Ogroff

For a sick and twisted cult fanatic like myself, who has seen practically everything already, the movie possibly couldn't start any better. Within the first three minutes, there's a psychopath with an S&M mask butchering a 5-year-old by planting an ax in her little chest and then literally putting his pompous foot on her body to pull it back out. That is sick! That is loathsome! That is … awesome! Of course, right after (and even during already, to be honest) the initial euphoria, it becomes painfully apparent that "Mad Mutilator" is a Z-grade amateur movie without a script, without equipment, without involvement of anyone who ever worked in the film industry, without suspense building, without continuity or without sense of subtleness. We can easily explain this, by the way. N.G. Mount, the writer / director / producer / lead actor and editor of "Mad Mutilator" is actually just an ordinary Parisian video store clerk who enjoys making movies in his spare time and this is his masterpiece.

The titular freak, apparently called Ogroff, is a deeply deranged cannibalistic maniac who lives in the woods and slaughters happy families when they stop near his hideout place to have some rest or a picnic. He's a real bad-ass because he disembowels the body of the child in front of her chained but conscious mother. He also pops out people's car trunks and we learn that he masturbates with his ax. Yes, that looks as bizarre as it sounds. Obviously, "Mad Mutilator" is a terrible piece of trash in every meaning of the term. The introduction of new characters takes approximately seven minutes. That's SEVEN minutes of staring at people playing chess in the woods and listening to atrocious electro music. The special effects and stunts, however, are beyond stupendous. When Ogroff pushes one of the victims' cars off a cliff, it's clearly just a matchbox car thrown in a sink. Another nifty trick Mr. N.G. Mount repeatedly takes advantage of is playing the soundtrack of another film (my guess a Hong-Kong martial arts flick) over the action sequences. The sub plots, allegedly added to increase the tension, are magnificent and 100% plausible. There's a girl investigating the strange disappearances in the area and she goes off wandering in the woods all by herself. What a genius! She also must be some sort of bionic woman because she pulls a guy's head right off! Unfortunately, for her, he wasn't the mad mutilator. The battle between Ogroff with his ax and a random woodchopper with his chainsaw is quite cool and incredibly messy, but unnecessarily stretched. The last bit of logic completely vanishes when suddenly an army of zombies crawl out of Ogroff's basement (well … hole in the ground) and the whole thing turns into a lame "Night of the Living Dead" imitation.

"Mad Mutilator" is amateur film-making at its most primitive and shameless. This kind of movie plays in the same league as Andreas Schnaas' "Violent S**t" and Don Swan's "Goremet: Zombie Chef from Hell". In other words, the kind of movie that automatically makes you think stuff like: "How come my mates and I haven't made any movies yet? If this guy can do, certainly ours would be better". You're probably right, too, but suppose it fails as well … Do you really want to see your name irredeemably linked to something like this? "Mad Mutilator" is unendurable for sane persons, but if you already spent a lifetime watching obscure and controversial horror movies, this is a true gem! Besides, it's somewhat admirable that N.G. Mount managed to convince no less than Howard Vernon (regular French horror actor) to make a very brief appearance.

Ogroff (AKA: Mad Mutilator) - 1983 (This Film Rates a B- ) A low budget French schlocky slasher subtitled in English. A masked man (Ogroff), kills folks who trespass in his wooded area. He even kills children. There isn't much of a story line beyond that. It's all very random and kind of crazy. There is no character development and things get kind of lost. The dead start to rise as the masked killer stalks his one true love as she tries to flee. Let's not forget the vampire priest. Ogroff eventually succumbs to the dead and a crazy WTF ending ensues. It's all weird and over the top (like the self-eroticism with an axe at the 26 min mark) and nothing seems to make sense. The sound quality is some of the worst I have heard with below average acting and very little to no dialogue. The overall visual quality looks like it came straight off of VHS (recorded on Super 8). The gore is plentiful even if fake and topped with extremely poor looking effects. They are often times laughable. I don't think anything in this film was ever meant to be serious (16 min mark, 26 min mark). The murders are brutal and grotesque, but the killer never gets any blood on him. The soundtrack hits all the right electronic sounds (22 min mark, 35min 30 second mark, 59 min mark 1 hour 8 min mark). No T&A. None of the film's components work individually, but together, all seem to propel the film into a higher end of cheap schlock success. Its all-great fun if you know what you are getting into. The lesson is, never pull over in the back woods.

