Monster Fest Film Review - Ribspreader
Image courtesy of Monster Fest.
When a movie tries to be bad on purpose, it toes a very fine line between tongue-in-cheek and just genuine schlock. It has to commit fully to the joke or else any apparent flaws become broadcast to the audience as innocent ineptitudes rather than purposeful goofs. Unfortunately Ripspreader, the new film from “Trasharama” spokesman Dick Dale, finds itself barely balancing along that line, ending up as a very disjointed low budget B-movie tribute that finds some excellent ideas but executes them with differing levels of inaccuracy.
The story focuses on the destitute Bryan Burns, who in his younger years was the model for a cigarette company. After his mother dies from lung cancer, he develops a visceral hatred for cigarettes and smokers, and begins to stalk and murder anyone with a smoke in their hands. What follows is a gory and wacky homage to the grindhouse horror films of the 70’s. For a movie that only meets a short ninety minute runtime, it’s jam packed with way too many characters, some unique and inventive, but most ugly and offensive. Yet each of these characters have their own intertwining storylines, so it can often get hard to pinpoint what’s happening, and I think the movie itself loses track too. The most fun storyline is how there’s a secret John Wick underground network of serial killers, which remains underdeveloped and could honestly have been a whole movie of its own. The worldbuilding of there being multiple horror villains all competing against each other made for one memorable scene where the Ribspreader fights with another killer over claim to a victim they’ve both broken into the house of.
Ribspreader hits this weird middle ground where it either tries way too hard to be wacky, or it doesn’t try hard enough. I can say it does get slowly better as it goes on, but could still benefit from tighter pacing in general, which is painful for an (allegedly) ninety minute movie. At certain points the film didn’t even feel finished, there were several errors with the audio mix: dialogue clipping, sound effects cutting abruptly, or music getting randomly louder halfway through a scene, plus the usual list of stock sound effects and public domain music.
But the true purpose of this kind of movie is to shock, and shock it does. Copious amounts of blood and other bodily fluids, body parts flying everywhere, exceedingly stereotypical characters, and any number of offensive attempts at comedy (the movie literally opens with a woman performing a coat-hanger abortion on herself in a dirty alleyway and flinging the fetus to the ground). There was some impressive gore, but unfortunately the low budget betrays the splattery ambitions. It’s funny that a movie called “Ribspreader” only includes one shot of ribs being spread, and for that shot to amount to a really poor visual effect. There are countless scenes of characters having their lungs cut out, but you only see the aftermath, or the Evil Dead style blood geyser on the wall. When they actually used fake blood it looked great, but a lot of the time they had to resort to YouTube-style blood splatter effects. The bad green screen for the most part fit the style, the obviously fake gore was fine too, the bad acting is par for the course, but some of the janky cuts or sound effects were just bad. Though the Raimi-esque effect of his sawblade gun is actually very impressive, and alongside the use of miniatures in the finale, adds to the attempts at camp.
Some of the actors put in a lot of effort but the majority of the cast looked like they’d never been in front of a camera before. There’s a number of cameos from Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman to Human Centipede star Laurence R Harvey, but the true star of the film is the Ribspreader himself, thanks to the unhinged yet sympathetic lead performance from Tommy Darwin, along with the distinctive costume design, over-the-top backstory and nonsensical motivation. He really stands out in an otherwise average cast of caricatures. The most consistent part of the movie is how he improves his get-up as it goes on: starts off very makeshift but by the end he’s got the full flesh-mask and slasher gadgets. Such a unique horror protagonist that deserves to be seen again in an all-around better production.
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Ribspreader screened as part of the 2022 Melbourne Monster Fest. For tickets to future sessions and more info, click here.