"Chainsaw Sally" is one of those movies that has a premise to die for. All I needed to know about this was that it was about a librarian by day and a chainsaw-wielding murderess by night. I can more than identify with that basic plot, so when "Chainsaw Sally" finally got its DVD release, I jumped on it immediately. Unfortunately, "Chainsaw Sally" comes across as a bad inside joke.
The film follows Sally (April Monique Burril), a small-town librarian who likes to keep things in order. Everyone in town considers her the local frigid spinster. However, Sally and her irritating drag queen little brother form quite a macabre little pair who use their spare time at home to reenact chase scenes from horror movies. And when someone rubs Sally the wrong way, she trades in her stereotypical librarian garb for a mall-punk outfit (which has her looking like a sad Switchblade Symphony reject) and goes ballistic with her chainsaw. A stranger who inherits a house in town starts snooping around for information on the house's history, and turns to Sally for her librarian skills and perhaps a bit of wooing. Will he get too close and uncover her secret? Who cares? There's so much wrong with "Chainsaw Sally" that I don't know where to begin. Sally's victims never recognize her as the dorky local librarian, even though the only thing that's different about her is a costume downgrade. One of the local snots who makes fun of her is later wooed by her at a "goth" club, and they engage in a quick sapphic smooch--yet she never notices it's the same chick. What's more is no one seems to be concerned that so many people in such a small town are constantly disappearing or being murdered. The amateur actors, especially the lead, all come across as unenthusiastic. Burril seems to attempt channeling Pamela Sprinsteen's "Angela" from the "Sleepaway Camp" sequels, with her absurd moralizing before each kill. "DO YOU KNOW THAT LIBRARY BOOK WAS THREE WEEKS LATE?!" While this dialogue can be amusing at times, Burril is clueless as how do give a proper comedic delivery. She just sounds bored. The supporting cast doesn't fare much better and mostly sleepwalk through their roles. The genre vets are in this only to give the movie some cred: the original Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) pops up for a few seconds in a flashback, and gore-god HG Lewis has a throwaway role as the hardware store employee where Sally buys her weapons.
What's just as distracting as the bad writing and acting is the awful editing. This completely unscary horror movie is filmed and edited like a daytime soap opera. Often a scene will end with characters talking and another scene will pickup with a different set of characters talking about something unrelated. Repeat. I will say that there are some interesting and inventive murder ideas here, but the execution of these scenes is very poor, usually not showing enough to satisfy even the slightest of gorehounds. Often the scene will cut to Sally's dopey mug instead of showing what she's doing to her victim, which just makes it all the more irritating.
The most frustrating thing about the film for me (nerd alert! nerd alert!) is that the filmmakers obviously know nothing about libraries. The small town public library in "Chainsaw Sally" consists of a small room with a bunch of books strewn loosely about on shelving units against the walls. They don't even have call numbers on them! Sure, this is probably due to budget constraints, but they could have at least tried! To quote Parker Posey's character in "Party Girl," "We'll just put the books any damn place we please! We don't care!" That classic outburst pretty much sums up "Chainsaw Sally"--a poorly thrown together movie that leaves the viewer with a big mess and a headache.
I was really looking forward to this one, and I'm sorry to say I do not recommend it.
