SPLATTAHOUSE 4: LAID TO REST

Well, only a few weeks have gone by and already Splattahouse is THE #1 violence-based sub-blog in all of hip-hop. But still there have been some dissenting voices. “Japanese girls with machine gun arms and Brazilian eroto-religious maniacs are all very well,” writes regular visitor Warren McGlone of D-Block, “but what happened to the good old-fashioned slasher movie, you Amyam cunt?”

And so, for Warren and for all y’all bitches, I bring you Laid To Rest.

For a low-budget slice’n’dice’n’be-not-nice flick, Laid To Rest has a couple of decent marquee names, namely Lena ‘The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ Headey, who belies her top billing by SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT having a massive knife jammed into her mush in the first ten minutes, and Kevin Gage, who is disappointingly not the Wimbedon and Aston Villa midfielder of the 1980s, but the scary-looking dude who played the treacherous Waingro in Michael Mann’s Heat.

The fun begins in a funeral parlour, where a distinctly hot girl (Bobbi Sue Luther) wakes up in a coffin with no memory of how she got there – boy, we’ve all had a few nights like that!!!!!!!!!!!! LOLZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Before she can ascertain why she is there from a kindly old mortician, said old-timer has had a spike jammed through his face, and then, as we say around these parts, shit be on.

She flees, is picked up by Gage and Headey, who we are meant to think are the killers but they’re not, they’re actually really nice, and it becomes apparent that the killer, who wears a metal face mask in the MF Doom style, intends to slice up Hot Girl at all costs, and kill everyone who gets in his way, as a bonus.

Once Headey has had her cheeks ventilated, Gage and Hot Girl head out into the night to get help, but just keep finding more and more corpses. However, they do pick up a computer geek along the way, who is played by Sean Whalen, who horror film fans will know as Roach from The People Under The Stairs (the movie, not the hip-hop group. Sorry if I’m overdoing the trivia bullshit in this one, it’s just that there’s a lot of it).

Eventually, it becomes apparent that a) metal-face doesn’t have much of a motive, he just isn’t very nice and b) the three are going to have to deal with him theyself, and so the body count begins in earnest. The decapitations (note: plural) are particularly unpleasant in an Al-Qaeda home video kind of way – no nice clean head-lops here – but the best splat comes when the three hole up at a convenience store, and some entirely blameless teens get bloodily offed. The “shotgun placed under chin, then discharged” incident, though lacking a certain narrative veracity, at least succeeded in giving me a big boner.

The ending is a little unsatisfying, but hey, you could say that about The Sopranos.