July 4th Is Here! Time to hit “Slaughter Beach” on DVD!
Ralph and Barry are best buds. They’re best buds freeloading off Barry’s father’s shore house during the height of Slaughter Beach’s Summer season. When Barry’s father becomes annoyed by his adult son and friend’s loafing, his ultimatum to them is to get a job or get out, but the touristy destination of Slaughter Beach has nearly become all but a ghost town as businesses and tourism shut down or come to a slow crawl after a string of mysterious disappearances along the beaches and boardwalk. Barry’s idea to become vigilante crime fighters, under the hero names of Awesome Boy and Bludgeon Man of the duo’s moniker The FenderBenders and hoping to resurrect the once booming vacationing hotspot back to its full former glory, reels in a boatload of trouble when a salty, horseshoe crab fisherman behind the disappearances casts his deadly fishhook line toward the wannabe crime fighters to make chum out of them and anyone else who crosses his path.
“Slaughter Beach” is the buddy horror-comedy and slasher set on the American Eastern shorelines of not the actual Slaughter Beach of Sussex County Delaware but actually shot 25 miles north in the more populated Rehoboth beach. The 2022 released, Daniel C. Davis written-and-director feature is “The Scarecrow’s Curse” and “X Knight Escape from Warp Hell” actor’s third film in a decade span. The Delaware-born, Wilmington University graduate continues his grow his independent filmmaking career in his home state and the surrounding metropolitan, tri-state area. His latest directorial lands him on the Eastern beaches of Delaware with filming done mostly at night during the tourism offseason, allowing more wiggle room for shooting, less hassle from onlookers, and a better chance at snagging shooting locations that would be, perhaps, heavily trafficked during peak months. “Slaughter Beach” runs under Davis and Brett Taylor’s production company, Clockout Films, and is produced by the two filmmakers alongside Jim Cannatelli (“Yester-Years”).
“Slaughter Beach” is amazingly well dialogued in the comedy context for a low-budget, independent feature and without the principal leads, the hapless and hero-lite buddies, of Jon McKoy, who I still recall his similar performance in “Easter Sunday,” and Ethan Han, in his debut feature film role, “Slaughter Beach” would have flop hard like a fish out of water, gasping for a watery breath. Between McKoy and Han, Ralph and Barry’s antics are contrived out of dunce energy with good intentions that slow churns infectious wit to character likeability. Their crude innocence faces impossible trials when against a foe that tests their trying not-very-hard heroic vigilantism on the shore’s boardwalk. Jim Cannatelli, yes, producer Jim Cannatelli, dons the Sou’Wester hat and chest waders for the crazed Fish Man Sam’s crusade on hooking Lilith, the mythical and monstrous horseshoe crab, with his special human bait from wielding a weaponized line and lure and fishhook to gut and chum his victims. In an appearance very similar to The Fisherman in “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” Cannatelli’s twist hits the old seadog stereotype complete with nautical vernacular and is a fine comic book antagonist to the campy, counterpart sideshow that is Ralph and Barry. However, the standoff between good versus evil is held to the very end with Fish Man Sam angling boardwalk and beach patrons to their deaths, that’s closer to shooting fish in a barrel with support bit parts performances from mostly Davis casting regulars, such as Amy Lynn Patton, Michelle Qenzel, Keith Crosby, Shawn Shillingford, Heather Street, Kiyneeanay Dykes, and Ethan Han’s actual father, Oscar Aguilar, playing Barry’s dad.
There’s no shortage of zaniness, slapstick, or waggishness in Davis’s “Slaughter Beach.” Same goes with the horror façade that’s well framed around the comedic core. “Slaughter Beach’s” terror won’t be a trepidant of tension or knock off your tacklebox with fright, but Davis shows obvious signs of paying attention to the what-works in horror motifs with the crafting of looming angles, danger-building and coherent editing and score, and a villain that might be a caricaturable and an exaggeration vocally but appears damn right creepy in the background as the obscured and shadowing lurking fisherman. A gory practical effects décor by Trauma Queen FX special makeup and effects artist, Isabelle Isel, elevates the feature’s victim pool to an anticipation level amongst the audience to see what Fish Man Sam has in store next for his ice chest full of horrors. While visually alarming and usually frightening in nature, the villainous veneer and gore-soaked effects are not excluded from the comedy tone with the fishing themed gallows humor that’s about as ridiculously funny as it sounds. What isn’t as fleshed out as hoped was Fish Man Sam’s obsessive and radical pursuit of bagging the giant horseshoe crab he’s bestowed as Lilith. Its an important motivation factor that drives the deranged angler left to swim upstream and doesn’t elaborate and relay Ralph and Barry’s foe sympathetically as a man on a mission.
The Clockout Films production has been picked up by the longstanding zero-budget genre label, SRS Cinema, for the at home DVD release. “Slaughter Beach” is MPEG-2 encoded onto a single-layer DVD5 with a 720p resolution and is ungraded. With nearly zip on the hue saturation and stick with a lower resolution, “Slaughter Beach” is able to compress adequately, suppressing any major artefact issues to lesser posterization, and keeping a soft, yet relatively clean image that doesn’t focus on stylistic highlights but rather draws all the attention onto the buddy heroes and the gore. Lighting is retained by the array of brightly lit Boardwalk bulbs, some specialized muted-colored uplighting for a slightly retro feel, and natural lighting, reducing much of the beachy backdrop to a black void that centers the characters without much depth to delineate within the widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The English LPCM 2.0 stereo track musters enough strength from the blemish-free boom recording. No crackling, hissing, or any other kind of distortions on the dialogue or LFE layers, suggesting that care was put into the audio, and it rightfully shows a coherent and competent mix with alternative-punk-ska tracks from The Jasons, Station, and Skatune Network. Dialogue clear, clean, and prominent. There are no optional subtitles available. Special features include a feature length commentary with a roundtable, ride along discussions with director Daniel C. Davis, stars Ethan Han and Jon McKoy, producer and principal Jim Cannatelli, and director of photography Brett Taylor. Also included is a raw footage gag reel and SRS trailers, one of which is for “Slaughter Beach.” The extremely detailed and aesthetically illustrated cover art gives the physical DVD a lucrative eyeful but the release do not credit the artist, nor do I see a signature hidden inside the tonal shades. The region free SRS DVD has a runtime of 80 minutes and is not rated.
Last Rites: “Slaughter Beach” is more than a head in the sand thriller; the Daniel C. Davis horror-comedy paces to deliver timely laughs as well as casting flesh-ripping, barbed lures that easily hooks us for more giggles and gore.
It's Bloggin Evil! 