The Orphan Killer

Description from IMDB:

Marcus Miller is a serial murderer hellbent on teaching his estranged sister Audrey what it means to have family loyalty. His lessons are taught in massive doses of vulgar and unimaginable pain. Throughout her brutal torture we learn that Marcus is not the only Miller with Killer in the bloodline as Audrey proves to be a formidable adversary.

Yet another movie I didn't know much about before I started it.  I knew it was a slasher.  And that's about all I knew.

Because of this, it took me a little while to settle in.  It's not a good movie in the traditional sense.  The lighting is terrible.  The acting is comically bad with most of the characters (I thought Diane Foster did a good job, but no one else stood out as particularly good).  The music is awful.  The story is decent, but nothing special.  I got the feeling that the filmmakers thought they were creating a great backstory of this killer, but it really just seemed like they were trying too hard.
The music was the main sticking point for me.  With very few exceptions, the soundtrack was just a bunch of terribly thrown-together metal songs.  There was no sense of setting a mood.  No sense of trying to match the music with the action on the screen.  It was as if the filmmakers just said, "There's a chase scene.  Throw on some metal.  He's killing someone.  Throw on some metal."  As I mentioned, it never fit with the scene, and it was usually louder than it had any reason to be.  It was incredibly distracting, and also seemed pretty lazy on the part of the filmmakers.
Some scenes also seemed to be ripped directly from Rob Zombie's Halloween films, but without any of the visual style that Zombie brought to those.

But, after a while, I settled in and found that I was enjoying it.  No, it wasn't good.  But, when viewing it as a kind of grindhouse movie, it made a lot more sense.  It was incredibly violent.  When there was blood (which was often), it spewed forth like a fountain.  It pooled on the floor.  It splattered on the camera (which made no sense, but whatever).  The blood splatter was inconsistent from scene-to-scene.
There was also some gratuitous nudity.
All of that just kind of added to the grindhouse charm of it.  I'm not sure if that's what the filmmakers were going for, but, if they were, they pulled it off pretty well.
I also really enjoyed seeing a psychopathic child wearing a mask.  That's always fun.

It wasn't a great movie, but it was a pretty fun movie.

Rating: 3.5/5