Halloween Pussy Trap Kill Kill is a 2017 thriller about an all-girl band who faces their greatest fears in having to escape a deadly hall of horrors.
If you’re going to name your movie Halloween Pussy Trap Kill Kill, you’re probably not all that interested in subtlety. And by all accounts, horror auteur Jared Cohn isn’t. Following in a long tradition of exploitive, dark comedic horror Indie films, this is an entirely warped, ultra violent cacophony of squirm-inducing mayhem, that like many in this curious subgenre, works hard to be as twisted as it can, mostly succeeding with what it strives to be.
Starting in the Middle East as a small band of US soldiers close in on a camp of heavily-armed resistance fighters, they are unexpectedly captured and brutally executed. All but one, he mutilated and left for dead. Flash forward and we are now in a club, banging heads with an all girl punk-ish style band call Kill Pussy Kill, including Amber Stardust (Sara Malakul Lane), Bridgette Van Mars (Kelly Lynn Reiter), and Natalia Midnight (Nicole Sterling). Getting a gig for Halloween night, they take to their van with their manager but before getting on the road, and after the band’s DJ – appropriately named DJ Speed (Demetrius Stear) – gets a little too rough with one of the girls, the band has an encounter with a wheelchair-bound, badly scarred war vet, and it spells nothing but trouble.
Mashing together a host of horror movie hits, from obscure titles like Vincenzo Natali‘s 1997 cult fave Cube to the Saw franchise among many others, the movie as the band finding themselves caught in a mad man’s house of hell (voiced by Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine and performed by Jed Rowen), where they must escape three rooms in order to survive, the only rule being that one of them must be dead in each room before they can move on. They are led there by creepy garage attendant Dale (Richard Grieco) who is in cahoots with the whole devious plot, supplying the killer with victims. It’s all done with a cheesy tongue-in-cheek attitude and buckets of blood because again, any movie called Halloween Pussy Trap Kill Kill had better be.
A movie like this is, for all intents and purposes, critic proof. It has a built-in audience that isn’t going to give a damn about the misogynistic themes, rampant nihilism, or gratuitous violence. In fact, it feeds on that, populating its cast with buxom young girls in ridiculous, barely-there costumes (at one point, Amber is unceremoniously disrobed for reasons that make no sense other than to fulfill a nudity obligation). It wallows in the gore, all of it designed to be as stomach-churning as possible, even as none of it is (purposefully) realistic. And it does all this with a campy smirk, foregoing standards such as the Final Girl trope in favor of shock and awe. This is creepy slasher-esque fodder made in homage to 70s drive-in B-movie horror with a title and a poster (see below) that reflect the same.
I will say that, as I’ve mentioned before, I really like Sara Malakul Lane, who keeps showing up in movies like this. She is a terrific actress and continues to commit with great enthusiasm to these roles, always making her fun to watch. Still, it would be great to see her branch out and I truly think she deserves to be discovered for parts in larger films. As for Halloween Pussy Trap Kill Kill, she again goes above the call, delivering as she always does, making her the highlight of the film. That’s not to say there isn’t good work from the rest, most stepping up with manic performances that are turned up to eleven. Also worth mentioning is how Jay Woelfel, a frequent contributor to our site serves as one of the film’s editors. Halloween Pussy Trap Kill Kill is exactly what you think it is and if you’re looking for a gory good time for the ghoulish holiday, this is certainly one to add to the playlist.