Headcrusher (1999) User Reviews

Well, movie ... if that's how you want to be about it ...

[Junkill · 4/10 · 28 January 2005]

We picked this up as a part of a Brentwood set, under the title "The Broken Skull." Shot directly onto video, with widely varying sound and lighting quality, this movie winds up with a hyperactive quality that may inspire the viewer to feelings of nervousness, confusion and irritability - and not in a good, "Evil Dead" kind of way.

Without going into spoilers, what appears at first to be a simple revenge ghost story becomes increasingly convoluted and bizarre. While there are some interesting ideas here, the overall effect is likely to leave you scratching your head and saying "hunh?"

This is a very, very gory movie. The gore effects range all the way from full bloody head appliances to a silly Video Toaster effect that has to be freeze-framed to be (dis)believed. The "Fangoria" level of gross-out effects in this film is really amazing and should likely please the gore-hounds while making anyone with a weak constitution feel a bit on the queasy side.

The Broken Skull is also an extremely noisy movie. It features not only ambient noises (captured by mikes and not replaced in post), but there is a lot of shrieking. No, no, I mean a LOT. A lot, a lot! Characters scream, wail, howl and yell, chitter and laugh maniacally. Turn down the volume if you value your eardrums and your nerves! But you can't fault the cast for their enthusiasm, they really eat up the scenery and sometimes the effect is rather entertaining. In particular, the actress playing a certain Vietnamese immigrant delivers all of the above with a remarkable amount of gusto.

In fact, very few of the actors were wooden. Some of them may have overacted a bit (oh, just a wee smidgen!), but most of them are certainly fun to watch go off. The cast is ethnically diverse and kudos to the filmmakers for that. The two middle-aged white women, however, are two of the most spiteful, exasperated characters since the shopkeeper in the MST3k classic "the Brute Man." Just watch them seethe at all the other characters, it's fun!

In closing, the Headcrusher may not become a horror icon on a par with Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers or Freddy Kruger (or even the Leprechaun), but we can definitely say this ... this was a movie.

Is this what slasher's have come too?

[manicgecko · 3/10 · 15 June 2006]

I admit - I was lured to this one from the hype - and I didn't stop to consider the sources. "one of the best indie exploitation flicks of the year (1999)", shocking", and " a must have ".

Well - I wasted my money. But not all was bad in this movie. THey at least got the gore right, as well as some of the most unique methods of murder seen in a long time. There is even a storyline (kinda) and that is about it.

But for an exploitation film there is a surprising amount of content - but no exploiting. We get gay sex - sorta. We have 3 inter-racial babes - maybe. We have a psychotic Vietnamese hooker - nice back, oral sex (ok that made me wince) and some female version of Gene Simmons (I don't get that part). We have an honest to goodness Capone - rates among the best of the actors in this film - that is not a compliment. And finally we have a government conspiracy thrown in to - I don't know - try to connect the vengeance/random/theme killing by Jimmy boy to make the Vietnamese psycho seem sane??????? If nothing else this movie proves that the Italians and the Americans do not have a lock on this type of movie. The Latinos can make crap as well as the rest of them. Kudos goes to anyone involved in this accomplishment that overcame it and made a career for themselves.

Probably the most amateurish effort I've ever witnessed

[gtc83 · 2/10 · 20 January 2007]

I don't think it really matters too much what the plot of this movie is about, the main thing you'll notice is the extreme amateurishness of the entire production. The acting is what you'd get if you chose people at random off the street. The sound is really annoying - a medicine cabinet closes with all the gusto of a gunshot going off in your ear, while at the same time the dialog is perhaps one-fifth as loud. Miscellaneous on-set noises dominate the soundtrack to a huge degree, with dialog taking a distant back seat. The theme music sounds as if it was about a quarter done when the movie was released, as large portions of the film don't have any music at all. Camera-work can best be described as a gnarled mess, with close-up shots where a medium angle would be much better, cameramen walking around and jostling the camera every which way, absolutely no attention paid to framing any scene, they just shot everything from whatever position it was most convenient for the cameraman to stand. If the cameraman was a foot taller than the actors and you end up looking at the tops of everyone's heads, well, so be it. Editing is just a butcher job; Everything is tossed together in the most abrupt manner possible, nothing flows or transitions in any sense of the word. I don't know if this was shot on video or perhaps a rented camcorder, I tend to think it was the latter.

I only made it about three-quarters of the way through this thing before I turned it off, I just got so annoyed at the low quality of the production I couldn't take it anymore. It's like a ninth grade audio-visual class project.

Exploitation in the extremist possible way...

