.

I Can't Believe That I Watched The Whole Thing

[aimless-46 · 2 September 2010]

Nothing to seek out or to avoid. A group of us made pretty much this same slasher flick back in 2004 as part of a 48-hour film competition; where we wrote, shot, and edited everything in just 48 hours. So I could relate the lameness; and I could realize just how fortunate it was that we did not have the time to put together a lot of embarrassing special features like the ones on this DVD. And I could be thankful that we had someone on the team who grasped that production design could be more than mixing up a lot of fake blood and a personalized birthday cake.

"Murder Loves Killers Too" (2009) demonstrates the old movie maker adage that you can't find a really good looking girl willing to take off her top in your movie, unless she is being paid. As the three unpaid females prance around early in the movie, it quickly becomes obvious that Lindy (Kat Szumski) is the keeper (the hot one with the great body), who should get the most screen time and should wear the least clothes; assuming the director has a clue about his target demographic. That Aggie (Christine Haeberman) fills out her jeans quite nicely and has an interesting face. And that Tamra (Mary LeGault) has a body that would benefit from more clothes and maybe a little liposuction. So guess who takes off her clothes? And guess who gets killed off almost immediately. And they wonder why these things can't find much of an audience.

There were two cool cuts to look for, one where Tamra lies down and the other where Stevie lies down; both of which then cut forward to the same shot, illustrating a passage of time without any sort of transition. Very nice.

The movie has good intentions and the cast and crew appear to have had a lot of fun making it, but it is student film quality without the strange quirks that make some of those films interesting. While the movie has some elements of obvious self-parody and is generally fun viewing, the overall production quality (from the staggeringly lame acting to the awkward and cheap staging) makes it hard to determine what is deliberate parody and what is just a mockfest moment.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Awful film

[misspinkalicious · 1/10 · 26 September 2018]

I actually can't believe I sat and watched the whole film. Its so terrible, I shall never be watching that one again.

seen better

[trashgang · 4/10 · 20 April 2010]

A youtube friend of mine pointed me to watch this independent movie because he's a gore geek and he knows what I like but this time he was wrong. Oh yeah, sure, they try to make it like in the good old days, the eighties and seventies but somehow the killer just didn't work for me. He never is scary, and a bit unbelievable. The weird part of the movie is also the fact that everybody is killed in the first 30 minutes so I thought, well what is next, next is the hiding of one of the survivors. And that takes place everywhere in the house but still way too long. The ending was what i good guess would happen. The blood flows but not in a gory way as in the old school horrors. The score used did refer sometimes to the grindhouse scene and of course the nudity did too. Still, it is a strange movie with so much to ask yourself, why does nobody notice that something is wrong, why didn't the love making couple didn't see the killer standing just in front of them? And why does nobody ask their self a question why that car stands in front of the cabin. Anyway, the geeks out in the states likes it, they see some comedy in it, sorry, but for us Europeans it was one of the bunch.

A nice modern slasher film

[Bezenby · 7/10 · 27 January 2015]

Although I've seen this referred to as being similar to Friday the 13th, this film really reminded me of The Mutilator - right down to the amount of victims and the middle aged murderer already being in the house. That said, no one here played a game of hide and seek for no reason.

Five annoying youngsters (including one whose dialogue consists of "Whoo" and "Party") head of to some cabin for a bit of boozing and the usual slasher shenanigans, not know that there's a bald killer called Steve in the house who's not averse to doing a bit of housekeeping in between murdering teenagers. At first I thought he should have paced himself as he goes through victims rather quickly, but then I realised that the film had a few tricks up its sleeve.

There's a lengthy stalking sequence later in the film, part of which seems to have been lifted wholesale from Sergio Martino's Torso (they thank him in the credits), and the last ten minutes or so come way out of nowhere. Plus the film's short and rather nicely filmed, so you can't go wrong here.

Poke-in-eye Slasher

[gumpr · 7/10 · 17 December 2010]

When I read the reviews of people that thought this movie was awful, they obviously missed some of the inside jokes and probably take their slashers way too seriously. This was an amusing slasher with many good qualities. It still suffered from ubiquitous B-movie trappings like some awkward edits, film quality and questionable staging . I don't really give away anything but I put a spoiler alert in just in case. The best way to watch this movie would be to not know anything much about it. The move is above grade because it throws in some twists and turns. I will say that the first victim was a complete surprise! Also, the director is obviously aware of camera angles because he dupes the audience once or twice with what is a cliché camera setup...something I think the people who didn't like it missed. They also missed the time devoted to the "three acts"...another break form normal slasher formula. The killings are mercifully quick without lingering too much. When the killer eventually speaks, his dialogue is deadpan hilarity. And the last third of the movie is completely off the wall...not in the goofy sense but in the sense that it completely breaks from convention. The ending was pretty darn amusing, as well. It may not be worthy of classic cult movie status, but parts of it are classic.

