There have been many bad flicks based in the "hapless vacationers" subgenre of the "slasher" subgenre of horror. These sub-subgenre movies have been sprouting from the poisoned cinematic earth of American soil for years, most notably being the summer camp series of Friday The 13th and the masked cannibalism of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre films. Well, it wasn't to be long before this aspect of Yankee "culture" made it's way into the Asian water supply, with the result being this Hong Kong release. I'm not really sure how to take it. I mean, I'd been waiting for so long to get my hands on it, it looked interesting and I was expecting something along the lines of F13 and TCM getting busy with Bio-Zombie for a little kung-fu flavoring. What I get is a sloppy and awkward one-night stand between the first two, with the third party canceling an hour before the dinner portion... you know, cuz you have to have dinner and wine to lighten the mood in situations... like... this one... What's with the funny looks, you've never been in a threesome before?

Yeah, so as I was saying, the end result is a messy stain with a Hong Kong look, but nowhere near the Hong Kong feel. You're of course invited to take your own opinion from it, and maybe my review can help you out with that. So, without further ado, I bring you Texas Chainsaw Massacre On Friday The 13th Part XVIII: Leather Jason The Samurai Legend, or The Deadly Camp as it's more commonly known.

Our story begins with a group of 6 friends (even the Chinese abide by the Rule of 6, it's universal law!) who are on their way to an isolated island to die.. err, I mean, to spend a lovely weekend camping out and enjoying themselves!... no, actually, stick with the "to die" part, it's a lot more honest. The gang mandatorily consists of 3 couples. Couple #1 is the stereotypical teenaged Asian wiz-kid known as Professor (you know, the nerdy type who's into digital cameras, the latest in laptop technology and cybernetic robot pets) and his "you never pay enough attention to me and everything that goes bad is your fault" girlfriend Linda. Couple #2 is the survivalist nut Soldier (the physical foil to Prof's big brain power) and his girlfriend/cook Be Be. Our last couple is that of Prof's hero brother Ken (the only guy with a regular name in the bunch) and his "deep love" lady Winnie... yes, like the Pooh. I think that even at the early juncture we know Ken's going to survive the forthcoming ordeal, probably with Winnie in tow. Meanwhile, I don't hold high hopes for any of the others to escape with their lives. It's not that I don't like them (though I really can't stand them for some reason anyway), they're just the fodder for this canon and that's their role in life. It's nature's way kids, get over it. To dig their imminent graves another few feet deeper, the group gather their cell phones together upon arrival at their island hideaway, giving them to Soldier who hides them in the woods in a plastic bag, tacked to a tree... for no other reason than that this is a slasher flick and stupid moves like this are to be expected. We all know it's a staple of the subgenre. The ignorance and stupidity of characters has been documented and exploited in flicks like There's Nothing Out There and the insipid Scream trilogy, so there's no need for me to contribute to this poor deceased equine's merciless flogging anymore.

From the bushes we get our first glimpse of the impending antagonist, as a bandaged and disheveled hand watches our heroes from the surrounding foliage, meaning the killer is already scouting his victims or there's a rouge mummy wandering around Hong Kong. Sure enough, no sooner does Soldier "hide" the group's cellular means of salvation, then said menacing hand is already five fingering the batch. Meanwhile, as the fresh faced teens set up their camp and frolic on the beach (like any bit actors awaiting death on a chainsaw or other nefarious power tool that was created for no other real means than to cause mutilous bodily harm to another human being), they discover this little island isn't as deserted as once thought. While fooling around with his woman, Soldier catches a slanty-eyed little pervert looking on. Jumping the punk and ready to kick his ass, we meet the perv's partner in crime, as well as his boss Boar and Boar's wife/mistress/casual hole to plug. What kind of business is this suspicious little crew into? Condom sales... yep, according to Boar, he's into the manufacturing and selling of latex penis sheaths... wasn't expecting that... After a tense exchange with the kids, the rubber merchants go back to camp, where their conversation reveals to us, the omnipotent audience members, that they're actually smugglers who have come to the island in search of one of Boar's men who's gone missing. This would definitely explain the opening sequences, in which the chainsaw wielding madman in rags put his tool to another young couple found trespassing in his island paradise of doom.

