ROTGUT ** U.S.A. 2012 Dir: Billy Garberina 101 mins
A batch of contaminated Mezcal finds its way into a run down bar and turns the bars regular customers Sunday morning drinking session into a frenzy of exploding eyeballs, popping skulls and projectile vomiting as the bottles inhabitants “worm” their way into the humans that are consuming them. Billy Garberina has acted and directed in a couple of Horror/Comedies before this (Necroville (2007) & I Heart U (2014) to be precise) and had small acting roles in Night Of Something Strange and the infamous Troma movie Teenape Vs The Monster Nazi Apocalypse so you are probably thinking this is going to be a lot of fun, right?!
It starts off quite promisingly with 2 hobos discovering a bottle of the condemned grog in a dumpster and one of them meeting a bloody, grisly end but (I’m now thinking the word frenzy in my opening sentence may have been a tad over enthusiastic) then it goes off on a boring tangent introducing all the other characters individually. The acting isn’t exactly top notch and features a fair few actors that are lacklustre and/or far too self conscious to be likeable. Garberina himself isn’t very convincing as girlfriend beating thug Lucas and one particularly obnoxious character, Verna (Merritt Glover) who insists on announcing that she “doesn’t like the dick” at every available opportunity. This is a low budget movie that is trying hard to be like Slither or Feast but is lacking the fast pace, humour and colourful characters these movies possess. The gore and effects when they happen are practical, bloody and entertaining but unfortunately I feel there could’ve been so much more if they hadn’t wasted so much time trying to build the characters. Very few laughs, a lot of awkwardness and dodgy accents lets this down, once things get going it could be considered amusing in parts but there are far superior movies to this out there to warrant giving this one another watch.
Review by Sarah Budd