"100 Tears" is a suitably dingy and sickening slasher flick, which at an estimated budget of about $75k, is at least a wonder of frugality.
Yes, $75,000 can pay for gallons of blood, viscera, and artificial limbs.
What money cannot buy, however, is a decent story, something you either have or you don't. Or characters. Or perhaps, even cohesive direction, which may be an innate gift some have and some don't.
The story - not that anyone cares about story in a movie like this - is about a serial killer clown and two obnoxious reporters, one of whom looks like Alex Jones, who track him down where the police have failed because they know how to use a computer and the police don't.
The introduction of the clown, shockingly violent though it may be, is handled so witlessly by the filmmaker that it is hopelessly undercut. We see one of the reporters looking at a computer screen and talking about a serial killer on the loose, and then the movie cuts straight to a series of brutal killings by our Bozo. The way this is shot makes it look like the reporter is watching the killings unfold on the computer monitor. They aren't. Some fairly cursory editing could have achieved the effect of having us realise we are witnessing the murders the reporter is describing. This would have provided a sense of mounting dread as we are let into information the reporter doesn't know, and we know they probably wouldn't try to chase up the story if they know what we now know. Get it?
Instead of quick cutting from the description of the acts to the violent crimes, as the filmmakers obviously should have done, we get a lengthy scene introducing 'characters' who exist only so that they can be killed, and their introduction grinding the film to a halt - a halt it finally comes to at around one hour into the proceedings, where I was so bored I mostly stopped paying attention.
I have put more effort into writing this review than the screenwriters did in writing the movie. But, yes, they really went to town on the gore. One early scene shows a person's head split multiple times by Bozo's big meat cleaver, until the head looks like a pinecone. If you're after sickening, over-the-top gore produced on a microbudget, I guess you already know where to look. Just don't expect anything else.
I would like to add, however, that the bad-guy, Gurdy the Clown, is actually scary. Much more so than almost any other slasher villain in any movie made for over one hundred times the budget that this one was made for.
