Mustang Sally’s Horror House (2006)

Rating: E

Dir: Iren Koster
Star: E.G. Daily, Mark Parrish, Lindsey Labrum, Erik Fellows

This isn’t a bad idea: a bunch of horny teenagers are lured to a remote brothel, where they are offed by the employees. In the hands of, oh, Eli Roth or Rob Zombie, this could have been very entertaining, grindhouse-style fare. In the hands of writer-director Iren Koster…not so much. The nicest thing you can say about it is, it looks quite good: the production clearly had access to some expensive cameras. E.G.Daily doesn’t disgrace herself, though seeing her lounging around in lingerie will make watching The Powerpuff Girls kinda weird (she provides the voice of Buttercup!).

However, virtually every other aspect of this is totally inadequate: I was transfixed by how the logo on the side of the “police” car was peeling off at the top, and chortled heartily at the plastic sickle used to dispatch one victim. Don’t even get us started on the ‘shootings’, which consist entirely of a sound, apparently located by Googling “gunshot.wav”. Okay, it’s a low-budget film. Fair enough: I wasn’t expecting anything else. So the makers ramped up the sex and violence to make up for their deficiencies in other areas, right? Wrong. For a film that spends two-thirds of its running-time in a brothel, there is remarkably little nudity, and gorewise it’s equally disappointing.

Add in a poorly-written script, paper-thin characters, both among the guys and gals, that leave the viewer not giving a damn about anyone, and all you need to complete the wretched awfulness is a cringeworthy cameo from the direct… Oh, hang on, we’ve got that too: he plays a diner chef. It’s painfully obvious that the tone the makers are going for is campy and silly; however, virtually all they are able to pull off is tedious and incompetent.