Halloween Pussy Trap! Kill! Kill!

Revenge. It's the big motivating factor in many a horror film. Sometimes it's very personal: the shunned child getting back at the family, the bullied schoolkid belatedly showing peers what it feels like - but at other times, an awful lot of the time, it somehow becomes about torturing and murdering random young women. In this film, which belongs to the latter group, the excuse given is that, dissolute rebels that they are, they need to learn what sacrifice feels like. Perhaps that doesn't need to be very convincing if we accept that the bad guy is insane, but he's not working alone, and quite what his accomplices are getting out of it is left to the imagination.

One cannot expect an audience looking for cheap and cheerful Halloween slasher fare to work their imaginations too hard, so the bad guy's origins are carefully overexplained in an introductory sequence set in some nebulous Middle Eastern dustbowl. There we see his foundational trauma, and it's no accident that little is shown directly in what is one of the most successfully horrific scenes in the film. Had writer/director Cohn kept up this approach he might have produced something significantly more powerful - but he has gore fans to satisfy, of course, so once we get to the meat of the film there's plenty of the raw stuff on display.

Back in the US, hampered by a need to keep himself swathed in bandages but aided by the voice of Megadeth's Dave Mustaine (which is guaranteed to amuse fans), the crazed former soldier kidnaps all-female punk bank Kill, Pussy, Kill! and their manager, and has them wake up in a concrete maze where the only way out is to play his games. For them to progress through each level of the maze, one of their number must first die. Of course, nobody wants to play by his rules - including him.

Invoking the iconic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! in a context in which the female characters are immediately disempowered is poor form, and it's also a risky thing to do if one doesn't have a strong enough sense of style to stand alongside Russ Meyer. Cohn has a handful of well planned set pieces here but for most of the running his direction offers nothing to distinguish it from countless other films in which young people run round the corridors shrieking. The women are plain spoken and angry rather than just whimpery - most of the time - but they don't get to do very much. Whilst an early scene of attempted rape shows a more sophisticated understanding of gender issues and sets the stage for later interactions with the potential to be really interesting, that aspect of the film is forgotten about as soon as it threatens to intrude on the more formulaic plot.

The main thing that will make this film memorable is its use of neon costumes which fit with the exploitation aesthetic. There's also some decent music of the sort you'd expect, which goes some way to generating a sense of energy. In the end, though, it all falls a bit flat, with nothing to offer but twists we've seen a dozen times before. It's a passable bit of seasonal entertainment but nothing more.