HALLOWEEN PUSSY TRAP KILL KILL! – The Review

Review by Mark Longden

One of my favourite things to do when a movie isn’t exactly holding my interest is play “B-movie economics”. I try and puzzle out how something gets funded inside the fictional world, and this one has a doozy. Our “villain”, a guy who had his face carved off by Middle Eastern terrorists when in the army over there, has built a huge underground concrete base with multiple rooms, all sorts of remote controlled traps, a huge control room with multiple TV feeds, etc. So, how did this guy pay for all this? Did he get an insurance payout from the Iraqi government? What did he tell the contractors who came to fit all his wiring and special death traps? Where did he pick up his two sidekicks?

“Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill!” is named after one of the great movies of the 60s, “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”, a legitimately brilliant thriller where three women decide to rob an old man and his family out in the desert, and bite off a little more than they can chew. It’s a surprisingly feminist movie, too, but enough about that, we’re here to talk about this, where the name is taken and absolutely nothing else is; one where the director clearly hopes you’ve never seen “Saw”, or, indeed, any good movies.

It’s about a band. Sort of. Kill Pussy Kill are a band, and the song we see them play might – just might – be the worst thing I’ve ever heard. Like, unbelievably bad. After a scene where two of the women kiss, presumably for the trailer, one of the other women goes to smoke meth with their DJ, who tries to rape her. Then, when they confront him, he beats up an old man in a wheelchair outside the gig venue, which turns out (eventually) to be a very bad plan. The women have to drive off for their next gig, and leave the DJ behind, which is the final vague nod towards feminism this movie bothers to make.

Hey, the creepy mechanic at the place they stop at is Richard Grieco! How the hell did he end up in this? Anyway, he tricks them and traps them and off they go to an underground concrete bunker, with three rooms, where they have to beat the challenges to progress, which mostly involve killing people. The DJ eventually shows up, as do a pair of people who randomly trick-or-treated at this shack, in the middle of nowhere. Friendships are revealed to be a tissue of lies, and it’s down to who has the greatest will to survive. Or, who’s the most famous female member of the cast (Sara Malakul Lane, one of my favourite low-budget actors).

As well as my bad guy economics question, one other thing pops into my head. The only reason this group of people ended up in Wheelchair Guy’s trap is because they happened to be passing the gas station operated by his associate. What if they’d taken one of the hundreds of other routes? Or stopped ten miles afterwards at the next gas station? You get the idea. Add in an ending which is utterly, utterly pointless, rendering every bit of struggle without any meaning, and …no, I got nothing. Do people like movies where the psycho wins easily, with every single part of his plan working out exactly, and gets to carry on killing people with no problems whatsoever? Even when he’s killing people who 100% don’t deserve it?

Filmmakers know you can’t just have women tortured and abused any more, so even though that’s all they’re interested in showing, along with as much nudity as they can get out of their female cast members, they have to pay lip service to feminism; although in “Pussy Trap”, all they manage is about two scenes worth before we’re back to young beautiful women in tight clothes being abused by powerful older men. And treating a meth-head rapist like the sort-of hero of the second half.

If you really miss the “Saw” movies, and didn’t get enough of that whole genre of things ten years ago, then…you could still do better than this. Grieco gets a producer credit, as does David Sterling, the guy whose business model is, if you give him $50,000, he’ll produce a movie for you (there goes my chance of getting review copies of the 14^th, 15^th and 16^th parts of the “Witchcraft” franchise, the franchise he bought the rights to, I guess). Director Jared Cohn seems to specialise in horror, just the sort that looks a little like something you might have heard of, but most definitely isn’t – he also works for The Asylum.

If you only watch one movie whose title ends in “Kill! Kill!” then make absolutely certain it’s not this one.