Ozone: The Attack of the Redneck Mutants (1986)

Directed by Matt Devlen [Other horror films: Tabloid (1989)]

This low-budget flick is not nearly as fun as the title would lead you to believe. In fact, it’s a pretty damn dry and boring film, and there’s very little here that’d be worth seeking it out for.

Does the movie occasionally boast some solid, low-budget gore? Sure, but it’s pretty sparse, and ultimately not really worth it. In the first half of the film, there was really only one scene worth watching (it was decently gory, luckily), but everything else was just utterly pointless filler (the highlight of which was an old woman chasing a chicken around her kitchen, cackling).

Let me let you all in on a secret: When the height of entertainment in the first half of a movie is an old woman chasing a chicken around a kitchen, cackling, you know that the film has problems.

The pitiful performances didn’t help much. Blue Thompson was the best of the bunch, which really, really isn’t saying anything. Scott Davis whined way too much, and Brad McCormick was just a ridiculous caricature of a hillbilly (though nothing so over-the-top as Redneck Zombies did, thank God).

Of course, nobody’s coming to this film because of the potentially solid acting – it’s for the low-fi gore. And I will admit, for a lower-budget film, the special effects and gore are decently effective. It’s nowhere near as good as Nathan Schiff, but it’s still decent. The problem is, save for the one aforementioned scene in the first half of the film, most of the movie just follows pretty uninteresting characters in extraordinarily dull ways.

We watch this farmer’s wife do some dishes and iron a few shirts as she looks to the window, where her husband’s outside giving water to their dog. We see an older woman knead some dough and chase a chicken. We see a wanna-be country singer (god, was her accent something else) get ready to go to her singing engagement (which takes place at the small general store). All of this is done without dialogue, and it’s more than a little boring.

Ozone: The Attack of the Redneck Mutants is nowhere near as fun as the title makes it sound. It was a painfully joyless experience, and the occasionally good gore (which including a tongue getting pulled out, an eyeball removed, and of course intestines being ripped from the stomach) doesn’t excuse this film’s unfortunately dry feel. Even if you are a gore-hound, there’s almost nothing about this one to recommend. It was just poor movie-making.

3.5/10