Main cast: Alastair Gamble (Steve), Mihola Terzic (Sarah), Nathan Witte (Jamie), Wade Gibb (Joey), Candice Lewald (Lisa), Jeremy Beland (Ben), Trevor Gemma (Patrick), Nathan Dashwood (AJ), Scott Alonzo (Dave), Jimmy Blais (Sam), Danielle Munro (Julia), Stephanie Schacter (Cindy), Saraphina Bardeaux (Hannah), and Dan Ellis (Egerton)
Director: Ryan Nicholson
Gutterballs is a horrible, horrible exploitative slasher movie. I’m not objecting on moral grounds, mind you – this movie is what it is, and expecting anything else from it is like watching a war movie and complaining that the people use guns too often. This movie is horrible because everything about it is just that. The script is horrible and makes little sense, the actors all look way too old to be playing teenagers (and the cheap porn movie-quality make up makes them look even more older than they probably are), the acting is laughably amateurish, and the characters utter cuss words non-stop like they are schoolyard kids discovering the forbidden thrill of saying dirty words for the first time.
The whole thing takes place in a bowling center. There are two rival teams, one led by Steve and one by Jamie. Steve learns that Lisa was dating him just to make Jamie all hot and bothered, in order to get Jamie to pay attention to her, and now that she has had him, she’s no longer interested in Steve. The two men fight, and Lisa drops a bowling ball on Steve’s foot to break them up. When she returns to the center later that night to retrieve a purse she left behind, Steve and his three friends ambush her and take turns raping her. Well, the guy Patrick almost doesn’t, but Steve makes him force a bowling pin into Lisa’s vagina, so he’s not exactly a good guy. And if you can’t tell by now, the rape scene is not something exactly fun to watch.
The two teams show up again the next night, and each one is soon picked apart – often literally – by a mysterious masked killer who uses sharpened bowling pins and bowling balls to kill each one most gruesomely and imaginatively. Given that Lisa often vanishes for a period of time and other characters remark on this, it’s probably reasonable to assume that she’s behind the murders, but there is more than meets the eye here.
As I’ve mentioned, almost everything about this movie is wretched beyond belief. Alastair Gamble, especially, is embarrassing to watch as he overacts to ridiculous extremes, and his character cusses non-stop like a mentally handicapped asshole with Tourette’s syndrome. The script has some scenes of deliberate comedy, but because the acting is so uniformly wretched, it’s hard to tell when the comedy ends and the shame begins.
But at the same time, this one delivers on the gore spectacularly. While the rape scene is painfully uncomfortable to watch, it’s far from the worst. A character’s penis is graphically cut open in half – with the camera zooming in close for good measure. Two characters perform oral sex on another in a very graphic manner that exceeds what is normally shown on a typical softcore cable TV, although I’m sure that penis the lady is working vigorously on is a prosthetic. At least, I hope it’s a prosthetic, or else it’s an unfortunate colored thing and I feel sorry for the actor. I suppose it’s not a spoiler to say that those two die shortly after getting down to business, but while I won’t reveal how they die, I can say that it’s an implausible, over the top ridiculous way that ends up working because of how audaciously awful and wrong it is. Besides, it’s probably a good thing that they die, because these two morons are lying on the floor of a dirty public toilet in a bowling center – goodness, if they weren’t killed, they’d probably die from some mutant bugs they pick up from that filthy floor.
And that’s the charm of this movie – it doesn’t care and just goes all out in delivering outrageous skanky and gruesome scenes. The death scenes are all implausible, some defy physics and gravity, but these over the top moments of gore are just so bad that they end up being good in a sick and twisted manner.
At the end of the day, watch this one for the gore as there is little else to savor. None of the cast has made it bigger in the business since this movie, and there’s a good reason for it. One watching of this movie and I’m certain casting folks everywhere would be adding some names to their blacklist. Especially Alastair Gamble – man, that fellow is so bad here that I don’t think even his closest family member is that big a liar to pretend to like watching this movie. At its very best, Gutterballs is a “watch once just to see what the fuss is about” kind of movie, with very little second watch value.