Mad Mutilator (1983)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Bizzrre French film that tries to cash in and pay homage to the American slasher. A masked lumberjack stalks anyone who enters his woods. Throughout the film we get a variety of people who come in contact with the killer and they don't live to regret it.

This French film from writer-director N.G. Mount never really makes too much sense and I'd argue the plot is extremely thin to say the least. I'm not sure what the budget was for this film but it was obviously extremely low and while the film isn't a good one, it's at least somewhat interesting because you have to give the young filmmaker credit for attempting to do something like this and it does deliver what most people are going to be wanting from it.

What would that be? The gore and violence level is quite high because the lack of plot means that people just randomly show up in front of the killer. More times than not he just chops them up without any questions asked and this includes children. The special effects certainly aren't the work of Tom Savini and more times than not we just see the aftermath but this is just a part of low-budget filmmaking and especially during the era of the slasher.

Believe it or not, Jess Franco regular Howard Vernon shows up at the end and that alone makes this worth sitting through at least once. The film's biggest problem is that the pacing is rather bad and it's quite long considering there's no real plot. The film has a hard time keeping the viewer's attention and the lack of sound (it's dubbed) is another issue.

Still, if you enjoy the weird and bizarre then MAD MUTILATOR is worth watching once.

Let's suppose that you have at least half a dozen friends who are just as crazy about splatter films as you are and who also want to make a movie of their own. Let's say that, between the lot of you, you have an almost non-existent budget and zero professional equipment. Let's also say that none of you have any prior film-making or acting experience, and have very little idea for a story. I still think that you would be hard pushed to make a film quite as awful as Ogroff The Mad Mutilator.

A completely inept French splatter crap-fest, Ogroff opens with the titular killer—a masked maniac brandishing an axe—slaughtering a family, including a little child who is chopped in the chest, and later has her head sawn off. Mean spirited, perhaps, but also completely inept, with horribly shoddy effects the likes of which make the work of fellow home-made horror hacks Nathan Schiff, Andreas Schnaas and Todd Sheets look masterful in comparison.

The film then proceeds to follow Ogroff as he attacks anyone he should meet in the woods, including a trio who are relaxing playing chess while listening to bad electronica, a man cutting trees with a chainsaw (which leads to an incredibly unconvincing 'axe vs power-tool' duel), and a pretty young woman who actually turns out to be Ogroff's lover.

The film then takes a completely unexpected turn when Ogroff's woman accidentally releases a horde of zombies from the killer's cellar, and an elderly vampire (played by Euro horror star Howard Vernon, who must have been a friend of the family) kidnaps the girl, with the axe-waving Ogroff in hot pursuit on a motorcycle. That's right… this is a splatter slasher with zombies AND a vampire!

With all of that, one might expect Ogroff to be an entertaining mess despite the amateurish nature of proceedings, but the terrible direction, random editing, god-awful performances, and lousy audio (any sound was clearly added after filming, since very little of it matches the action), the whole thing manages to be a total bore. I rarely say that 'I could do better' since I was involved in the making of some pretty shoddy super-8 horror shorts myself in the '80s, but, in this case, I could definitely do better.

Only for the most well-versed of cinemasochists, MAD MUTILATOR (a.k.a. OGROFF) is one of the unique Z-grade chillers of the 1980s that is inept enough to transcend the barriers of this world and exist in a reality completely its own.

Almost completely silent, MAD MUTILATOR doesn't have a plot, per se. There's a forest. There's a killer in the forest. Random people without names happen to find themselves in the forest and then get killed. But plot isn't the point here. The point is the almost-psychedelic atmosphere of a film possessing no talent, an atmosphere that seems not to be part of the world as we know it.

No, MAD MUTILATOR isn't set on Earth, it's set in an alternate universe only tangentially like Earth. A universe where people do not act like normal human beings. One where instead of helping screaming women, civilians in cars get out, curse at them in French and keep driving. Minimal synthesizer music showers the fields like rain, and potential victims of Ogroff are just as likely to consensually sleep with him as be killed by him. It is an existence outside our own, one where sense is not taken into account.

It is delightfully bizarre, but is often a bit of a drag. For every axe/chainsaw fencing match, there is a 5-minute scene of an old scrap car being destroyed. The film decides at the one-hour mark that it is now a zombie flick, and everything after that is wasted celluloid (except for the truly out-of-the-blue ending). Probably worth a watch if you're into movies like BOARDINGHOUSE or THINGS, but it won't mess with your sanity nearly as much as those two films will.