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).            

           

 

          

Ruptured Guest Review: Top Sensation

Country of origin- Italy  
Year of release- 1969  

Director- Ottavio Alessi   

Stars- Rosalba Neri, Edwige Fenech, Eva Thulin

Top Sensation/The seducers is the definition of exploitation, hot females, murder, hot females, outrageous plots oh and some hot females. The film centres around a group on a small cruise, sounds like a rather average set up. Wrong. The cruise is centred around the plot of mother attempting to cure her son’s (Tony) mental illness by surrounding him with prostitutes, as what better solution to a mental illness than a good old cherry popping? Am I right? Surprisingly he hates his mother… strange, because I think she is doing a swell job. Now I can hear all you pre-pubescent boys praying for your mum to take a leaf out of that character’s book.

Anyway I digress, so this voyage of taking advantage of the handicapped, stumbles across a strange deserted island, except it’s not actually deserted, it’s inhibited by a man and wife (Beba). A wife which is way out of his league, but hey choices are limited when you’re the only two fucking people.  So Tony randomly escapes to the island, and manages to bump into Beba, and well the two kind of hit it off. So the crew of the ship see her as a way to cure Tony, because you know as I said before what’s better medicine than sex. So the crew take Beba on board and treat her like the guest of honour, and have an overall swell time. Oh, and a casual lesbian threesome? Did I forget that minor detail? What unfolds after this a situational plot device of them attempting to get Beba alone with Tony, while distracting the now present husband. But while everyone is distracted with this lumbering fool of a husband they forget to notice that Tony has killed his new love interest. I hate when I by accidentally kill my crush. This is the catalyst to spin the film into a dark spiral of murder.

Overall the film is average, its plot is ludacris at the start and makes little sense. But the last act of the film (when the murder kicks in) is actually rather dark and interesting, and the last shot is damn creepy. This is the perfect film to watch with a friend and have a good laugh, but it is not by any mean a masterpiece to sit and have an intellectual discussion on the plausible use of sex as a mental illness cure. Overall I give this film a score of 4/10.  I do have to give props to Shameless Cinema though, for releasing this film especially with the amount of scenes they have restored, and recommend this edition over any other way of watching it. 

This review was kindly contributed by my good friend Robert James, to see more of Robert's work see his YouTube Channel