Pizza Girl Massacre (2014)

I’m always looking for something new to cover here on my annual Slasher movie marathon. With a name like Pizza Girl Massacre, I couldn’t resist. I mean how bad could it be really? No honestly… oh crap.

This found footage flick… God Damn it… follows a group of documentary filmmakers as they go into the woods and shoot footage of a local theater troupe rehearsing Shakespeare. But first we get to watch the auditions, some infighting, and even the director of the documentary getting shot down by all the actresses. Eventually they get to the cabin, which has a huge basement under it that is explained away as a bomb shelter. Though obviously they shot this in a dorm or some other large building. 

They meet the creepy landlady and her son, who she refers to as an idiot. The cast and crew parties and the director of documentary tries to score some points by ordering pizza for everyone. This doesn’t end well, and he takes his frustration out on the delivery girl by not paying her and then by losing his mind and getting really drunk. The next morning people start to die as they soon figure out that the pizza girl is pissed and killing them. People die, jokes are told, and not surprisingly the idiot son and mom are involved.

I’ll start off with some positives. I thought that the cast did a good job and were very good for a low budget production. This is especially true when doing the comedy that is sprinkled throughout the entire movie. There are some especially funny gags like Harrison not being totally dead yet and the hot dog man. Without decent actors this would have been a complete failure so having people with some timing was much appreciated.

The gore was also surprisingly good. Now understand this is a low budget movie so it has to be judged differently. But there are a lot of deaths and while a lot of them are after the fact there is quite a bit of fun to be had. Throats are cut, people suffocated with plastic bags, an eye gets gouged, someone dies to a rolling pin down their throat, and there is a head rolling. The best is the guy getting cut in half and the sketchy director getting his head cut off slowly with a hacksaw. That last one is by far my favorite. So again, they did some good things with the kills and gore like every good horror/slasher movie should do. Now we get to the bad.

The camerawork killed this for me. I get that it is being shot as a found footage movie but it really isn’t a found footage so you can make some effort to clean it up a bit. First issue is that they had autofocus on the cameras they were using. That means the damn thing went out of focus every time someone moved or entered/left the frame. What that means is most of the movie was out of focus and blurry as hell. Not only couldn’t I see what was going on but it gave me a splitting headache as I watched. They then double down on this by adding fake static and digital defects to the shots. I guess they were trying to imply that the gear was damaged or something. All it does is make a difficult watch even worse.

I wanted to like Pizza Girl Massacre. The cast is solid, and I thought the writing was good. But I just can’t recommend that anyone sit thru and deal with how poorly it was shot. Should the filmmakers being paying attention to me (hey it could happen!) if that was intended, you need to do better and understand that your movie needs to be watchable. If it was because you just had bad equipment, then by new cameras and make another movie because you clearly have talent and I want to see what you do next. This is one of those rare times where I can’t recommend a movie but am still very excited to see what else they have made.

 

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