Though it's 100% HK, you'd swear that some of this stuff was written by American slasher hacks. For instance, one of the next scenes involves the two dimwitted lackeys in a good ol' fashioned American penis comparison, both under the assumption that the man who can fire his hose the furthest has the superior member... of just the better bladder control... believe me, after years of meditation and practice, Lil' Anub can smack a squirrel from 50 paces... okay, so maybe you didn't need to hear that, but you get the idea. Unbeknownst to the urinators, their projectile liquid waste happens to give one very sick little boy the golden thrill of his life. A big fan of the newest Kool-Aid flavor, "Natural Lemonade", the little freak follows the shower with an offer to go down on the two, who both react the only way they know how in a homoerotic situation like this: push the kind into a fire and walk away casually calling each other assholes. When the kid returns to his family shack, his bandaged leper of a father (yep, that's the guy) treats the minor burns, then screams menacingly into the darkness before turning his attention to his dormant chainsaw... of the plot were any thinner, it could walk on the thin layer of skin that's formed on my pudding... uggh, pudding skin, that's pushing even my limits of taste... what in the fucking name of the Virgin Mary's sloppy brown eye would make me say a thing like that?! Oh, and about that "Virgin" Mary shit, don't believe it, she's about as virginal as that Spears skank. She's what my people call "river with wide delta". Trust me, I had her, Osiris had her, Lucifer had her on 8 different occasions, Set's been doin' the S+M thing with her for the past century or 3 at least. You wonder what Christ's deal was? If your mom was as big a deity whore as his was, you'd go crazy and think you were the son of an omnipotent hallucination too.

Sorry to deviate from the cookie-cutter storyline here, so I'll get back to work... and trust me, watching movies like Deadly Camp are far more like tedious physical labor than entertainment. So, the next morning, after their odd late night encounter with the junior fetish brat, our two nimrod comic relief fodder find themselves going for a brisk walk through the forest, trading "porn stories" (what we insolent Yankees refer to as dirty jokes. Andrew Dice Clay could find a whole new career in China! Maybe we could finally get rid of him...). All the while, these two are so oblivious to their surroundings that they never notice the still twitching body of their missing friend's female acquaintance, saturated in her own gravy and tangoing the line between life and death. But, like I said, these clods manage to overlook her and she winds up left for dead. This is where the really killings start though and we can get this thing out of the way soon enough. The first to go is the toadiest of the two sidekicks. This guy is so weak willed and desperate to please that he's a sidekick sidekick. While Boar's sidekick is busy hanging on his every command and awaiting an opening to compliment his boss on his new sock garters, sidekick's sidekick is hiding in the shadows, trying to figure out how he can compliment sidekick's boot licking without it sounding as lackey as possible. Anyway, the guy gets suckered into the woods, beaten and tied up by the shabbily garbed madman, then pissed on by the guy's twisted down syndrome son. After the worst 10 minutes of his life (or at least his day), the beloved character known simply as Pervert is pegged to a tree stump with a pick axe before getting chopped into bullion cubes. So long Pervert, we hardly knew ye... nor did we want to.

Back at the beach, if you'll allow me to deviate from the dumbasses who have become the focus of the flick, our original gang of friends (you remember them, right?) frolic and jump around in the water like complete waifs... but enough about those egotists, let's talk about the shady "condom merchants" some more. Boar and his skank are the next to meet their demise, when Leperface (get it? he's got Leprosy and he carries a chainsaw! hahahahahahahahahaha! Boy, I amuse myself WAY too much...) kidnaps them and drags them to his humble hovel. At home, Leperface demands that Boar give 'Face Jr. lessons on how to satisfy the libido of the human female... a feat bordering impossible... why else do you think so many women are exploring homosexual and bisexual lifestyles these days? Things go bad when the broad resists Junior's "charms", meaning she'd rather die slowly and painfully at the whirling teeth of a hungry chainsaw rather than let a retarded kid fondle her and fuck her for a couple of minutes. As for Boar, he makes a run for it while his honey's getting butchered, ultimately paying for his selfishness when he trips one of Leperface's guerrilla traps and gets his guts ventilated with a sandwich of bamboo shafts. The lessons here kids?
Lesson 1: bad guys who break the law smuggling prophylactics die every time.
Lesson Dos: if you're selfish and use a woman for her gotch and don't love her for who she is and treat her as such, then you will die agonizingly when you turn your back on her to try and save your own neck.
Lesson C: when running for your life, try to keep at least one eye on the path ahead. Besides, you don't really wanna see it when the chainsaw dives into your spleen, do you?

