Splatter: Architects of Fear (1986)

The pseudo documentary purports to be about the making of a low-budget post-nuke sci-fi/action opus with a tribe of fierce Amazon women battling rot-faced mutants, but it's actually nothing more than a shameless excuse to showcase several elaborate gore set pieces, with a generous sprinkling of tasty gratuitous female nudity tossed in for trashy good measure. Said gore includes a machete in the head, an icepick piercing an eye, a juicy throat slicing, a gruesome dismemberment, and, best of all, an exploding head that's caused by strenuous sex (don't ask). Director Peter Rowe maintains a zippy pace and a lighthearted tone throughout. The staging and shooting of all the gore gags are depicted in fascinatingly meticulous detail. Alas, Paul James Sanders as bumbling comic relief dimwit Fang proves to be more annoying than amusing, but fortunately he ultimately receives a suitably nasty comeuppance at the end. Allan Kane's spirited and syncopated synthesizer score keeps things bouncing along. Chris Britton's plummy narration rattles off a lot of pretentious film school level howlers. A real goofy hoot.

Fool am I for giving in to heedless grab-and-go impulses at the video rental shop...I should have known what was in store for me when the checkout girl at the counter held up the video box and yelled "Hey Jim!", at which point her co-worker spun around. They both let out a knowing little snicker, and today I can join them in that snicker because I fully understand the joke, except that it's not *really* a joke, because jokes are funny. SPLATTER, on the other hand, *IS* very much a joke, though there's nothing at all funny about it. This is a docu-styled look at a bunch of hopeful twenty-nothings at work in the special effects tier of a low-budget barbarian apocalypse film. There's gratuitous nudity and really naff gore to keep things barely watchable, but I still couldn't guiltlessly recommend this garbage to Hitler himself. It's boring and very dated, and infinitely less interesting than most of the "extras" you can see currently in most DVD releases. 3.5/10

SPLATTER is interspersed between real-live action sequences of a "movie" and a documentary crew going behind the scenes to show us how the grisly fx are achieved. The "movie" portion is awful. For starters, it's shot-on-video. So right off the bat it's production values are that of your typical 80's porn. The story, or lack thereof, concerns a tribe of amazon queens doing battle with all sorts of zombies and mutants. The gore is cheap and phony, yet strangely disgusting and gratuitous. A very dated but enjoyable synth score plays throughout to spruce things up a bit. I won't lie though, this portion of the film is extremely entertaining and I wish a real movie called SPLATTER was made and not this pseudo-documentary piece. The behind-the-scenes portion of the film bogs things down a bit. Stupid humor, a dumb character named Fang and a shot that would've been cool, loses all merit when it is played over, and over and over again. But, the most amazing thing about SPLATTER is that there once was a time when something so offbeat, so corny and low-budget like this was made. I'm talkin' 100% Velveeta here. If you dig REDNECK ZOMBIES then SPLATTER is surely worth 75 mins. of your time.

Claims to be a documentary of the filming of a sci-fi / horror movie. Doubt the movie was actually made. Only good part worth seeing is the fine looking future babe who pins an alien against a wall, strips, and proceeds to "f*[ < his brains out" until his head literally explodes!! Nice between the legs shot as well.Otherwise the effects are lame. No Savini work here.