Well, this is my first review of 90s Franco. I was pleasantly surprised! Cheap, stupid, silly, very spooky and pretty damn entertaining.
This is one of Franco's "for hire" commercial crowd-pleasers. Not up to par with Faceless and Blood Moon, but retaining enough of the spirit. There's heavy gore and light sex (the reverse of Franco's preferences) and Jess works in his Orloff formula to create some familiarity and continuity.
The plot is setup like a slasher, Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be specific. Kids in a van run afoul of some crazy backwoods yokels in an old haunt. Was TCM a riff on Scooby Doo? We may never know. But Killer Barbys feels A LOT like Scooby Doo. Since its Franco in charge, the villains of course are a cold hearted man, his bed-ridden lover who needs flesh to survive and their demented and darkly comical henchman. They're not mad scientists this time. The bed-ridden bitch is a vampire, tying in to Franco's most famous period. Oh and she's played by Mariangela Giordano, the stunning Italian milf from the immortal "Burial Ground". She was around 57 here and looking absolutely incredible.
The Killer Barbys are a pop-punk band from Spain who I can only assume wanted to promote their name with a fun no-budget horror movie. They must be big Franco fans because someone pulled strings to get Franco work at this point in time. Euro-schlock movies were few and far between after the late 80s.
As usual, Franco makes chicken soup out of chicken shit as there is no money on the screen and the script is way more amateurish than the stuff hes usually associated with. But its a good watch. Maybe even a repeat viewer. The Barbys are likeable enough, the weirdness is there, the gore and special effects are cheesy and excessive, its typically well-shot and full of Gothic mood. And The Barbys' music ain't too bad.
A small feather in Franco's cap.
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