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Overall Rating : 6/10
Directed By : Jill Zurborg
Jim Boggess
Rhona Brody
Ryan Martin Dwyer
Kimberly Ann Kurtenbach
Supplied By : Camp Motion Pictures
Film Reviewed By : Rick L. Blalock
Date Reviewed : August. 21, 2007
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| PLOT Phyllis Loden is a shy, overweight teenager relentlessly picked on by the popular girls of her high school. To make matters worse, Phyllis has been entered into the local beauty queen pageant for the sole purpose of humiliating her in front of the entire school. The prank works to perfection, with the poor girl devastated by the cruel treatment of her classmates. But it becomes the final straw that pushes Phyllis over the edge and into a dark, bloody, vengeful place in her abused and shattered psyche. Armed with implements of slaughter, Phyllis hunts down the unsuspecting competitors one by one to make each of them pay in the most horrifying way. She'll have their pretty little heads…and wear the beauty queen crown. |
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| THE REVIEW It's CARRIE meets PROM NIGHT and CRIMINALLY INSANE, in Jill Zurborg's 1991 comedy/Horror film, BEAUTY QUEEN BUTCHER. No one likes Phyllis Loden an overweight teen, whom spends her time alone, minus her only friend, the nerd of the school, Cameron, and her cat Eartha. Everyday Phyllis is tormented at school by the more fortunate and prettier girls - her biggest tormented is Muffy, the girl that seems to have everything poor Phyllis doesn't. As a joke Muffy and her pals; Shelley, Allison and Elizabeth, decide to sign Phyllis up for the local beauty pageant, a pageant in which they all would be participating in. The woman in charge of the pageant, Betty Punish, it total disgust of Phyllis vows to make this pageant experience terrible for the troubled teen. Phyllis becomes the laughing stock of the on-looking crowd failing to win anything - but the girls just couldn't stop there. The group of snobby girls, on night decide to break into Phyllis' home to kill Eartha, Loden's cat - (because the cat triggered one girl's allergic reaction just prior to the pageant). The death of her cat sends the once shy teen over the edge and into a fit of rage, and she begins killing the beauty queens off one by one - with each death, a pageant runner-up moves up to queen, and Phyllis doesn't stop until she's number one! When a company like Camp Motion Pictures makes a promise to release lesser known gems of the 80's,(and in this case, early 90's) BEAUTY QUEEN BUTCHER would be such a film I would hope to get from such a promise. Sure this film isn't exactly the best of it's kind, but it is of familiar kind, as it borrows from many films that were already successful before it, giving the viewer that warm feeling of familiarity. BEAUTY QUEEN BUTCHER is another entry into Camp Motion Pictures' ever-growing "Retro 80's Collection", and is essentially a teen comedy, tightly packaged as a Horror movie. The back of the box calls it "CARRIE meets PROM NIGHT", on the surface the ideas are the same, but I also saw resemblance of CRIMINALLY INSANE. In that film, an overweight mental patient named Ethel escapes and kills(and eats a lot too), for some reason, I see a lot of Ethel in the character of Phyllis. The film is very low budget as it's appearance would tell you, with many sets being reused to keep it at a minimum. The cast was also short-handed as there were not that many extras, and the film's main focus is kept on a select few - even having the pageant head Betty Punish being played by a man....not sure what the story on that is, but nonetheless, the filmmakers got it all to come together in the end, making the best film they could I suppose Although I did have fun with this story, I did find that the film ran a little too long, and was a bit too drawn out. This isn't a real gory film, therefore, there is action but just not enough to fill the film's run time. In other words, in BEAUTY QUEEN BUTCHER, there's a lot less action, but a whole lot of filler.... I felt that some scenes ran a little too long, causing the film to drag in certain areas. Truthfully speaking BEAUTY QUEEN BUTCHER, technically is simple and thin as far as execution goes, and sure it's bad in terms of acting( a majority of it is way too over the top), and whatnot, but it has enough tongue-in-cheek comedy bits to keep you watching and surprisingly enough entertained. Seeing this film was like seeing something stuck in a time capsule, as it has stayed in the decade in which it hasn't aged much. But sometimes, it's kind of fun to see those things you had forgotten about.... like those huge cans of Aqua Net Hairspray - BEAUTY QUEEN BUTCHER is a great snap-shot of early 90's nostalgia. | ||||
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| GORE
METER 2.5/10 Not that gory, as I said earlier, the film relies more on comedy - there is a strangulation and stabbing via a crown that is most memorable to me. |
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| MUSICAL
SCORE 3.5/10 Typical 80's/early 90's stuff - cheesy pop music. |
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| OVERALL
IMPRESSION OF THE FILM Although BEAUTY QUEEN BUTCHER isn't the best ever, it is still surprisingly fun, I enjoyed the film's quirkiness. With this release, this is the first time BEAUTY QUEEN BUTCHER has EVER been released in any format whatsoever(not even VHS), so Camp Motion Pictures, actually did "unearth" this one literally, and it proves to be yet another quality release for them. This DVD will be released on September 11, 2007 |
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