Linda and BeBe, two of our inane heroines for those who lost track of the good guys like I have at this point, happen upon the squishy corpse of Mr. Boar, only to freak out with BeBe getting 'napped by Leper in all the panic. When Linda gets back to camp, a brilliant plan is formulated worthy of even the most oblivious of American slasher films: Soldier alone will go into the badly lit forest with nothing more than a boot knife to search for and rescue his subdued girlfriend, while everyone else sits on the beach and awaits Soldier's death cries to echo through the night sky... guess they don't really like him, do they? If these guys were my friends, I'd circle around behind them, then cut them all into beef jerky, making a necklace and matching nose piercing from their teeth. Anyway, following a trail of bloody bandages and decayed flesh, Mr. Muy Macho discovers the villain's lair after hours of penetrating the thick vegetation long into the night. No surprise, after he's kicked around like a soccer ball for a little while (all to the tune of something I can only describe as a Chinese John Denver), Testosterone Boy is stuck to a tree by his own pig sticker, sheathed into his torso as he lets out those aforementioned death cries... which everyone can hear clearly ALLLLLLLLL the way back at camp... guy's got a set of pipes to rival that fat beard-o Pavorotti. In an attempt to keep everyone nice and sane and manageable, Ken reminds his pals that the boat will return and everything will be okay if they can last the next 10 hours... yes, everything will be peachy-keen, except for the 4 corpses and the abducted BeBe... then again, that's a walk in the park for my daily life...

Our next body-to-be is the surviving goon, off to join Boar and Pervert in the great Trojan factory in the sky when he leaves the group to seek out his cell phone. His demise throws the others into a panic and they dart off into the woods, breaking character and actually sticking together. However, it looks like Linda's got the stamina of a fruit fly (you know, because they only live one day... at least I think that makes sense), as she stops the gang 30ft into the forest, sucking wind like one of those geezers in the Medicalert™ commercials and pleading with the others to stop and rest a while and give her some H2O… I'm a big sweaty man-beast and even I'm not THAT out-of-shape. When Leperface catches up to them, were left with the quandary of who in this scene needs a prescription for corrective lenses more, our killer or our killed?! Is it worse that the good guys need a night vision lens for their camcorder to see the goon less than a yard in front of them, or that the creep with the degenerative skin disease CAN'T locate them at his feet, from the same distance, all within the overly luminescence of a moonlit clearing in the woods!? To add on to Faces horrible sense of his surroundings, not only are there 4 people right in front of his face that he cant see, but they're also making enough noise to wake the dead (i.e. Me… trust me, I fell asleep watching this movie and this is what stirred me to awaken) and he doesn't hear it… I guess some of the overlooked effects of Leprosy include blindness, deafness and stupidity of a “dumber than a coffin full of Roger Corman Classics” level. I think another thing that disappoints me about Faces limited abilities to overcome his prey, is that fact that he cant kill even one of these 4 while they're stuck running in a haze of perpetual “Baywatch” slow-mo. The madman finally just gives up, realizing that on his best day he's no better than a 78 year-old Michael Myers who's been reduced to a severed head tied to a lawn-mower with some shoelaces… see now, if that had been the case with Halloween: Resurrection, I might've had the slightest interest… beyond putting the entire cast tween a pair of crosshairs that is. Back at the Love Shack, Junior tries to initiate BeBe as his sister and newest member of the Leprosy Clan, only to have her push him down and attempt to run off… only to be in turn decapitated by the knife formerly belonging to Soldier, or rather have as such done to her silhouette. Does anyone else get bad Hugs™ and LSD fueled flashbacks of The Forest here? As if that little nitpick wasn't enough, that boot knife must be the Ginsu™ for the new millennium. Watch as it slices through bone, sinew and meat like a machete through Spam™! I ordered me 12 of em off the 3am infomercials and now I'm swimmin'' in guts!

To help get our remaining four bodies-to-be back into the “well do anything we can to eliminate our chances of surviving this fiasco” mentality, Prof and Linda choose this time to have a falling out, as Linda blames him for bringing them all to this nightmare and he finally has enough of her back talking and hauls off on her with a limp wrested backhand upside her coconut! The two then split up, relationship wise and physically, sending Winnie after Linda and Ken after his brother, because its easier to let a lunatic with a skin disease kill you in groups of two rather than one gang of four, despite their claims of all wanting to live… Don't try to feign surprise as the ladies are kidnapped and dragged back to the Leper Lair. The brothers have no trouble finding the place themselves, as they simply tailgate the little retarded lad on one of his nightly romps through the moonlight. Things look like they might just be going the way of our heroes benefit, when Prof uses his pocketknife to hold Junior hostage, but things quickly deteriorate from there, when Prof sets off another of Leperface's bamboo maidens (as opposed to an iron maiden… or a Judas Priest or Alice In Chains for that matter… groan now kids, I'm not stopping the car once we get going), filling himself and the boy with numerous painful spikes, killing them both. Not only does this leave our group with one less man and one less pocketknife, but it also leaves Face VERY pissed. Its not long before Big Daddy Leper and his cheap Chinese Stihl™ knock-off are in pursuit, but that doesn't matter because Kens still alive and Kens the hero, which means Kens got a plan!… and the all powerful Nail Shoes given to him by his loving Winnie!… whatever "Nail Shoes" are. The good guys also have the advantage that 'Face likes to take his sweet bitch ass time getting into a project, giving them plenty of time to set the stage for their grandiose revenge. When the killer does finally catch up to them, sure enough he falls for the amateur booby trap and winds up ensnared, hoisted into the canopy where he's impaled on numerous, yep, you guessed it, sharpened bamboo chutes. But, here's where the twist surprise comes in. If you're like me, you expect that the retarded boys mother is either dead or just abandoned the little freak, leaving him for father to raise on his own… well, it looks like were both wrong my unpopular little friend(s), because mommy emerges from the dense tree line, wrapped in her own little ensemble of bandages and Leprosy ridden flesh, and wielding her own matching chainsaw, which she's no slouch with as she proves by carving Linda like a Thanksgiving Chinese babe… why, what do you usually eat?

