In addition to the usual reviews and comments you would find on a horror movie blog, this is also a document of the wonderfully vast horror movie section of the video store I worked at in my youth.

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

V is for Victims! (1985)


This was just a coverbox from my memory that just happened to be on YouTube.

Four young women on a geology(!) field trip in the desert are stalked by a pair of sadistic bank robbers.

Whoa, this movie was something else. A woman takes an axe to the head in the first minute. Then, almost immediately another completely unrelated naked woman gets murdered in bed. THEN, a dude dressed as an old lady stabs a woman in the back in broad daylight. So trashy was the violence on display, it would have made H.G. Lewis blush.

It was at this point I was wondering if this entire film was just clips of murder scenarios. I mean, Victims! did little to dissuade me, as it took almost twenty minutes to offer up any kind of protagonists, or even actual dialogue. This was the opposite of yesterday's movie; almost no exposition. Scenes just kind of happened and sometimes didn't even finish before cutting to the next “scene”.

I cannot undersell how cheap this movie looked. Disregard that it was shot on 16mm, the threadbare story, awful sound - you can hear a lawnmower in the background during one scene - and again that editing should be enough to unhinge your jaw. I noticed on Imdb that director Jeff Hathcock also did 1986's Night Ripper and that makes so much fucking sense. And that movie is somehow a sizable step up from this.

Shot from just beyond where the mic can properly pick up dialogue.

You know, it always boggles my mind how they got actresses for these movies back in the day. Like, I can't imagine these were high paying (if at all) gigs so Hathcock somehow convinced four(!) women to go into the desert for two weeks to recreate a shittier version of I Spit on Your Grave. What a world... 

Having said all that, for the next week I will definitely be asking every horror hound I know if they have seen this. Just for the tan lines alone. Now, THOSE were scary.

Those aren't panties, folks.

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