I will be completely honest, the main reason I wanted to see this film was because it starred a very well-known former XXX hardcore porn star, I knew she professionally acted later in the Steven Soderbergh film The Girlfriend Experience, so I was keen to see what she was like, and I guess I was up for a cheesy scary movie. Basically the latest film from director Able Whitman (David Hess) has had many negative comments from cinema goers, poor reviews from critics and very low box office takings, and frustrated his only entertainment and distraction comes when he goes into a strip club. There he meets and takes home stripper Georgina Carson aka Gigi Spot (Jennilee Murray), and he is most interested in her that he may like to cast her in his next film, a sequel to the one recently getting the negativity, but they end up in a road accident killing Gigi, and he has to do something with the body. In a moment of madness he remembers cinema goers saying that all his gore effects look fake, so he decides in convenience to use parts of the dead body he has and "disguise" them as set pieces and props to use in his new horror film. Meanwhile television news celebrity April Carson (former porn star Sasha Grey), Gigi's sister, joins forces with private investigator Isaac Beaumonde (Jesse Buck) to help find her sister, and with Whitman being the last person to have apparently seen her she pretends to be a wannabe actress and get a part in his latest film being made. The new set design and the new "more realistic" props are met with praise by the crew members and studio heads, and when more "props" are needed the madman resorts to going on a killing spree murdering crew members for their blood and body parts, and he even drains some of his own blood. Whitman gets going on a return to good form for the film industry, finding a long lost film to open the audiences to before his brand new film is presented, but obviously his evil plans are discovered, and not long before he can finish and premiere his "masterpiece" he is killed. Also starring The Hills Have Eyes' Michael Berryman as Philip Farmsworth Jr., Herschell Gordon Lewis as Fred Sandy / Radio Announcer, Ray Sager as Reverend Roscoe Boone, Michael Dubue as Alan Dackman and Barry Blake as Armand Parys. Hess is alright as the psychopathic filmmaker, Grey at least shows she can act a little – but I'd have to see more of her (in acting, and flesh terms technically, LOL), the rest of the cast are hardly worth mentioning, especially Buck who was dreadful, well, actually it was the whole film that was dreadful, the plot and story are pointless and not all that imaginative, it is predictable and most of the time tiresome, no body parts and blood spattering can rescue it, I would not waste my time watching it because it is an awful horror comedy. Pretty poor!

Two things might attract you to this movie; if you're like C, it's the prospect of seeing adult film actress Sasha Grey doing something other than swallowing massive meat (although why you would want to see her doing anything but that is a mystery to me), or you're like myself, and want to see a movie that is a tribute to the life and works of the God Father of gore H.G. Lewis....The gore, or lack of it, is another disappointment. The effects aren't really the problem, I realised that they were obviously fake to mimic some of the questionable gore props used in the 60s and 70s however I distinctly remember most of Lewis' gore being quite revolting and of bad taste. In 'Smash Cut' they are all played for a laugh which was a bit of a shame. In addition to this, and contrary to much of Lewis' ethos, many of the gore scenes are remarkably weak, nothing much is shown. On occasion the gore is there with some guts and plenty of blood, but certainly nothing which sticks in your head like in Lewis' movies.'Smash Cut' delivers an experience which is occasionally close to the great Lewis movies of old, too often though it forces the formula too far, with the 'bad acting' coming off a little to camp, and many of the jokes coming too close to seeming like a bit of a micky take. There are many aspects of the movie which fall short, but overall, the main problem remains that for a movie attempting to pay homage to the God Father of gore, it's not anyway near gory enough.Read the full review at: beyondthegore

Bitter and deranged hack horror director Able Whitman (marvelously essayed with trademark rip-snorting gusto by the always reliable David Hess) gets slammed by critics for the hokey quality of his hopelessly cheesy movies. So Able decides to start killing his enemies and using their body parts as props in his latest schlock opus. It's up to spunky reporter April Carson (a solid and appealing performance by adorable hardcore porn starlet Sasha Grey) and suave private investigator Isaac Beaumonde (smoothly played by Jesse Buck) to stop the lethal lunatic. Director Lee Gordon Demarbre and writer Ian Driscoll lovingly craft a bright, witty, and energetic ode to blithely low-grade horror exploitation cinema that makes the grade thanks to an engaging tongue-in-cheek tone, nifty homages to the grisly work of legendary goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis (who has a neat small part as April's boss Fred Sandy and does a spot-on introduction warning folks about the graphic nature of this picture), outrageously excessive gore set pieces that really hit the splattery spot (a snobby film critic getting bagged with a clapper board rates as the definite wonderfully ridiculous highlight), and a wild climax set at a movie theater. As usual, it's a total blast to see Hess go gloriously bonkers and bump off various folks in inventively gruesome ways. Popping up in nifty supporting roles are Michael Berryman as shyster producer Philip Farnsworth Jr., Ray Sager as flamboyant hypocritical preacherman Reverend Roscoe Boone, and Jennilee Murray as doomed stripper Georgia Carson. Jean-Dennis Menard's gaudy cinematography gives the film an appropriately garish look and boasts several impressively intricate tracking shots. Michael Dubue's funky, lively, syncopated score does the right-on groovy trick. Enjoyable junk.

Not sure how I'm going to take this review up to 10 lines, which is the minimum I'm allowed to write, but saw this on a shelf again recently and felt obliged to warn others not to bother with it. I had assumed that, by now, it had been swallowed into a dark abyss and nobody would be at any risk of parting with money for it.Mercifully, I only rented it and don't think that I even finished it. It was awful. One of those films where someone tries to make a 'so bad it's good' film'. Well, that didn't work. It was so bad it was painful. At a glance I expected it to be biographical, but it was just using that in the blurb to get noticed. A total nonsense, dragging painfully on and on.Take your money and give it to a wino - it will be better spent.