With VS: The Movie, director Luigi Pastore has done the seemingly impossible: he's made a film that makes Andreas Schnaas' Violent Sh*t Trilogy look good by comparison. Although Schnaas' films were excruciatingly bad in many ways, they at least compensated with loads of enthusiastic bargain basement gore; in contrast—barring one 3 minute sequence where serial killer Karl the Butcher goes crazy with a machete—VS: The Movie is relatively devoid of splatter, and with a terrible plot and painful performances, the film proves very difficult to endure.
Somehow (gun to the head, perhaps?), Pastore not only managed to cast Italian horror legend Giovanni Lombardo Radice in his crap-heap of a movie, but also convinced cult film-makers Enzo G. Castellari (The Inglorious Bastards) and Luigi Cozzi (Alien Contamination) to take on roles, AND got Claudio Simonetti's Goblin to provide the soundtrack. None of this counts for much, though: Radice is terrible, Castellari and Cozzi usually work BEHIND the camera for a reason, and Simonetti's score is forgettable.
With much of the film consisting of lengthy scenes of dialogue in English, mangled by a cast whose command of the language is only slightly better than my Italian (I can order a beer and ask where the toilets are), only hardened fans of z-grade crap will make it to the end, where they will be rewarded with some gratuitous female nudity (not worth the wait) and the aforementioned kill spree by Karl, which finally serves up the kind of gore that the film should have delivered throughout.
2/10, solely for the nasty castration, minus 1 point for naming characters after famous people in the horror industry (Fulci, D'Amato), an idea that is neither original nor clever.
Somehow (gun to the head, perhaps?), Pastore not only managed to cast Italian horror legend Giovanni Lombardo Radice in his crap-heap of a movie, but also convinced cult film-makers Enzo G. Castellari (The Inglorious Bastards) and Luigi Cozzi (Alien Contamination) to take on roles, AND got Claudio Simonetti's Goblin to provide the soundtrack. None of this counts for much, though: Radice is terrible, Castellari and Cozzi usually work BEHIND the camera for a reason, and Simonetti's score is forgettable.
With much of the film consisting of lengthy scenes of dialogue in English, mangled by a cast whose command of the language is only slightly better than my Italian (I can order a beer and ask where the toilets are), only hardened fans of z-grade crap will make it to the end, where they will be rewarded with some gratuitous female nudity (not worth the wait) and the aforementioned kill spree by Karl, which finally serves up the kind of gore that the film should have delivered throughout.
2/10, solely for the nasty castration, minus 1 point for naming characters after famous people in the horror industry (Fulci, D'Amato), an idea that is neither original nor clever.