Ogroff The Mad Mutilator

Once in a while, a movie so terrible, so vile, so bad will come out and shatter everything that I believe in when it comes to cinema. I watch a lot of crap, as you might have noticed, but there are some things that are almost impossible to comprehend. One of these things is Ogroff The Mad Mutilator, one of the earliest slasher films to come out of France. France has become a hot bed of horror material, with films like Haute Tension, Martyrs, L’Interieur, Ils and Frontier(s). But this came many, many years before that, in the mid-80’s to be precise.

A mixture of Friday the 13th part II with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the story involves a psychotic backwoods killer, Ogroff, who has his own shed just like Jason and goes around killing people with an axe. He’s quite the character, both a villain and a hero, as he butchers innocent people and then killing zombies. That’s right, the movie also has zombies. No real reason is given for their existence, they just pop up and start doing their business thing, although it’s Ogroff who kills them and eats them, not the other way around. There is a lot of gore to be had, a ton actually, as our killer is a cannibal and nobody is spared, not men or women or children. There is also a very funny homage to the Burning, when one of the dudes cuts off the fingers of a zombie with shears, similar to the way Cropsy took out the campers in the famous river raft scene. It’s still very hard to comprehend, however. There are five lines of dialogue in this movie, at the most. The rest of the soundtrack is composed of a very droning music score that’s just as bad as the one in Chester Turner’s Black Devil Doll From Hell, and the movie is shot in very grainy 8mm stock, with all it’s dialogue replaced over. There is no continuity at all, not in lighting or in camera angles. It’s one of the shoddiest films ever made in the horror genre, and that’s saying a lot.

Although perhaps I’m being too unfair with the film. After all, I’m a no-budget filmmaker myself, and I know I’ve done stuff as bad as this. This is so bad, however, that it’s almost entertaining. Much like Boardinghouse and A Night To Dismember, these are movies that are so damn bad that they reach an almost hallucinogenic, surreal nature. For no reason, Howard Vernon (The Awful Dr. Orloff, Delicatessen) shows up in the end as a vampire cardinal and kills our lead. What the fuck was I watching?