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Sickle - aka "Slaughterhouse Massacre" (2005)

Dir: Paul Gagné

Now then, normally I start a review with a brief synopsis before discussing the movie itself, but with "Sickle" I shall make a little change because the opening scene sums up everything wrong with this sad excuse for a horror film.

We open with a guy 'n' gal making out in a car when the girl announces "I want to make love where they slaughter all those animals". Good old Texas.
Thus we end up at the main setting of our fetid opus, the abandoned slaughterhouse.
The sight of dead, plucked, electrocuted chicken hanging from the rafters elicits the orgasmic cry of "take me now" from our Texas gal and much naked thrusting and jiggling later (seems it's now turned into a soft core porn flick) all we get is...off screen deaths!

Now titties are important I grant you, but not as important as the kill scenes in what is meant to be a horror flick.
So please do take time to show those titties if you must, but show the deaths with as much enthusiasm please!
When you think that 24 years ago, in a similar opening scene set-up, Lucio Fulci gave us a guy with his brains hanging out stuck to a door and a girl with a knife slammed through the top of her head as an opening treat in "House by the Cemetery" you have to wonder where Paul Gagné’s mind was when he opened with such a weak, weak sequence.
Oh wait! I know, his mind was having a snuffle between those titties.

We are then introduced to some obnoxious student/teen deadheads (And lo! Once again Gagné spends 5 times as long on a naked lesbian frat fondle then he will on any of the deaths) where we are spun the tale of 'Marty Sickle' a weirdo slaughter house employee accused of murder who was lynched by some rednecks.
He was then said to return and kill anyone who enters the slaughterhouse.

It turns out the couple in the opening scenes were two such people and, because Gagné refused to open his film in a balls-out fashion, we are (finally, with far less success at this belated point in the narrative) shown that the 'dead chickens are sooo hot' chick whacked off Marty's head (cue delightfully gratuitous fully naked chick brandishing a machete scene) after he had oft the boyfriend.
But it is said that Marty’s spirit still roams the slaughterhouse and that chanting his name there can bring him back.

So guess what? Yeah, that's right, 30 (mostly) tedious minutes later two of the fratheads, each with their bimbo of choice, eventually end up at the slaughterhouse for some 'duder' party/psycho summoning while (oh God no, spare us) video taping their 'adventure'.
OOPS! Not a good idea methinks as they are not alone. No. Not alone....

There is absolutely nothing original here of course (It's "Blair Witch", it's "TCM", it's "Slaughterhouse", it's "Hell Night", it's even "Candyman"), but that's okay as long as what you do, you do well and that what you offer is damn tasty.
Nothing here is done well though. And tasty it's most certainly not.

The dreaded 'endless walking around footage to bulk up the running time' hits us as soon as the characters enter the atmosphere free slaughterhouse and 40 minutes in we are still waiting for something to happen. Anything to happen!
The fact they walk around (endlessly don't forget) with glaring flashlights in rooms that are almost perfectly lit anyway, often by some unknown lighting source, does not help to ratchet up the tension or sooth the now fraying patience of the viewer either.

But surely we have some great acting and top dialogue to sustain us? Yes?
NO!
Well that is unless you consider lines like "What's up dudes and dudettes" and "Do you think she's hot with her big tits and no panties", to be wonderful writing.
And how about this classic exchange (acted out with all the thespian skills of a junior school play) between a frathead and his bimbette;
Frathead: "We have to chop his head off"!
Bimbo: "How de we do that"?
Frathead: "I don't know"!
Well here's a tip...try something sharp!
And also hope it's sharper than the tool that wrote the script! Oh no, wait! That tool is the same tool who directed this heap...good old Paul Gagné!

52 achingly bad minutes later (yes I am watching the clock) we have our first on screen death and guess what? It's rubbish! A laughable, bloodless, split down the middle dummy effect with some very weird (and lousy) CGI embellishments. Man...that was not worth the wait.
A brain numbing 20 more minutes passes until anything else happens and all we get is yet another off-screen death (though it has a pretty good aftermath), a bloodless CGI decapitation that looks like it was programmed for the Sega Megadrive and a stabbed cheek that somehow manages to kill the person!

As the credits roll (after a dreadful damp squib of a weirdly extended finale) we have a body count of 5, with 2 of them being off screen and all of them being dreadful in execution!
Sure, a body count does not make a movie (just check out Tobe Hooper’s astonishing "Texas Chainsaw Massacre") but the movie damn well needs a good and juicy body count if there's nothing else going for it. And believe me this is one movie with absolutely nothing going for it!

Oh yes, the killer. I seem to have left out old Marty Sickle himself, played with all the skill of a dead trout by one Paul Cagney, certainly no relation to James!
And how I wish the makers had left him out as well.
Ol' Marty speaks with a booming electronically enhanced echo that sounds like someone's been listening to too many 80's death metal intros. This is to try and make him scary.
He's also lit by some invisible red light. This is also meant to make him scary.
Guess if it works or not!?
Marty Sickle is, dear reader, the weakest, most utterly annoying, psycho in horror history!

Right, I've had enough so let's wrap this up quickly (advice Gagné could have used).
This is what happens when you give petri dish contents their own video camera and some (now wasted) money to allow them to secrete their crud into the public arena.
And this review is what happens when I get duped into spending my (now equally wasted) money, though thankfully very little, on such foul secretions.
That, and said secretion gets sold off to the local 2nd had shop the very next chance I have! Or thrown into the bin to ensure no one else is suckered into watching this abomination.

Avoid. Please Jesus...just avoid. Normally I give film makers a bit of lovin' even if their efforts fail...because at least they made an effort. But in this case there obviously was no effort here, just wasted money and my wasted time.
So don't make my mistake in giving these people the false hope they could have a chance in the film business, outside of sweeping the floors. And actually I'm not so sure I'd trust Paul Gagné to do even that!