Idiosyncratic and true to form

[SweetCakesTruck · 10/10 · 19 March 2008]

This movie is great if you are into the camp of the 80's slasher movies. It's got a humorous twist on the conventional form but is loaded with dialog that fits the genre as well as if it'd come out of an old Friday the 13th movie. The acting is very much in line with the bulk of 80's slashers but the lead girl is solid and has a great scream. The killer, hope that doesn't spoil anything, but there's a killer, pulls off the part with a funny deadpan take. The movie is scary in places, but the character keeps it pretty funny throughout. It's obviously a budget movie, but the camera work is sharp and there are some cool panning long takes and well orchestrated shots. Overall, I give it a 10 for the genre. Good entertainment.

Bonus points

[neil-476 · 7/10 · 18 April 2010]

This cheap little teen slasher victims in the woods movie deserves a pat on the back. There's no-one in it who is anyone, and it is all too apparent that the budget was minimal, and it is very much a generic movie - you know what you are expecting to get, and that is exactly what you do get.

Yet it is attractively shot, it is adequately performed within the limitations of its genre, and it has a number of moments where what you expect to happen is not what happens and, as a result you are genuinely surprised. There is a strong element of suspense running through it which is very effectively maintained, and I absolutely loved the last 10 minutes or so, when it appeared to turn into a completely different movie.

Every now and then a film delivers appreciably more than you expect it to, and this is one of them.

Pretty good

[larawoolley · 7/10 · 2 September 2012]

This film isn't so bad. At first I was a bit put off with the narrator, and the weird filming effect; it looks like it was filmed in the 70s. But it's not.

Anyway. The characters aren't totally likable which is great in slasher films, I tend to enjoy watching them a lot more then.

I thought that this film would be one of those irritating ones where you see the annoying happy, care free teens having a blast and getting wasted for the first hour before anything happens; I was wrong, and happily so. Things start happening within the first 15 minutes which really grabbed my attention; usual films of this genre/story line take a lot longer for things to happen. It's a pretty short film and things happen quickly; there's no unnecessary hanging around or irritating dialogue.

What I liked the most about this film; I seriously empathised with the killer!! I love films that make me feel this way (Devil's Rejects being another). Maybe I'm weird.

Well I won't spoil the ending here .... I was surprised to hear the narrator's voice again though.

Big Steve's Place

[sol1218 · 6/10 · 6 October 2012]

***SPOILERS*** Much better then you would have expected slasher film with this group of the usual oversexed and party going teenagers taking a trip into the country for the weekend for fun & games as well as non-stop sex. This fun ends almost as soon as it began after they stopped off at this house in the woods that Big Steve, Allen Andrews, was also spending the weekend at. Before you and the teens can catch their breaths Big Steve went into action putting an end to their fun as well as their lives.

In no time at all Big Steve had done in, in the most horrendous way, all the teens with the exception of the plucky Aggie, Christine Haeberman, who was the least sexually active, in not having a boyfriend, of the group of teens. Alone in the big house with Big Steve staking her Aggie manages to fight him off until he finally gets the best of her. But instead of doing the terrified Aggie in like he did her friends Big Steve instead wants her to help him out in his sexual dysfunction problems! That's by her being his personal sex slave for him to do with her whatever he wishes. Big Steve in trying to get in on with Aggie she finally manages to escape but is tracked down by him in the woods who ends up strangling her. But here's the rest of the story.

Back home with his old lady and daughter Big Steve is a completely changed man. Kind understanding and non-violent even when he realizes that his wife is screwing around behind his back big Steve is the perfect husband and father. Too perfect to say the least.

***SPOILERS*** For some time watching all this, Big Steve's tranquil home-life, you just quite don't know where the movie is leading up to until the last few shocking minutes. It's then that Big Steve gets all that he's got coming to him in a way that he as well as we in the audience never expected!

Great genre film

[macntosh · 10/10 · 26 October 2008]

When you know a movie is about a slasher and teenagers, you don't expect 'The Godfather'. What you do expect is a fun 90 minutes of blood, screams, humour and thrills. This film delivers for its intended genre and audience. For slasher films of the modern age, the gore is quite tame. The same goes for the nudity. But this film hearkens back to the late 70's and 80's when the filmmakers knew their audience. I enjoyed it because it reminded me so much of a movie I would have stayed up late to see back in the day. Yes, you can call it retro.

For the negatives, there is a very awkward scene to start the movie with a narrator, but once you get past that, it's clear sailing. I also feel the audio could be better, but it doesn't detract from the film much. Grab some popcorn and enjoy.

