THE GOATMAN MURDERS aka Deadly Detour *** USA 2011 68 mins
A daytime-set, no-budget slasher movie in which a goat / human hybrid – disfigured by scientific experiments and resembling Sloth from THE GOONIES – butchers two cars worth of mouth-breathers who fail to note the bad vibes coming from the kind of area where a shit-eating weirdo lurks in the public toilets.
With its CAMP BLOOD-style production values and deliberately gross sex scene involving an odious, insulting fat guy (pre-ejaculation line : “This time’s for real, unlike your tits!”), this movie has the kind of endearingly ramshackle and amateurish feel of much earlier slashers like DON’T GO IN THE WOODS ALONE. Parts of it are out of focus, there’s a wholly gratuitous close up of a Ron Weaselly lookalike’s tiny dick / ginger pubes and a guy gets his face shredded in a car engine while the car is switched off…but all of these facts make you love it more. Clocking in at just over an hour, it doesn’t outstay its welcome and climaxes with a full-blown Troma-esque bout of bad-taste splatter, as kids (including unborn ones) are cheerfully massacred when the Goatman boards a bus full of blind folks.
Review by Steven West