It must have seemed like a good idea: create a parody of all those popular slasher films with their oversexed, clueless teenagers, their pitiless, monstrous maniacs and their buckets of phony blood spurting from mouths, arm sockets and eviscerated bellies. Expose every cliché, pillory every improbability and pour scorn on the bloodlust that brings audiences back for sequel after gory sequel. Most of all, have fun. Good, grotesque, horrific fun.
It didn't work out quite that way.
Splatter Theater, currently playing at Ybor City's Silver Meteor Gallery, is a three-or-four-joke comedy that goes on for a full 60 minutes, long after its sparse bag of tricks has been emptied. Yes, it provides a few laughs, and yes, the spectacle of stage blood whooshing copiously out of endless wounds is weirdly comic, but good satire needs to be constantly inventive, and Splatter runs out of ideas all too soon.
Think deliberately bad acting is funny? You'll get an hour's worth here. Think a horny gay cop is the utmost in risqué humor? He'll leer and lurch around the stage till you're no longer laughing. I admire the energy of the dozen or so performers in this deliberately sloppy spectacle, but Splatter Theater has the feel of a college production stocked with your best friends — who cares if it's crude, these are your buds and you love them. Now carry in that keg and let's have some killer brew!
There's a smidgen of a story. Carl is a new student at Pinegrove High, and he's holding a party for the sake of his new schoolmates. There's the Jock and his girlfriend the Slut, there's the Class Dick and the oddly normal "Gary Jenkins," and there's Ellen, the love interest, who's virginal and sincere and just the thing for a self-conscious nerd in a new town.
There are other guests, too: Carl's intense father and his girlfriend Ingebor, Officer Hayworth, the pruriently interested policeman, a Prophesying Bum who preaches fire and brimstone, and, finally, a Killer with mask and weapons. As the evening proceeds, each of the guests gets killed off by a machete or a sawblade or a rope or a bludgeon. And as this one is beaten to death or that one is skewered, lots of bloody soup splashes, spurts, flows and spews from their insulted carcasses.
Soon the walls and the furniture are stained a bright red. And the question arises: can Carl and Ellen survive? Can their innocent love hold out against this sanguinary campaign?
The truth is, it hardly matters. By the last of the killings, we're inured to the fact that the creators of Splatter Theater gave all their attention to the slaughter and forgot to include any real drama in the before and after. (Originally produced by The Annoyance Theater in Chicago, IL, the play was collaboratively created by director Mick Napier, composer Faith Soloway and a 20-member cast.*)
Besides the cases of Carl and Ellen, there isn't much in the way of characterization either. The Jock acts dumb, the Slut acts sluttish, the Class Dick pulls a few unconvincing pranks on poor Carl… It seems never to have occurred to the writers that even parody unfolds in time, and we need new information every few moments or the play will lose our interest.
As for the acting, only in a few cases does it rise above an amateur level and seem consciously "bad." Deftly managing this feat are Jesse Hutson, whose Carl is pathetically earnest, Ashley Chapman, whose Ellen is winningly demure, Brooke (Lost Boys) McCarter, who as Carl's father seems a casualty of a '50s beach movie, and Nathan Juliano, who as the unheeded Prophet seems (loudly) to believe his own warnings. The uncredited set is slovenly even before the bloodletting begins, and the costumes are crude. Caveat emptor.
I've seen a lot of satires during my years as a critic, and the best of them always point you intelligently to the weaknesses and absurdities in the genre they travesty. After seeing Splatter Theater, I'm only aware that I'd have preferred the real thing — a Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street, something thought through and well-constructed, whatever its limitations. Like a good roller coaster, the best of these films mix moments of tranquility with sudden frights, the feeling of safety and the certainty of danger. They can be a lot of fun — which is more than I can say for this energetic, bloody mess.
*An earlier version of this review did not credit Annoyance Theater and the collaborative team behind the original Splatter Theater.
This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2011.