[LuisitoJoaquinGonzalez · 5/10 · 11 February 2005]

The major difference between the slasher cycle of today and the boom years of the early eighties is that it's much easier to make a movie nowadays. If you had the budget to produce a small feature then there's not a genre less complicated than the traditional stalk and slash flick. Many of the hundreds of direct to video turkeys that have been released post-scream haven't even attempted to revitalise the age old formula, which makes it even more inexplicable that a fair majority of them have still made a tidy profit. Being a self-confessed avid fan of the category, it's great to find a poorly financed effort that actually looks to have been made with the inspiration to try something different. Headcrusher certainly carries a great deal of intrigue that warrants it to be seen by aficionados like myself. Despite being one of the few Spannish-American influenced cycle-entries (Don't Panic and Angel Negro are among the others), it also boasts a gore-filled reputation and a cameo from a blood-descendant of Al Capone playing a psychotic mobster!

After the credits have rolled, we see prolific scream queen (and all round nudity guarantee)) Stephanie Beaton straddling a soldier named John Ramsey (George Orsini) in a dimly lighted room. Adultery is a cardinal sin; especially if the wife that you're playing around with is 'married to the mob'. Unfortunately for this randy couple, her husband just happens to be a sadistic gangster - and he's just caught them in an inescapable situation. Before the Lothario has even had the chance to zip up his flies, the mob boss has strung up his flirtatious mistress, snapped a few of her fingers and strangled the last gasp of air from her lungs. It takes two to tango of course, so lover boy gets his head squished in a vice and gives us the explanation for the choice for the movie's title. (Great brief gore shot!)

Twenty years later a group of builders are renovating that same room, which has now become an abandoned basement. As the rest of the workers go to lunch, Manolo Santana (Kris Haines) continues digging until he discovers a broken skull lodged behind some re-laid brickwork. As he examines his bizarre find he suddenly begins smashing his head against the wall as if a mad spirit has possessed him. His friend Miguel - who was eating his lunch nearby – rushes to help his workmate, but by the time he arrives Manolo's head has been crushed to a bloody pulp. Sometime later whilst being prepared for an autopsy, Manolo's body re-animates and goes on a bloody rampage. Dressed from head to toe in army surplus garb and sporting a gore-splashed gas mask, the maniac begins killing off the gangsters that were involved with the soldier's slaughter from the prologue. Manolo's daughter Sol (Paola Valdes), his friend Miguel (John Arreola) and an inquisitive doctor (Nancy Adams) all begin an investigation to try and discover what strange occurrence has lead to this gruesome massacre...

Headcrusher is possibly the most gratuitous exploitation effort that I've seen for quite a while. Perhaps you could say that it vaguely resembles the works of Andreas Schnaas. Actually I must admit that Richard Islas does look to have a sprinkling of talent, which is more that can be said for the former hack that I mentioned. Make no mistake about it, this is one gore filled excursion into exploitation that is literally overflowing with blood and extreme scenarios. One guy gets his 'little friend' bitten of whilst being 'pleasured' by his girlfriend in a scene that's both painstakingly gruesome and hilarious in equal measures. Another fellow is kneecapped and then squished by a train, plenty get their heads crushed and the torture scenes in the pre-credits are right out of a hokey human slaughterhouse. Islas manages to get away with the cheap gore effects as they're only on screen for an extremely brief time. He provides just enough splatter to allow your mind's eye to grab the full extremity of his intention.

I bet that many gore hounds will disagree with my opinion that a filmmaker can ruin a feature by over-stretching the limits of gratuitous exploitation. But this is coming from a fan of the likes of Absurd, Zombie Creeping Flesh and The New York Ripper. The problem with Headcrusher is that a lot of things were thrown in wholly unnecessarily, when the feature would have probably played better without the excessive attempts at 'shock factor'. There's a gay sex scene, which seems only to have been included to include a gay sex scene and also I must mention the Cambodian torture-vixen, who is a female character so inexplicably bizarre that she makes Elvira look like the spectacled church girl that lives next door. There's also a brief sub plot concerning a government 'Jacobs Ladder-type' conspiracy that was immensely intriguing, but was left simmering on the back burner, which is a shame as it deserved a decent conclusion.

Although Head Crusher does feel somewhat like a petrol sports car that has been filled with diesel and never manages to get out of first gear; the good points easily outweigh the bad and it remains worth a look. Watching Dominique Capone play a mob boss, when his relative was the most famous gangster in the history of the mafia was a neat touch – even more so when you see how similar Dominique looks to Big Al. Although the dramatics will never be mind blowing in a film of this level, these guys certainly tried their hardest and they deserve credit just for that. I can think of worse ways to waste eighty minutes

I didn't think horror could get this bad...

