Chainsaw Sally

Pretty good flick. Back in 2004 I attended the Shockerfest Convention down in Modesto, CA and watched this on the big screen (and met some of the cast). I had no idea this was scheduled to play, when I saw one of the little flyers, I knew I had to watch it. My sister and I agreed that it was one of the best feature-length films shown.

By day Sally works at a library. She has a younger brother who lives with her. I found this character 'Ruby' extremely likable and funny. At night Sally goes a little psycho violently murdering anyone she believes to be a threat to herself, her brother and her home.

On a personal note, I thought the girl who played the 'Cinthia' was/is hot. Felt a little sad to find out this is her only film to date. Hope to see her in more movies in the future.

Anyway, going back to Chainsaw Sally. The audience seemed to like it as much as my sister and I did. Can't wait for the sequel, hopefully I'll be able to watch it on the big screen as well!

"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.

This flick was only released as a zone 1 DVD which means that Europeans couldn't catch a copy or you need a zone free player. On the other hand it was sold out rather soon and it even became a bit of a cult flick in the US which resulted in some kind of series know as The Chainsaw Sally Show released in 2010.

I just tracked down the original flick because it contained two famous names, Herschell Gordon Lewis and Gunnar Hansen. I think that I don't have to make any introduction to those both names. Herschell the godfather of gore and Gunnar being Leatherface.

For most of the other actors it was their first real attempt, except Silver Scream (2003) which came out straight on video. And you surely doesn't want to watch it for the acting. There are a lot of problems with this flick. The acting is sometimes really wooden. Okay, maybe Jimmyo Burril (the director) didn't knew his stuff back then except for Silver Scream and it shows. The editing was really bad and the sound was sometimes worse. You couldn't understand what they were saying when there was a conversation going on. The comedy added was for me so typical American and for me that's mostly not laughable as it shows again here. The story on the other hand is okay but didn't really work out on the screen. There's red stuff on the screen but most of Sally's torturing is done off-camera. There's a big ode towards The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, just watch the poster and Sally's swirling with the chainsaw just like Leatherface did at the end of TCM. Or when Sally is playing TCM with her brother. Nevertheless it wasn't really my cup of tea. Some parts I did enjoy others I didn't like. It's clear that gorehounds hate this, it had so much to offer but I blame it on the extreme low budget and being the first attempt of Jimmyo to make a full feature.

Still, the series that was made in 2010 had more gore which is normal, it was made 6 years later. Even that became a bit of a cult series and is already OOP.

Gore 2/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0,5/5

Chainsaw Sally is an homage to The Texas chainsaw Massacre (even the original Leatherface, Gunnar Hansen, is here with his chainsaw) and to horror classics in general (some Halloween explicit references for example). Its done in black comedy fashion, with a shy, nerd chick that at nights becomes a chainsaw sadistic killer and his drag-queen brother. This indie low budget flick is far from great, it have a couple of good killing scenes and some moments of good photography but the movie itself is a little slow paced. Overall, its a good effort and its worth a look if you don't have huge speculations. A plus is the stunning Kristen Hudson...a really hot chick. Ultra-tippergore rate this movie: 6/10

Despite an engaging central performance from April Monique Burril as sexy schizophrenic Sally, the goth girl with a penchant for power-tool mayhem, this low budget trash horror didn't quite cut it for me, never attempting the true horror one might expect from a film that frequently references The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, nor delivering the gruesome graphic splatter from one that features a cameo from none other than the 'godfather of gore' himself, Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Director Jimmyo Burril, lucky spouse of leading lady April, clearly has a great love of the genre, and his script throws up plenty of suitably warped and offensive situations, but the full potential of his delightfully deviant material is often left unrealised: Sally's early murders are frustratingly gore-free, her severing of a guy's tally-whacker remains strictly out of frame (although the addition of the sparkler to the wound was a nice touch), the splattery demise of a woman forced to consume acid is regrettably brief, and some nail-gun action towards the end really could have been much nastier.

Whilst the absence of in-your-face, gross-out effects can probably be put down to budgetary restraints, no such excuse can be applied to the low standard of acting from all but its attractive star or the weak stabs at dark humour.

4.5 out of 10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb (although I was tempted to round it down to 4 to counterbalance the suspiciously high proportion of over-enthusiastic reviews here on IMDb).