Ready to Eat? “Butchers Book Two: Raghorn” Available Here on DVD!
The abduction of a wealthy family’s daughter drives the four kidnappers onto the backroads of rural America toward their way to riches. However, things turn south as their vehicle strikes a large raghorn, instantly dissolving their escape route and their previously teetering plan. A festering betrayal and greed divide the group that leads them into the cannibalistic hands of the sadistic, backwoods inhabitant Clyde and his monstrous freak of a brother Crusher. Always looking for a good piece of meat and with a brutal penchant for playing with his food, Clyde takes them hostage at gunpoint, ties them up, and has fun torturing and tenderizing his foraged prize before chopping them up to pieces on a bloody stump for stew makings. Yet, the abducted woman refuses to be the victim and let terrible, awful atrocities happen to her, and not even let it happen to her kidnappers, by escaping her confines and managing to get ahold of a double barrel shotgun. A standoff ensues but nothing gets in between Clyde and his food.
“Butchers Book Two: Raghorn” is director Adrian Langley’s 2024 standalone sequel to his lowkey breakout 2020 hit, the indie backwoods cannibal-survivor picture, “Butchers”. The sequel doesn’t stray too far from the precursory film’s primary premise with a family of degenerate provincials with a taste for human flesh whisking away stranded travelers in some kind deranged version of roadside assistance. Langley directs and writes the script for the film based off a story conceived by Langley and Kolin Casagrande, who previously collaborated with Langley as a producer on his 2010 crime thriller directed feature entitled “Donkey.” More than a decade later, Casagrande and Langley are again making beautiful violence together with Blue Fox Entertainment’s James Huntsman (“Bunker”), a parent company of the film’s distributor, Red Hound Entertainment, and “Butcher’s” Doug Phillips as producers and another “Butcher” producer, Kevin Preece, as associate producer.
Aforementioned, “Butchers Book Two: Reghorn” doesn’t subsequently follow the first feature and introduces new set of paltry protagonists versus a new set of insatiable and vile cannibals deep within the middle of the woods of Nowheresville, America. The party forcibly partook in the cannibals’ cruelty isn’t necessarily all an innocent party as they’re mostly kidnappers looking to score big from their captive. Dave Coleman (“Ghoul House”), Miguel Cortez, Sam Huntsman (“Bunker”), son of producer James Huntsman, and Hollie Kennedy portray the ensnared antiheros with the latter two being most of the focus amongst them, seeing that they are cousins that evoke more empathy than the less empathic former. The wild car outside of that and who are not the viciously outweighing outliers is the girl in the trunk, who is actually a man named Corgand Svendsen. The androgynous model from Canada hikes up a skirt and wears a tight top crop to become the damsel Ash but Ash is no damsel in distress. The story shifts from Ash’s bagged head and wrists tied helplessness to become the infiltrating protagonist to take up Clyde and Crusher to do what’s right, even if that means saving the skin, literally, on a couple of her captors. Svendsen gives a calm and subdued performance, especially as a hostage in the money scheme and in the bloody mitts of cannibals, but perhaps there’s more than what meets the eye for Ash. Perhaps, Ash is a part of the kidnapping scheme in a theorized plot between Ash and Sam Huntsman character Josh who frequently tries to make Ash comfortable in the whole ordeal and Ash is just trying to salvage her investment, but the strength of that theory never fully materializes in Ash’s motivation to go against two ruthless killers rather than to flee free with her life. Clyde and Crusher are the two mysteriously originated characters who live in the woods and eat people. Their background is not specified or shared in any minute way but “What Lurks Beneath’s” Nick Biskupek plays a mean, man-eating son of a bitch in Clyde while Michael Swatton, who previously played one of the Watson brothers in original “Butchers,” compliments his “little” brother as a colossal, head-crushing freak of a nature left in the audience’s peripheral view. The sequel’s casts ends with Mark Templin (“We Are the Missing”) as a moment of reprieve stopgap sheriff tracking down the vehicular accident victims who may not be victims after all.
Watching “Butchers Book Two: Raghorn” is like watching in a déjà vu fog. The similar premise to the 2020 film peruses familiar aisles of country-chic cannibals chopping careless characters who stumble into their killing grounds. What the sequel drops is the perversive and family legacy angle, reducing the story to just two brothers living isolated on the outskirts and barbequing people as they happenstance wander by. Langley also doesn’t up the graphic nature but sustains the same amount of gore and mordacious violence. Even when cutting down the killer contingent down half its size, violence remains taut and palpable for shock effect as Langley does make the savagery purposeful rather than just gratuitous. “Raghorn” is by no means a bigger, badder sequel, as most sequels tend to try and exceed expectations and outdo the first, i.e. more blood, bigger body count, detailed special effects, etc., but the indie roots that made the original film palpable are still firmly grounded with a, literally, grab-it-by-the-balls, suit yourself story without the poking and prodding influences of a rapacious producer or studio with flashing dollar signs in their eyes.
Breaking Glass Pictures’ “Butchers Book Two: Raghorn” would have been a perfect fit for the distributor’s short-lived extreme horror sublabel, Vicious Circle Films. However, we’re still glad the sequel made the home video market under one of Philadelphia’s most prominent indie distributor labels with a DVD release. The MPEG-2, single layered, DVD5 is presented in an upscaled 1080p with a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. While not receiving high-definition resolution, you’ll be fairly pleased with the quality of this release that retains some faithful reproductions in textural details, such as Clyde’s cutoff jean jacket and overall grimy attire that does highlight the jacket’s frayed ends and the outlined dirt patches or the engulfing variety of foliage that naturally exhibited innate green shades, but also the general appearance is soft in the more depth of details. Langley, who wears multiple production hats between editing, directing, and writing, also is behind the cinematographer lens to create the space of depth and to be stylistic with a few pan and track occurrences. The English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix is the only lossy option available that renders a traversable diffusion of sound throughout with balanced layers between dialogue, ambience, and soundtrack layers. Clyde’s intelligent intelligibility under a twang tongue clearly finds the audio receptors with the remaining dialogue denoting clarity in the same fashion. English subtitles are available for optional use. While Breaking Glass Pictures’ releases do not have a wealth of bonus content, most have some content to peruse; however, this particular release is feature only. The region 1 playback DVD has a runtime of 89 minutes and is not rated.
Last Rites: From the book of Andrian Langley’s cannibal misfits, a second story lives and breathe in “Butchers Book Two: Raghorn,” a gruesome, miscreant fanned, survival of the hungriest for their cravings tale wrapped just a tad too lightly for proper consumption.
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