Harefooted Halloween: Butcher Boys (aka Boneboys)

What I Liked: Once the zaniness starts it doesn’t stop for even a second.  One minute this group of teens is bumming around the outskirts of San Antonio and the next they’re on the run from a gang of maniacs.  Civilization seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet with nothing but abandoned factories and warehouses left.  Then our protagonist gets trapped inside the bad guys’ lair that’s a fiendish nightmare of enslaved women, torture equipment, cannibalistic freaks and demented lunatics.  I was on edge the whole time.

Ali Faulkner (Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1) plays the lead Sissy and she does a really good job here.  She goes through some serious trauma of witnessing her friends getting killed and then being kidnapped and assaulted by the butcher boys.  Faulkner had to be distraught and seething for basically eighty of the eighty seven minute run time which couldn’t have been easy.

What I Didn’t Like: The crazy shit I mentioned earlier cuts both ways.  I mean I didn’t really have any idea what was going on basically the entire time.  Shit isn’t exactly explained and the movie moves at such a fast pace and throws so many ideas at you there aren’t quiet moments where the characters or story can breathe.  While the all consuming chaos is fun it leaves confusion and a certain emptiness in its wake.

The group of butcher boys we initially run into and spend the first two thirds of the film with have like a 50’s greaser look to them which is weird.  I don’t really get it.

For the first ten or fifteen minutes the editing is horrible with a lot of awkward cutaways and closeups.  Maybe the filmmakers wanted to match the bulk of the picture better by cutting the opening quicker but it just looks like shit.

The batch of teens that initially bite the dust are particularly annoying.  I had no problem with seeing them gutted.  Sissy and her brother are the only two who aren’t keying people’s cars or starting fights or you know, acting like pure assholes.

Overall Impressions: This was originally a Texas Chainsaw sequel script written by series writer and producer Kim Henkel.  I’m not sure what happened that caused this to be turned into its own thing but the end product is so close to something from that universe that I’m counting it as an honorary entry.  Don’t think fake diamond, think genuine cubic zirconia.

Interestingly the first part is really like a Judgment Night rip off with a vicious gang chasing innocent passersby through a seedy underbelly urban jungle.  But then the switch gets flipped and we’re most definitely in TCM land with maniacal off the wall characters and gruesome carnage.

Even with all the gore, brutal imagery and frightening ideas that keep piling on I found myself strangely enjoying it.  I wish it were more focused though because the butcher boys conjure up way too much mayhem to get a handle on anything.

If you’re a fan of the Texas Chains then I guess I cautiously recommend checking out this alternate reality curiosity.  All the TCM references and cameos are kinda neat to spot but they also blur the line even further about it not being an official entry.  Sure it doesn’t come remotely close to the excellence of the first two Chainsaws but even with its problems I think it’s probably better than the remakes/reboots from the past twenty years, except for possibly Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.  It’s absolutely better than TCM: The Next Generation.  That I know.