As homemade horror cinema goes, the S.O.V. (standing for Shot On Video) "Splatter Farm" didn't quite reach the uproarious heights that this viewer would have liked. That's not to say that there aren't some very good laugh out loud moments, but they're spread a little thin. Even at a mere 70 minutes long, there is a LOT more padding here than plot. Still, sometimes the padding is amusing.The slim story sees twin brothers (played by actors / editors / directors John and Mark Polonia) being sent to live with their Aunt Lacey (Marion Costly), who lives on a woodsy farm with a seriously demented farmhand named Jeremy (Todd Michael Smith, who also directed this thing with the Polonias). Jeremy's in the habit of slaughtering locals, and the brothers, concerned with the weird goings-on at this place, try to confront him about it.Suffice it to say, this kind of thing isn't for everybody. One has to be willing to tolerate very amateurish (if undeniably hilarious) acting, limp pacing, and thin writing in order to get into the spirit of it. The good thing, though, is that there are little flashes of brilliance here and there, and the movie does do its job of living up to its title. This truly is a "splatter farm". The bargain basement gore is very endearing - in fact, it's the most enjoyable aspect of the whole thing. The music by John Rayl is actually one thing that's not too bad, although it does get repetitive. The nutty old lady is quite a hoot, especially the way she's very forward with her affections.What truly makes the movie worth sitting through is its depraved climax in which Joseph (John P.) is tortured by Jeremy. After this there's an absolutely hysterical climax with somebody getting blown up REAL good.In the end, even though there's a lot of plodding going on, there is something that's appealing in seeing non-professional filmmakers put something together; unlike a lot of Hollywood product, there's a genuine HEART to be found in these tiny productions. That's nothing to be laughed at.Six out of 10.

I just received the twentieth anniversary edition two disc set of Splatter Farm from www.regalstudios.com. Wow! This is one of the most entertaining DVD sets I've ever received and I've purchased a lot of indie films over the years.I won't go into all the details of the set but if your a Splatter Farm fan you have to get this. It's got a new version of the film with a new soundtrack plus a new documentary with the cast and it's even signed by Todd Michael Smith who played Jeremy! Whats more the two disc set is just as insane and fun as the movie itself.Splatter farm now and forever!!

Splatter Farm! SPLATTER FARM! Sometimes I see a work of art that just makes me withdraw to reassess my life and the meaning of art. Splatter Farm (SPLATTER FARM!!!) is not really one of them, but it's sort of close. It is the first and only shot-on-video homemade horror film I have seen.Splatter Farm was shot by two teenagers, the Polonia Brothers, who eventually became producers and directors of independent low-budget cult horrors. I wonder how this movie, SPLATTER FARM, ever got distributed, and how it fell into my hands. How? It is about these two kids who-- Wait, no, before I tell you what it's about, I have to tell you what it looks like. The first thing you think when you watch this thing, this "Splatter Farm" is "huh?" This is a home-video. It was shot on a camcorder. It looks like the tapes of your cousin's birthday party from way back when. It doesn't look this way as a stylistic technique-- it looks this way because that's what it is. You see this old house in the country. You see a cat out in a regular yard, not doing anything. You see a kid with an axe, standing over a stuffed dummy... and he begins swinging that axe right onto that stuffed dummy in a manner that indicated this kid, this "actor" has never swung an axe before, and the stuffed dummy begins leaking some red syrup. SPLATTER FARM! A toy keyboard provides the soundtrack, but it's not supposed to sound funny. Splatter Farm. I've never watched a movie like this before.Regaring the "story," it is something like: these two teenagers (the Polonia Brothers) are going to spend the summer vacation with their aunt on her farm-- her Splatter Farm... with the other kid from the opening sequence, that one with the axe (he lives in the barn and does chores). The setting is realistic and grimy because it is a real, old house in the country. Throughout the course of the movie you'll see a mustached teen grunting on a toilet, then excretes a stream of blood and a butcher's knife into the toilet, and he gets up, drooling blood and pulls his underwear up over his mutilated groin (it was just a dream), the aunt constantly hitting on the boys, finally giving one of them a roofie and raping him (which is depicted as someone hopping up and down underneath some blankets on a bed), ol' crazy boy gets ahold of one the brothers and gives him the ol' Splatter Farm with a pitchfork (SPLATTER FARM!), performs fellatio on him, drools out the guy's semen, turns him around, fists him (not explicitly shown) to pull out a handful of pudding (supposed to be feces), licks it then rubs it in his victims face, before sending him up to the great Splatter Farm in the sky. It also contains a scene of a decapitated head being used for self-fellatio before "Haute Tension" made it chic. Oh, and the boys' aunt is also a necrophiliac (with a nicely decomposed corpse wearing pants into which she reaches and sadly pulls out fear in a handful of dust), and then there's a twist regarding incest (again) at the end. The boy who plays the bad killer of SPLATTER FARM actually menaces me, yet he needed to learn how to properly swing an axe. The final scene of him, after murdering everyone, (don't worry about me spoiling the ending, you don't care about the plot when you watch something like this) frolicking and dancing gaily in the field is touching like Mabel reenacting the Death of a Swan in Cassavete's "A Woman Under the Influence." Not really. Everything in this movie (SPLATTER FARM) looks fake, yet, the fact that these boys put their imagination into doing this, it disturbs me.The acting is great, and by great I mean not so great, and by not so great I mean SPLATTER FARM!!!! The people recite their lines as though they were just told what to say before every shot without knowing anything about the movie (they probably wouldn't want to know anyway) (because the movie is Splatter Farm.... SPLATTER FARM!). I don't... you know... I... This looks like the kind of movie my buddies and I would make in high school, for fun... except our themes weren't so sickening.In a way, I want to recommend this to everyone, because it shows a totally different side of homemade film-making that many are not familiar with (I wasn't). And the camera angles, cutting, editing, everything, kinda shows conventions at their most stripped-down and basic... if you see it in this naked light then you can kind of recognize it better when you see it done professionally (check out the strange shot of an oven being lit). I suppose it contains some interesting comments on youthful film making.I bought this used for a dollar from a rental store in a very small Midwestern town. The tape had been stopped and queued about 25% through into movie, indicating that the last person to have rented this probably could not get through this strange video. I would love to have seen that person's reaction. I believe this film is now available on DVD from its distributor's website.Rating: "Splatter Farm" out of "Splatter Farm" SPLATTER FARM!!!!!!

