Ruptured Review: The Mutilator

Country of origin- USA
Year of release- 1984

Directors- Buddy Cooper, John Douglass

Stars- Matt Mitler, Ruth Martinez, Bill Hitchcock   

The film opens with a young boy (Ed Jr) accidentally blowing away his dear old mother with rifle he was cleaning as a birthday present for his father, who doesn’t react too well to his wife being shot dead. The father never forgives Ed, and years later, sends him a letter telling him that he needs to go to their beach house to close it down for the winter. Ed decides this will be a great get away opportunity for him, his girlfriend and two other couples, all of whom are more annoying than genital crabs. However once at the house Ed’s father begins a gory rampage against his son and his friends with an array of gardening and fishing instruments, along with a few casual medieval weapons.

It would be easy in many parts of this film to fool yourself into thinking you were watching a shitty 80s teen comedy featuring the usual cavalcade of bad acting and dialog that reads like nails on a chalkboard. This is helped along by the absolutely cringe inducing theme song “Fall Break”. Because of how sickly and forcefully ‘humorous’ much of this film is, the transition to the scenes of gore and bloodshed is quite stark. One moment we will be watching teen hijinks on a beach played out by actors who are mostly in their early 30s, the next we might be watching a battle axe decapitation.

This strange juxtaposition can be found throughout most slasher films of the 80s, although it seems particularly prevalent in The Mutilator. This might be down to the amount of gore this films throws at you. I watched the most complete version of the film ever released in the UK, which was recently put out by Arrow Video, whether this version of the film is the infamous ‘Unrated’ version I sadly cannot tell you. I can however say that it doesn’t skimp on the gore. Sadly however between the scenes of splatter and dismemberment I found myself being very bored by the seemingly endless scenes of teen bullshit. This really made the film drag, and meant that the only reason to watch this, at all, is for gore. There is literally no other reason to expose yourself to The Mutilator. I would recommend this one to most slasher fans, and based upon the gore we see on screen, most gore hounds as well. This film may mostly be shit, but it does have its moments, so I am going to give this one a 4/10 for its only redeeming factor, gratuitous gore and violence (I.e the bread and butter of this blog).