‘Bikini Guillotine’ VOD Review

Stars: Bryan Brewer, Julia Burenok, Christina Fielding, Briana Nicole, Jamie Grefe, Maggi Nowlan, Kristine Thompson | Written and Directed by Jamie Grefe

We’ve covered plenty of Scott Jeffrey’s output on Nerdly, but he’s not the only rapid-fire filmmaker making waves. Gregory Hatanaka has somehow produced 54 films in 2025 – a number that should not be humanly possible. His projects often come from a small indie crew whose work funnels onto Fawesome. That’s where I caught a streak of films by writer/director Jamie Grefe, a filmmaker nearly as prolific: 46 directing credits, with 42 since 2024. Grefe’s films are about as micro-budget as they get — minimal casts, simple edits, and a raw SOV-inspired feel. Modern digital tech keeps them looking acceptable, even if, sometimes, the casting choices do him no favours.

The latest film from the duo of Hatanaka and Grefe under the Nerdly microscope today is a film that sold me on its title alone… Bikini Guillotine.

If you grew up in the VHS era – the era of lurid titles and even more lurid cover/poster art, you might remember a little film called Master of the Flying Guillotine – one of the greatest martial arts films of all time starring Jimmy Wang Yu. For me, I hear the word guillotine, and I think gruesome deaths – after all, Yu’s 1976 classic saw people beheaded for christ’s sake!

But what do we get in Bikini Guillotine? A supposed killing device that should be tearing flesh from bone, dismembering limb from limb, or at least looking remotely dangerous. Instead, we get a strange prop that looks like someone wrapped a small hula hoop in black duct tape. Badly. Then stuck a few Twizzlers to it for colour. And to complete the aesthetic, Grefe appears behind a plastic mask that looks like it was fished out of the bin behind a dollar-store Halloween shop. Oh, and I should mention that our killer, bizarrely, hypnotises some of his victims BEFORE killing them in more bloodless scenes of mutilation (there’s no mutilation, I’m being fucking sarcastic). It looks and feels like someone said, “We’ll fix it in post with CGI” and everyone conveniently forgot!

I’ve given Grefe credit in my recent reviews. Even when the budgets are microscopic, he usually manages to spin something weird or interesting out of nothing and deliver films that feel odd but at least curious. Here? Not a chance. Grefe has always been a bargain-basement filmmaker, but with this film, he digs so far below the basement that you start to wonder if he’s tunnelling. Bikini Guillotine is so staggeringly incompetent that it makes Paranormal Body Stream and Robot Girlfriend: Revenge look polished.

Scenes replay out of nowhere, almost certainly by mistake and almost definitely to pad the runtime – hell, one character goes indoors and in the next scene she’s back out at the pool, then she’s back inside again! And the audio is a complete disaster. Everything sounds like it was captured straight from the camera mic, assuming Grefe even uses cameras and not, as some reports suggest, an iPad. In some of the pool scenes, it even sounds like the audio was recorded from a few doors down the street on someone’s phone. Awful. Just awful.

And those aren’t the only problems. Time doesn’t just stretch in Bikini Guillotine… it sags, drags and eventually collapses into a puddle of pure cinematic nothing.

I genuinely lost track of how long we spent watching our bikini-clad victims drink, swim and gossip, but it felt like it made up about ninety per cent of the entire film. And for ninety per cent of THAT time, we can’t even hear what they’re saying because the audio is so bad. Conversations drown in wind noise, pool splashes and whatever budget mic Grefe taped to a stick. Honestly, this could have been slightly forgiven if the film at least delivered the kind of nudity that oftentimes cheap slashers rely on, but even that box stays firmly unticked.

So what are we left with? A film that promises a guillotine and bikini-fuelled mayhem, yet manages to deliver neither bikinis nor guillotines with any conviction. Bikini Guillotine isn’t just a misfire; it’s a full-blown cinematic faceplant that somehow keeps tripping over itself long after it’s already hit the ground. Honestly, by the end I wasn’t wondering who would die next; I was wondering if I would make it to the end credits. Spoiler: I did. I shouldn’t have.

Bikini Guillotine is available to stream on Fawesome now.