Crew
Director/Story – Tony ‘Tex’ Watt, Screenplay – Tony Watt, Additional Material – Elvin Domenic, Mike McMurchy, Lewis Mercer & Vivita, Photography – Slurpy Goodwill, Music – Mike Burry, Lewis Mercer & Tony ‘Tex’ Watt, Visual Effects Supervisor – Elvis Parsley, Special Effects – Pepe Chingadero & Vivita, Art Direction – Clarence Trigonometry. Production Company – Tony Watt Inc.
Cast
Tony Watt (Butch Thunderfuck/Cletus Flytrap/Dracula), Vivita (Pheromone ‘Acid Head’ Labonza), Lewis Mercer (Himself), Lana Tailor (Lana Mercer), James Taggart (Joey ‘Nipples’ Cucamonga), Elvin Domenic (Elvintino Mullato), Deanna Prall (Lexus), Paul Nicholls (Chief Leghorn), Jane Longeye (Dixie Stoolsoftner), Mandy Maim (Louisiana ‘Lulu’ Lu), Rooster (Charlie Thunderfuck), Justin DuSelle (Sheriff Jethro Elrod Goober/Rasul), Mike McMurchy (Agent Orange/Bo the White Rastafarian/Bank Robber), Victoria Iris Stack (Charlie’s Daughter), Krista Noguchi (Krista), Jeffrey Nham (Agent Yellow), Chris Kerley (Arschlock), Eric Scealf (Zebulon Shinwell Hopnoodle), Danielle Leslie Dickson (Strawberry Grenade), Daniel Cargnello (Binocular Beach Bum)
Plot
Lewis Mercer flees after a bank robbery in Brampton, Ontario goes wrong and his partner is shot. Wanted by police, he heads to Buzzard Nuts County, New York. There Lewis’s sister Lana works for the Sorority Sluts Escort Service. Her would-be boyfriend, the layabout Butch Thunderfuck, presses his friend and former roommate Joey to let him stay at his apartment. During a disagreement, they beat up the landlord and think they have killed him. Buzzard Nuts County is terrorised by a killer known as Acid Head. This is Pheromone Labonza who was horribly mutilated after having acid accidentally thrown in her face during a fight between her parents. She has been given powers by Dracula, the demonic figure who lives in the graveyard at the back of the sorority house, and uses these to kill. All of these people converge on the sorority house as Acid Head goes berserk.
Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter was the third full-length film from Toronto, Canada based filmmaker Tony Watt. Watt has previously made Frankempimp (2009) and Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus! (2010). These are agonisingly bad films – and it would appear are made that way. Indeed, Tony Watt seems quite delighted by the fact that his previous films have each been ranked at the top of their respective years’ Worst List by this site and the fact that I will happily nominate Frankenpimp as maybe the worst film ever made.
Disappointingly, at least as far as expectation of his films goes, Tony Watt seems to be improving in his skills as a filmmaker when it comes to Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter. I must be careful to state that this is relatively speaking. That said, the degree of polish that has gone into the film between Frankenpimp and Acid Head has begun to markedly improve. On the other hand, this is still a Tony Watt film we are talking about where he seems to go out of its way to confound and drive crazy anyone who comes to it expecting good acting or anything more than a series of aimlessly rambling scenes and random exploitation homages that only ever occasionally connect up into a plot.
As Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter starts, there are all the usual characteristics of the Tony Watt film – characters in incredibly obvious wigs and fake teeth; cartoonish sound effects and in particular fart noises added everywhere as though someone had raided a library of open source sound effects; random switches between 4:3 and 16:9 frame format, sometimes even between shots; random colour saturations; racially dubious scenes with people in blackface caricature; and a hodgepodge of exploitation movie elements.
But horror of horrors, there are even things that suggest that Tony Watt might be getting better – while scenes still go on and on forever without any seeming point (in particular the ones with Watt’s Butch and his ultra-nerdy friend James Taggart messing around in the apartment), other scenes show the glimmerings of dramatic staging.
There are the odd times where Watt in his role as Butch seems to be giving a halfway decent performance, as also does Lana Tailor who is likeable as his girlfriend and Justin DuSelle in his role as a landlord despite an incredibly fake British accent. (It is hard to say anything about frequent Watt collaborator/wife Vivita’s performance as most of it seems to consist of a series of wild stares). Unlike Tony Watt’s other two films, I cannot in all honestly give Acid Head the Worst of 2011 award – that is a distinction reserved for a far more deserving film like Uwe Boll’s Blubberella (2011).
The main problem with Acid Head is that Tony Watt develops several plot strands over the 145 minute running time and then does almost nothing to bring them together. Things happen and are then just forgotten about – a hunchback figure who turns up inside the sorority house; a character called Dracula (who seems more like voodoo’s Baron Samedi than anything out of Bram Stoker) who mysteriously appears in the graveyard behind the sorority house to give Vivita supernatural powers and is then of no further relevance to the film. Typical of a Tony Watt film and its mass of cul-de-sac plot strands, much of the early part of the film follows escaped bank robber Lewis Mercer but after Mercer holes up in a hotel with a girl, his involvement seems to peter out and be forgotten.
Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter also appears to be the film where Tony Watt has gained enough money from his previous films (which gave the impression they were made on budgets of about $150) to obtain a better calibre of actor. This promptly provides the opportunity for him to go with the old exploitation standard of paying various women to take off their clothes. Thus we get lots of extended scenes that go on for several minutes at a time with Lewis Mercer watching a stripper perform; Playboy model Lana Tailor taking a shower; Lewis Mercer in bed in a motel with a girl (adult model/actress Deanna Prall) that he picks up while hitchhiking; scenes of a guy with binoculars watching two girls in bikinis playing volleyball at the beach.
The funniest of these is when Watt holds a ’10 Minute Beach Sluts Intermission’ – true to his word, we get ten minutes where we get nothing else except the two bikini-clad girls on the beach playing volleyball, sunbathing and hanging out with guys. There is even a time counter along the bottom of the screen to count off the minutes and seconds.
Tony Watt next went onto make Nosferatu vs Father Pipecock & Sister Funk (2014).
(Winner in this site’s Worst Films of 2011 list).
Trailer here