If you’ve spent your life up to this point begging the universe to combine your loves of misogyny, extreme violence and hot oil wrestling into one piece of entertainment, then I have some very good news for you. However, if you’re anyone else it’s possible that Las Vegas Bloodbath might be missing some of the elements that you typically associate with “quality” or “competence”. Revenge fantasies don’t get much messier and more unpleasant than this, but those with a love for Z-grade movies will find enough scenes of jaw-dropping awfulness and bad-taste to make a watch worth your time.
Ari Levin stars as Sam Butler, a young businessman who has just closed a big sale in Sacramento and decides to surprise his wife in Las Vegas with a new sports car before taking her on a vacation. These plans are interrupted when he finds his wife – sporting some of the worst hair i’ve ever seen – in bed with a local police office (his suspicions are peaked by smelling a strange pair of shoes he finds in the front porch). In a fit of anger he gesticulates wildly with the officer’s gun, before two vaguely gunshot-like sounds ring off on the soundtrack.
Sam – now insane – decides that he’s going to teach all females a lesson by randomly killing all that he encounters. The first target is a prostitute who Sam immediately calls a whore, before parking in a filthy alley and tying the classy temptress to some errant pipes. Pulling out his wife’s severed head, he hits us with the classic “you give me head and i’ll give you head”, before stabbing the women through her mouth and tying her leg to his car. Luckily, the woman is held together with clothespins as her limb flies off as soon as the vehicle tugs on it.
Eventually Sam interrupts the love-in and has Barbara (incompetently) tie up her friends before being led upstairs into a very odd bedroom featuring walls that have obviously been covered with white fabric. This will become important in a moment. They make small talk and Sam reveals that, like Barbara, his own wife was pregnant before he murdered her. Unfortunately, this reminiscing leads to some hallucinations which send Sam off the deep end, and he proceeds to cut her stomach open, pull out her unborn fetus, and throw it at the wall!
Not finished, Sam kills the other women via power drill to the head, claw hammer to the stomach (which is provoked when, after the young lady admits her profession, Sam yells out “Ruth LOVED oil wrestling!”), and, um, arm pulling. He literally pulls a woman’s arm off after fending off a rather random baseball-bat swinging vigilante. Coming downstairs, Sam decapitates a Jehovah’s Witness via swinging door (“You’re not a witness anymore”) before heading back to the bathroom and bathing in the blood and limbs of his victims. A not-so-real looking police officer finds him and tells him to get his hands up, but Sam is wearing falsies and shoots the police officer. The credits roll over a still frame of the actor’s face, as the worlds worst theme song (“Las Vegas Blood Baaaaath”) plays in the background.
Shot on video, Las Vegas Bloodbath often looks like a particularly seedy porno movie, with dialogue that seems almost entirely improvised – particularly in the seemingly endless “party”scene featuring literally twenty minutes of small talk. Ari Levin seems to be trying hard, but effort doesn’t quite make up for lack of talent, though he’s Olivier compared to his oil wrestling co-stars who laugh when they should be terrified, make small talk when they should be screaming, and somehow fail to even die convincingly. Director (producer, writer) David Schwartz effectively manages to point a camera at the things that are happening, though every other element of production seems beyond him.
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