Okay, time to get this last stretch over with. Its been a long and drawn out experience for all of us, but I'm sure well all look back on this review one day and smile… because well never have to sit through it again! Mrs. Leperface chases down Ken, enraged by the death of her love machine (sex between two insane Lepratic people, not a pretty picture, and almost too sick to find amusing… almost) and looking to chop up some virtuous and morally tender homo-sapien veal. Too bad for the old maid however, is that the grass on the island is apparently made of Slip N Slide™ plastic, as her momentum makes it impossible to slow herself and she's thrown strait into a backdrop by Ken, going bye-bye over the cliff side to “certain” doom. Then the boat comes, Ken and Winnie are free to fulfill their fantasy of marriage and chastity, and we get an ending typical of a lame slasher, as a bandaged hand reaches up from the depths to grasp the exiting boats protruding ladder, suggesting this isn't the last of those lovable Lepers. If you should be suckered into seeing this movie, pay attention at this last scene. If the island this all takes place on is so damned secluded, why is it in the last shot that we can see PLENTY of other land not a ¼ mile off in the background, spreading from the left side of the screen to the right!? Not only this, but even worse, there are TELEPHONE POSTS plainly visible on this “isolated” land, meaning there's at least SOME kind of civilization within swimming distance! All this lame misattention to detail forces a war to be waged in my fragile conscious mind as to whether this was all a parody of the American slasher genre, or just a movie that defines the unprofessional, incompetent side of Asian cinema that I'm thankfully not a casual victim to. For a slasher flick, director/writer Bowie Lau forgets/ignores the two elements that draws people to mindless murder-fests: tits and gore. Its almost hilarious when you consider that all our “heroes” talk about is their futures, getting married to each other, having successful careers, blah blah blah, only to have all of these hopes and dreams chopped into thin slices by a random madman with a chainsaw. Unfortunately, the movie suffers from this, because all these kids want are meaningful lifelong relationships and their one child per family, pushing premarital fornication and nekkid boobs to the back burner. Sure, its a change of pace, but when the premarital fornication and nekkid boobs are about the only thing to look forward to, my Magic 8 Ball predicts nothing but disappointment in my future. As far as the gore, its great to give your killer a weapon that includes a very sharp and moving part backed by a loud motor, but to waste it on silhouettes and raspberry syrup instead of spoiled pig innards and homemade gore juice is a crime of the highest order. As if that crap wasn't bad enough, I cant approve of the acting in the movie, as I don't understand the Chinese or their appropriate emotional conveyances, meaning I cant judge their work correctly. However, I can judge the subtitles. Speaking of which…

Man, the subtitles were just so bad at times so as to make them entirely unreadable. We all know that Chinese-to-English never translates well, but at least that's when American producers or subtitlists can step in and rearrange words, or add a few lines as a way of saving the viewers from having severe brain hemorrhaging trying to sort this shit out. Sadly, that's not the situation here and my cortex is starting to smell funny from all the brain cells that have been exploding while trying to compute the translations of this movie. This is just what happens when translators take their work literally and don't help us out with a little creative embellishing. For an example of how bad things can get with literal translations, I decided to translate a couple of English sentences to German, then back to English, then back to German, then finally back to English again. Why German? Because I'm technology illiterate and couldn't figure out how to set my fucking dime store translator to Chinese without getting a bunch of question marks and the word "credenza"... Anyway, here's the result:

Original sentences: A man with his face wrapped in bandages attacked my friends and I with a chainsaw. Many died, but I was saved thanks to my "nail shoes".

After numerous translations from English to German and back again: a man with its face, which was rolled above in the combinations, packed my friends and I with one chainsaw on. Many died, but I was stored due to my "nail beschuhe".

See what I mean? Though my Evil Dead Bride Krissy would disagree, sometimes bad dubbing is a positive alternative to fucked up subtitles, so says Anubis and so ends this review.

Also Known As: 1999: The Deadly Camp

Sequels: Nope

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: shoving a few copies of Camp Blood 2 in your rectum. "Rectum"?! Damn near killed 'em!... that joke never gets old...