Gutterballs Review

Movie: Gutterballs
By: Maniac E
Date: June 5, 2013

Do You Have The Balls?

Ryan Nicholson, the man responsible for the excellent rape/revenge short Torched, returns to that same genre for Gutterballs, but now a full length feature that gets its inspiration from the 80s slasher movies. This movie is one of the many to try and catch the Grindhouse train, but did it succeed?

The plot is simple and deals with a bunch of annoying members of rival bowling teams, including a Tranny, who get into a confrontation one evening. This leads to some punches being thrown, and in an attempt to save her friend from having his ass kicked, the resident none wearing panty girl drops a bowling ball on her rival's foot. He is not pleased with this, but it does break up the fight. As the girl leaves with her friends, she realizes she forgot her purse. She goes back into the now isolated alley to retrieve it, only to meet up and get BRUTALLY raped by her rival and his buddies as revenge for crushing his foot. The next night, the teams return to have a bowling competition when a mysterious killer begins killing them in sadistic and gory ways.

First I want to get the negative stuff out of the way: ACTING... again it is not bad if it isn't top notch but this really dropped the ball. The acting is horrendous and is barely watchable. The pacing of the film is rather poor, with the first half lacking gore (most of the juicy stuff is saved for the last half hour), and many scenes are way too talky. Also, much of the humor is rather juvenile, with a goofy, talking, ball-waxing machine being particularly grating (at least until it removes one character's face!).

Now you got a pretty gory slasher movie with loads of sex and cheap jokes thrown in. The movie is nicely shrouded in 80ies music which fits the setting and gives the movie an interesting and kind of different vibe. All in all "Gutterball" has everything the horror community wants but the movie was too torn up for me... the real stupid twist in the end just didn't fit the vibe of the movie and reminded me a lot of "Scream". The acting was medium and many scenes were overacted to a ridiculous degree. The raped lead actress is totally unbelievable and beside the ridiculous overuse of the word "FUCK" or "Faggot" I was also appalled by the actors wandering through the alley alone and talking to themselves... "Oh, the door is locked... this is really strange!". I liked the humor and the killer wearing a bowling bag for a mask... especially the Waxatronic with its Robo-Voice was hilarious. But the mixture just doesn't seem right after the movie ended.

This is one of those movies that does a lot right but also a lot wrong. The gore effects are excellent and really shows the creative side of the people that worked on the movie. But there's a thing commonly referred to as overkill, and this film suffers from it. It is a shame they couldn't get things more straightened out and made this movie maybe a real classical piece. For now it is nothing more than a drag with nice effects.