This movie clearly demonstrates why people shouldn't give other people their home-made movies.The story, what little you can find of it, is that 2 twin brothers go to visit their aunt Lacy at her farm. The place is supposedly being kept in shape by Jeremy, but he's kinda busy killing people and using their corpses for sexual gratification. The twins begin finding body parts and grow weary of Jeremy. On top of this, Lucy has been alone too long and now finds herself lusting for one of her nephews. Eventually the twins decide enough's enough and try to get away. There's plenty of sick stuff going on, but the rest of the movie is so annoying, you'd be hard-pressed to even notice.To my amazement, I actually found something not that bad in this movie. The guy playing Jeremy looked truly freakish and was doing a fairly decent job acting.Absolutely everything else in the movie was undeniable crap though.It was cut with a spoon, and put back together using chewing gum or something. You went from scene 1 with (extremely annoying) background music playing, to a silent shot of some scenery. No fading out the sounds here, instead they chop it off mid-tone. I lost count of the amount of times there was a crackle or pop when they put 2 scenes together.The assembled corpses looked okay, but then someone would stand over one and work it over with an axe, getting blood sprayed into him from the side. Come on people, stuff like that isn't rocket science.The lighting sucked in that oftentimes you couldn't see anything, but even more often everything was way, WAAY too bright, having the same end result.The dialog, notably absent for the first 5 minutes of the film, was stupid and (st)uttered completely unconvincing. The redneck with Down's syndrome accents of the twins didn't help either.This movie also has a rather large abundance of walking, sleeping, running, sitting doing nothing, reading the damn newspaper (and not noticing anything to help the story along), awkward silences and more, equally enjoyable filler.The guy handling the camera seemed to be having Parkingsons disease or something. They couldn't even take a shot of the moon without shaking the camera!To round it all off, they decided to add a (gasp) plot twist (!) at the end of the movie. If only the creative genius that dreamed that one up had been able to stay focused during the other 90 minutes of the film...That this movie got a 3.7 here is a miracle in itself, and it's certainly undeserved. The fact that it's a home-movie doesn't excuse it from being the crap that it is.This movie isn't fun, shocking, entertaining or gruesome. It's a dull, slow, boring, fake, cheap dog of a movie, and your time would be better spent watching paint dry.