Ghost Killers Vs. Bloody Mary review: Arrow Video Frightfest gets super silly with this over-the-top, gross-out gore fest.
Club Filmes
Brazilian film Ghost Killers Vs. Bloody Mary is not a film for everyone. It may start innocently enough, but before long it gets crude, crass, and downright disgusting. Issac Newton School has a problem, their toilets are seemingly haunted by ‘Bloody Mary’ who appears when you summon her by chanting her name. Obviously worried, the headteacher calls in local ghost-busting group ‘Ghost Killers’. As they arrive on their first big job, the group start to document the night and soon realise that Mary might not let them out alive.
Towards the end of Ghost Killers Vs. Bloody Mary, the line ‘This movie should be twenty minutes, we could all be in bed now’ is uttered, and personally, I couldn’t agree with that statement more. The first twenty minutes of the film has a nice, albeit twisted, humour, and in many ways, it feels like the Ghostfacers episode of Supernatural. Were the film to stop there. or continue along with the same tone, then I would be writing a rather different review. As it stands, the film drags itself out for 110 minutes of what becomes repetitive scenes of people being attacked in wacky ways.
Club Filmes
It’s not just the bloated run time that throws up issues though; the shift in tone is a real misstep for me. Some folks will enjoy the zany antics, but the film seems to be determined to keep one-upping itself and ends-up aiming for the lowest common denominator of humour. This results in a lot of crass, crude, and literal toilet humour as one man is attacked by his own faeces. Yes, you did read that right, his own faeces. That’s not even the worst set piece, that accolade belongs to a reanimated fetus that does something rather extreme to one of the gang.
All of the random encounters and attacks also break one of the cardinal rules of scriptwriting, know your monster. Great movie monsters work when the have well-established rules of what they can do. Here Bloody Mary initially just appears to people in the toilet, but later she’s appearing all over, without people chanting her name. She can also suddenly possess people, animate things (like the already mentioned faeces). The ever-changing limits make it hard to follow and eventually just causes the viewer to switch off.
Gore fans will have a lot of fun with the film as there are gallons upon gallons of blood showered upon the screen. There is an audience for Ghost Killers Vs. Bloody Mary, it is zany, wacky, and for the most part harmless. That being said, there are moments that are just a little too crass and crude for this writer to stomach.
Ghost Killers Vs. Bloody Mary was reviewed at Arrow Video Frightfest 2019.
