Would fans of any other film genre besides horror enjoy this kind of blow-by-blow satirical deconstruction of the production process?  Probably not.  So even in its nonstop silliness, Brutal Massacre is insightful in terms of the kind of comforting myths horror fans tell themselves.  In fact, if Brutal Massacre’s sensibility were made to think aloud, it might sound something like this:

“Yes, the lower you descend into filmdom’s alphabet (b-movies, c-movies, etc.), the more apt you are to find shoddy technical values and gratuitous nudity, but don’t get too worked up about it—that stuff is actually endearing.  And heads getting ripped off bodies—what do you mean there’s nothing ‘artistically valid’ about that… do you know how hard it was to get that shot?”

Gunnar Hansen:  one of the high points of Brutal Massacre  

In an inspired bit of casting, David Naughton of An American Werewolf in London fame stars as the downtrodden, and wonderfully named, Harry Penderecki.  On a good day he’s a cult director with a loyal following; on a bad one, he’s recognizable to all (including himself) as a sweet-natured hack whose following might actually consist of maybe a couple of dozen fans worldwide who make up for the lack of numbers by being extremely loud at his public performances.

I’m guessing that the more you can relate to this movie, either as a talent, a hardcore fan, or a behind-the-scenes mover-and-shaker, the better time you’ll have.  I personally overlap very slightly with those groups, so I laughed at many parts of Brutal Massacre but could relate to most of the Murphy’s Law-driven vignettes only abstractly:  I never found myself saying, “Oh, I so know what that’s like.

”  And other viewers, who are not frequent readers of Fangoria or Dread Central may find the movie downright puzzling; it’s not a horror parody that’s accessible in the same way that the Scary Movie franchise is, but to be fair, nor is it trying to be.  In fact, writer-director Stevan Mena seems to go out of his way not to send up the narrative or archetypical conventions of horror films themselves, a bold move that helps distinguish Brutal Massacre from other horror-comedies.  That is, we never learn the backstory of the film-within-the film’s killer or even much of the frontstory plot.  Bolder still, Brutal Massacre does not dilute its focus on filmmaking with the appearance of a “real” horror plot a la Diary of the Dead.

The risk with that approach, of course, is that sheer comedy must bear all the generic weight of the movie as there are no thrills to fall back on.  And in that respect, Brutal Massacre holds its own but hardly represents a home run:  you’ll probably have a smile on your face throughout but there are few lose-it moments of outright hilarity.  Instead, and unexpectedly, it’s a movie of small pleasures.  Horror vets Ken Foree, Gunnar Hansen, and Ellen Sandweiss in particular turn in highly entertaining performances.  Some of the less experienced actors, though, seem to suffer from some of the same confusion that the film as a whole does—the line between a mockumentary and a straight-ahead comedy feature often seems blurred.   Specifically, we are led to believe that much or all of what we’re watching is shot by a documentary crew but the camera set-ups belie this conceit as they are often waiting in advance at locations for our protagonist to walk into the shot.  (Check out some of the great extra material on the DVD for a much more convincing “nonfiction” tone and style.)  Still, this kind of observation may be regarded as nitpicking by the target audience for this film.  In short, if the world of no-budget horror filmmaking is your thing, you could not find a much sweeter self-penned Valentine than Brutal Massacre.