Nocturnal Butcher


Title: Nocturnal Butcher (2010)
Rating: 1/5
Genre: Horror
Starring: Bob Macabre, “John Doe”
Director: Bob Macabre
Duration: 38 mins

It’s Christmas time and Beer Guy and Pizza Guy (yes, those are really the characters’ names) are planning a party with CDs and everything! But lo! A masked killer, a “nocturnal butcher” if you will, is stalking the premises with murder and mayhem on his mind. One by one, all two partiers fall victim to this deviant’s fowl Yuletide carnage. Only bloody horror awaits them under the unholy full moon!

Don’t I make it sound good? In reality folks, Nocturnal Butcher lowers the bar for terrible shot-on-video shenanigans. A little background on our Pennsylvania-based auteur Bob Macabre: he is the sole member of more than a dozen one-man death metal/grindcore bands including Chainsaw Dissection, Psychotic Homicidal Dismemberment, and Goat Bleeder. His work is heavily horror-themed, so it makes sense that he try his hand at low-budget horror filmmaking. In fact, this movie is so low-budget (all: “how low-budget is it?”)… it’s so low-budget that to identify a POV shot, the cameraman simply breathes really loudly. However, this gets confusing since the cameraman breathes loudly ANYWAYS. By the way, only 2 people are behind the entire production of this movie. Surprisingly, this is not unheard of; the segment “Last Resort” in the 2003 SOV anthology Before I Die was also shot entirely by 2 people, but I digress…

With its awesome retro-sounding synth score (that surreally distorts every other sound in the movie, including dialog) and its grainy picture quality, Nocturnal Butcher harkens the sleazy slasher movies of yesteryear and it delivers, to an extent. The atmosphere is eerie, the editing is simple yet competent, and the killer in question is effectively menacing (when he wants to be, that is, if you can ignore the pillowcase over his head and the gardening gloves on his hands). But the bulk of the movie runs like this: the first half is of Beer Guy doing the most mundane of activities, and the second half is of Pizza Guy fumbling around the house, cursing at no one. When our characters finally meet up with the Butcher, their foreheads are slit with dastardly sadism and they are eventually dismembered off-screen by axe and chainsaw. There is a nice touch towards the end that showcases an outdoor Christmas tree dementedly decorated with severed limbs (bought at a Halloween store, no doubt). Hey, I thought it was clever.

This film automatically loses 4 point due to abysmal technicality. When I watch a movie I don’t want to hear the camera “click” on at the beginning of a shot. But coming from a fellow horror fan who also makes homemade, horror-inspired grindcore music, I appreciate what Macabre was trying to do. His output will always be a funny little guilty pleasure of mine. Keep rockin’ that flannel boys!

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