[monsterman865 · 1/10 · 14 November 2005]

I got this for my birthday in a box set under the name Broke Skull. Well, after watching one on the DVD and being pleasantly surprised, I popped this sucker in. It was worse than I had expected, and I didn't expect much. This movie is basically a convoluted story about a guy who dies and comes back to life with the mob, and other bull crap. There was some interesting ideas in this that were never followed up on. Now everybody has been saying there was a lot of gore, can somebody tell me were? I saw a bad effect of a head being crushed, brain tissue (or something...), and blood coming from the penis area two times. I have to say the the part were the guy gets his man hood bitten off made me squirm, that was the only good thing about this movie. And that gay sex scene was just thrown in there for no reason. The acting in this was Atrocious, really, it blew. That Asian chick was annoying, then the annoying Mexican boyfriend who comes in to just be killed. I say if you get this in a box set, that is fine, but don't spend any money on it, at all.

Comments on Headcrusher/Broken Skull

[jjturley · 22 July 2004]

Spoiler!! A Chicago gangster and his men walk in on a young couple having sex. The woman is the gangster's girlfriend, and the man is an off-duty US soldier. The gangster's men kill them both. We now advance 20 years to a dreary winter in the late 1990s. The murder site has become a basement underneath a disco. Construction workers are busy remodeling. During lunch one lone worker discovers a cracked skull buried in the wall. While examining it he suddenly goes crazy and starts hitting his head against the wall. His returning co-workers try to stop him, but by then his head is a just bloody mess. Taken to the morgue for an autopsy, the construction worker awakes, now possessed by the spirit of the cracked skull. He kills the morgue doctor and escapes and seeks revenge against the gangsters. A doctor working on the case discovers that the dead soldier had been used in some medical experiments during the war in Vietnam. These have given him super-human powers.

When the construction worker was handling the skull, he was infected by some of the remaining brain tissue. This means the construction worker also has super-human powers. The doctor now tries to find this re-animated corpse. Meanwhile, the daughter of the dead construction worker is looking for him. She thinks he's still alive, since the police cannot explain his disappearance from the morgue. The daughter solicits friends in her Kung Fu class to visit the construction site after hours to search for clues. During this time, the gangster's men are being killed off in gruesome ways. The gangster suspects that someone unknown is getting revenge.

The gangster and his remaining men find the soldier's former wife, who is Vietnamese. She tells the gangsters that the soldier had killed her family during the war. She also knew her husband was sleeping with the gangster's girlfriend. While relating this information, she laughs. Her babbling is hard to follow. The gangsters kidnap her, since they think she knows who the killer is. She directs them to the construction site. They arrive at midnight, and meet the daughter and Kung Fu friends. The killer suddenly arrives and mayhem ensues.

really bad, but I liked it

[thomas-408 · 3/10 · 8 June 2023]

This really crappy film fails on every level. The sound design is a mess, often too loud, often too low, with different sound levels from shot to shot (probably used the in-camera mic). Acting is amateurish, and the script is confusing and nonsensical. The gore effects are childish; lots of blood but unrealistic.

Even so, I liked this film. Like others here, I bought it under the title Broken Skull in the 4 DVD pack. I've watched it three times over the past 20 years (I seen 100s of horror films multiple times). So obviously it has something going for it.

I suppose I enjoy a peak into the amateurish work of low-budget filmmakers before digital cameras became prevalent. I wonder, who are these obscure actors and filmmakers? Yes, theirs films are crap, but they tried hard to make a movie when it was much more difficult.

And if you suspend your disbelief, and overlook the plot holes, it's possible to enjoy the hammy acting and nonsensical story.

Very Bad Headache...

[azathothpwiggins · 7 June 2022]

HEADCRUSHER (aka: BROKEN SKULL) is an ultra-low budget movie for the true splatter junkie. The supernatural-revenge-horror story is about a man who is caught shagging a mobster's wife, only to be executed in a way that ties in with the title.

Years later, a construction worker (Kris Haines) uncovers the titular skull, leading to his rather gruesome demise. However, said worker doesn't want to stay dead, embarking instead on a gore-drenched mission to seek out and destroy those gangster types responsible for that murder so many years prior.

Director Ricardo Islas pays tribute to the slasher films of old, making the killer an amalgam of those found in MY BLOODY VALENTINE and THE PROWLER. Yep, he's wearing army fatigues and sporting a gasmask. Upping the ante, the murders in this movie are vicious, visceral, and over-the-top mean-spirited! In a word: Perfect!

Not recommended for the squeamish or the easily offended...