Horror-On-Sea 2019: ‘Hooker With a Hacksaw’ Review
Stars: Kasper Meltedhair, Jason Crowe, Colleen Herkert, Steve Guynn, Mason Roberts, Jocephus Hudson, Alaine Huntington, Ashley Vetere, Ford Windstar, Julianne Brock, Benita Hudson | Written by Donald Farmer, Kasper Meltedhair | Directed by Donald Farmer
Kirsten is just an average girl with big problems! Problems like psycho pervs, snuff movie makers and animal masked freaks. Too bad for them Kirsten has a very big hacksaw. Now she’s out for revenge, sawing her way through the scum.
From the get-go you know this is going to be something of s struggle to sit through, even at a mere 73 minutes! Hooker With a Hacksaw starts out in an inept fashion and that ineptitude keeps on going, never letting up for a second. It’s like watching someone’s student video… and to be fair, if you’ve ever seen any of writer/director Donald Farmer’s previous work then you know that’s to be expected.
Farmer originally made a name for himself in the late 80s, early 90s era of DTV shot-on-video filmmaking, where – at least in the US – wannabe directors could shoot a movie on the cheap, on video, and sell it to distributors eager to plug the gaps in video market,in order to satiate an ever-hungry genre audience who, more often that not, were sold on a film by garish (oftentimes unrelated to the film) artwork and ridiculously over the top synopsis.
In more recent years Farmer has had something of a resurgence in popularity due to Massacre Video re-releasing his early films, such as Demon Queen, Savage Vengeance and Vampire Cop, on DVD and Blu-ray. However that doesn’t stop Farmer from still making terrible films though! Yet many will say that is the charm of Farmer’s work, the sheer “homemade” auality of it all, after all for someone to have such longevity in their career there has to be some positives right?
When she’s not imagining carving people up with a hacksaw, or seeing men with rubber bird heads, or shagging a plastic skeleton (which is supposed to be a clients dead mother), phone sex girl and reluctant hooker Kirsten spends time driving around listening to metal on her cars tape deck, goes to the drive-in, visits a flea market and tries to buy a Star Wars action figure… but she doesn’t have enough money so arranges fucks some guy for the cash; and there’s where things start to REALLY go wrong for Kirsten, as she becomes the target of a former client who tries to kill her on numerous occasions, even going as far as kidnapping Kirsten’s would-be girlfriend too.
For a film called Hooker With a Hacksaw, this flick is ridiculously tame. From that title I expected tons of gore, buckets of sleaze and the kind of hard-to-watch grindhouse cinema that would wind up the BBFC. But no, we get a sweet-natured love story about a hooker, her girldfriend and the weird clients she has to deal with. Of course there is some gore, but even when its trying to push the envelope (including a dismbowelling where our heroine seemingly gets off on rubbing intestines all over herself) the gore is of the cheap and cheerful variety – with plastic heads, rubber limbs, over the top blood squibs and… a blunt hacksaw. Yes, at no point it the titualr hacksaw real of any danger of actually carving anyone up!
To stupid to be scary and too cheesy to appeal to anyone other than existing Donald Farmer fans, Hooker With a Hacksaw screens at Horror-On-Sea 2019 today, Friday January 11th, at 10.30pm. The film is also available to watch now on Amazon Prime.