TASTE OF FLESH

Four girl friends drive out to a building one evening where they hope to attend a rave, having found an invite tucked anonymously beneath the windscreen wiper of their car. The building is dark and empty when they arrive, but they hang around and drop some free pills anyway.

One of them even wanders off alone, and becomes the first to fall victim to The Hunter (Ricky Scott Hall) - a brute with a sack over his head a'la BLOOD AND LACE.

The Hunter stabs the girl in the back and carries her over his shoulder to a bare room where The Chef (Nathan Todaro) carves her up, in-between offering shit one-liners.

In the meantime, the other three girls forget about their missing pal and take a nap in their cold, unwelcoming surroundings. Very normal behaviour, I'm sure you'll agree.

But silly behaviour nevertheless, as before long The Hunter has come across them ...

And that's it. The rest of the film is made up of the women waking from their trip in a state of confusion, and the bad guys hunting them down in the empty building.

Some lame sub-HOSTEL torture fills in the gaps, as The Chef hacks the girls to pieces while they're still alive (not as grisly as it perhaps sounds) because that's how The Hunter prefers his meat to be prepared. Can CC (Mary Avelis) and her friends make it through the film alive?

In short, TASTE OF FLESH is rubbish and it doesn't deliver. Its only virtue is the inclusion of some occasional bare tits.

Christopher D Grace's 2008 effort TASTE OF FLESH looks like it was made for $10. Cheap blurry images, soft digital colour bleeding and badly lit interior scenes make this a film that cannot be warmed to visually. Aurally, you're on to a loser too: dialogue is stupendously muffled for the most part. And when you can actually make out what the characters are saying, the script reveals itself to be dumb and terminally dull.

Bad acting, slack editing (despite a promisingly short 76-minute running time) and the annoying occasional attempts at indie filmmaking techniques - handheld cameras zooming in jaggedly on character faces; lengthy still shots of nothing much happening - push this one farther into the realms of the unwatchable.

The film was apparently originally going to be called "Blood Feast". That gives you a fair idea of the level of intelligence we're dealing with here. I mean, didn't these people know that there is already a film of incredible genre significance bearing that title?! Maybe they did, as they then changed the title to the laughable "Kannibale" ... before settling on TASTE OF FLESH. Which is not to be confused with Doris Wishman's A TASTE OF FLESH. Or GATE OF FLESH. Or A FEAST OF FLESH. Or FEAST OF FLESH. Or so on.

Anyway, TASTE OF FLESH is inept. It's unoriginal, badly shot and boring. It's ugly to look at and cursed not only with plodding horror scenarios lacking in suspense, but also with cheap and unconvincing attempts at minor gore. The film it sometimes reminded me of was P2. But, as flawed as P2 is, it is a masterpiece in comparison to this chocolate biscuit.

Grace is at fault, of course. But the cast must take the blame too. Not only because they make Tom Whitus' by-the-numbers script even worse (a feat in itself), but because the credits reveal that almost all of them had a hand in other aspects of the production (design, FX etc). So, damn them all.

TASTE OF FLESH comes to us courtesy of the generous nutcases at Brain Damage in a somewhat blighted non-enhanced 1.85:1 transfer. Often murky looking, colours are worn and detail is soft in this digital video presentation. Some scenes literally look like you're spying on the film through a steamy window. Motion blurring is an issue throughout as well.

English 2.0 audio is mixed too low and has a tinny, claustrophobic disposition. It's almost impossible to hear dialogue without turning the volume up to the point of causing distortion. Pitiful.

It's likely that the audio and video quality of the film is down to the cheap source materials, so I'm reluctant to lay the blame at Brain Damage's door. Especially when the disc is offered brand new for the lowly sum of £2.99. But, it has to be said regardless that the playback quality of the film is dire.

The disc opens with a static main menu page that leads into a scene-selection menu allowing access to TASTE OF FLESH via 4 chapters.

The only extras on Brain Damage's DVD are a trailer for TASTE OF FLESH, plus trailers for the remaining titles in their second run of releases: AWAKEN THE DEAD, HELLHOUSE, CURSE OF THE WOLF, BACHELOR PARTY IN THE BUNGALOW OF THE DAMNED and FIST OF THE VAMPIRE.

A cheap film on a cheap disc. You may well find this in Poundland before too long. Even then, I'd suggest you think hard before being tempted to part with one hundred pennies to buy this.

Review by Stu Willis