Slaughter Day is quite the anomaly- a backyard SOV gore-fest rip-off of The Evil Dead made in Hawaii! Even better the main characters are a couple of long-haired, working-class White dudes who wear AC/DC shirts and light their cigarettes with other cigarettes! This is set somewhere in rural Hawaii and other than a few minor roles for native Hawaiians and a scene of a beautiful waterfall in a lush tropical rainforest this doesn't come off as very "Hawaiian". Most of the movie looks like it could have been set in any number of rural areas in the continental US. It starts out fast with the boys going to a job at a remote plantation only to be immediately attacked by a possessed person. Blood spurts and flows freely in this film with a generous helping of cheap but effective low budget gore effects including full body dismemberments and things shoved inside of bodies. Think more early Schnaas than Ittenbach.
The movie never lets up for long and there's a number of not very well choreographed fight scenes. There's quite the ambitious one towards the beginning which is a fight in the back of a moving pickup truck. Not something I was expecting to see in a amateur SOV film. The plot is a mostly typical Evil Dead rip-off with people getting possessed, trying to kill our protagonists and then getting hacked to pieces with even the parts being dangerous. The Necronomicon here is actually an artbook- H. R. Geiger's Necronomicon. If you watch the movie with subtitles you'll discover that it's hilariously called the "Microeconomic"!? Get someone with an at least scant knowledge of horror to subtitle your films please Visual Vengeance. The possession happens when a person puts on a demonic gasmask which is goofy but kind of cool I guess. It can also make a person invisible which happens once in the movie. For some reason they left in footage of the cameraman yelling at the person to move out of the shot after he's supposed to have turned invisible. An odd inclusion but it adds to the low budget charm. The acting is what you would expect and there's little character development. At the end the brothers take a yacht trip to dispose of the body parts. This trip probably costs more than most SOV films did. While we only get to see a small rural area of Hawaii here this is still more expansive than many films like it. Slaughter Day is a lost SOV almost gem with a thankfully brief 58 minutes runtime. The mostly frantic pace and threadbare plot don't really require anything longer. Visual Vengeance has only been around a few months but has already released a number of gems (well not the Chupacabra films, those are truly dreadful). This should be a Vinegar Syndrome "partner label" (sounds literally gay and lame, cohort or collaborator sounds superior) as it's better than just about any of their others outside of Satan's Core.
