“By sword, by pick, by axe, bye bye,” reads the tagline from The Mutilator‘s poster art which was ubiquitous in every mom-and-pop video store’s horror section in the mid-1980s. Anyone who grew up as a horror fan in the VHS era who hadn’t seen the bloody 1985 gorefest, had at least surely seen the video box artwork. You couldn’t really miss the menacing gaffe that threatens to disembowel four teenagers hanging by hooks just above that title that leaves absolutely no doubt as to the film’s content: this is a movie about a guy that mutilates people. If you’ve seen the unrated version (the film was originally released in “R” and “unrated” versions on VHS and betamax), you know the film delivers the goods.

As a teenage Fangoria-subscribing gore-hound, The Mutilator was one of my favorites of the slasher genre. As a low-budget film, it’s “got a lot of heart.” In what initially seems like a dragging ramp-up, screen-time is actually taken to develop likable characters with unique personalities—not simply establish machete fodder. Once we get to know and care about those characters, the killer wastes no time in dispatching with them in various grisly ways. One particular scene, in fact, is so over-the-top that I’m left wondering to this day how they were able to get away with it in 1985. Then again, it might be even more difficult to get away with something like it in today’s current culture of outrage. This scene, involving a gaffe and a woman’s hoo-ha, remains the most talked-about and notorious scene in The Mutilator. It’s a rough watch, not for the faint-of-heart.
 

Miss, you don’t want to know what comes next.
 
The Mutilator was shot in coastal North Carolina by Buddy Cooper, a first-time director with a cobbled-together crew of locals and American University film students. Though some reviews have described the production as “amateurish,” I’ve always felt that there was a vibe to this film indicating that everyone involved had a blast with what they were doing. I think that’s one of the reasons it’s always stuck with me: the actors’ performances, while not always perfect, are nonetheless engaging and fun. The special effects created by make-up wizard Mark Shostrom (later of From Beyond, Evil Dead 2, A Nightmare of Elm Street 3) elevate The Mutilator to a higher tier of splatterdom than your typical ‘80s Halloween and Friday the 13th clones. The murder pieces are original and the ending is totally nuts.

An interview with Buddy Cooper, director of ‘The Mutilator,’ after the jump…