Murder loves genre too

[alibroon · 8/10 · 11 June 2009]

I agree with everything the others have said. As an 80's slasher it has the lot, blades, chicks, bad hair, soundtrack(kept in house, might be wrong there)god it even has sex, breasts and a pool table. But what does this bring to the table that so many have failed to deliver? To be honest very little. But what it does do is it doesn't try too hard to be what it isn't and, importantly, it knows what it is.

A low budget killer-on-the-prowl-unsuspecting-victims type movie. And it delivers! Way more than some accomplished studio efforts. There are some genuine moments of tension with the roving/following camera which has been well orchestrated.

I dare anyone not to feel the tension as our heroine reaches for the key within possible view of the killer, it just goes on and on, but never tiring.

Dare I say "Cult classic" perhaps? For me it is a little private gem and I will keep it safe because it's one of those films that stays true to it's source and it's audience, and it does deserve an audience.

Catch it if you can because it would be murder to miss it..

note to Rob Zombie: THIS is how it's done

[movieman_kev · 8/10 · 23 September 2009]

Big bad Stevie is celebrating a birthday and he's overjoyed to have a group of fun-loving teenagers stumble upon his house (which they think is vacant at first). Oh yes Stevie is going to have so much fun, the teens....not so much.

I really enjoyed this low-budget slasher film. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, but you can tell that writer/director Drew Barnhardt is definitely a fan of the genre. He hardly misses a beat in this one. The acting is much better than average (for a film of this type), the soundtrack is great, throw in a bit of nudity, gore & some honest to goodness tension later in the film and you have a winner on your hands. Fans of low-budget horror films usually have to wade through a whole lot of excrement in order to find a (too few) diamond in the rough. This movie is one of those diamonds. I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for Barnhardt's future endeavors.

Eye Candy: Mary LeGault gets topless

My Grade: A-

DVD Extras: a 7 minute making of; 'creating a killer' featurette (5 minutes); Director's notebook (9 minutes); 'Scoring the film' featurette (11 and a half minutes); Title madness (about 14 minutes on why they choose the title of this movie); photo and artwork gallery; & original trailer for the film

Hugely enjoyable slasher outing that benefits greatly from a clever story and a neat sense of tongue-in-cheek humor

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 24 July 2012]

Stop me if you've heard this one before: A group of free-spirited teenagers venture into the woods for a rowdy weekend of heavy duty partying. Naturally, said bash gets brutally crashed by sexually repressed psycho Big Stevie (well played with amusing and affable nonchalance by Allen Andrews), who bumps everyone off with the exception of the sweet Aggie (a solid and engaging performance by the fetching Christine Haeberman). So far, so familiar. But fortunately not only does writer/director Drew Barnhardt effectively cover all the satisfying slice'n'dice horror bases -- a vicious homicidal maniac, jolting moments of savage'n'sadistic violence, a handy helping of graphic and unflinching in-your-face gore, a good deal of tension, a pleasing smattering of tasty gratuitous female nudity -- in a witty, straightforward, and entertaining manner, but also smartly transcends one's standard expectations with a wickedly funny sense of self-mocking humor and a crafty plot with a few surprising twists to it. Moreover, Barnhardt deserves extra praise for making the wacko a plain, balding, and chubby middle-aged guy with a calm demeanor, a pleasant speaking voice, and a laid-back attitude towards killing folks who even has an adulterous wife (a brief, but sturdy turn by Kathryn Playa) and an unsuspecting adolescent daughter. The appealing and attractive cast of young adults have a ball with the shrewd material, with commendable work from the foxy Mary LeGault as shameless slut Tamra, Scott Christian as swaggering stud Brian, and Kat Szumski as ditsy redhead airhead Lindy. The tight 75 minute running time ensures that this picture never becomes dull or overstays its welcome. Both the sharp cinematography by Kevin M. Graves and the pounding score by Ryan Franks are up to speed. A nifty little flick.

funky little horror film

[superdense · 8/10 · 1 March 2010]

dunno why this has a low average score, it's a very decent low budget horror film, just the right length, an 80s vibe to it, and it's gotta be said the music and sound is ace...sometimes music makes a movie, and in this case it's very true...the same film with crap music and sound design would've been pants...there's a great little whistling motif tune running through the whole thing and giving it a cheeky slant... yep i can't really fault this film - for what it is it's a fantastic way to use up an hour and a half of your precious horror movie loving life, not too much preamble before the nastiness gets underway either - Cloverfield did the preamble really well but since then it seems that all the new big budget horror films spend a lot of time hanging about with really unlikeable characters for the first half of the movie before they start getting bumped off. Not so with Murder Loves Killers.... Overall, two severed thumbs up!