Movies That Suck: Attack of the Killer Shrews! (2016)

The first internet content creator/"critic" whom I became a devoted follower of was Noah Antwiler, aka the Spoony One, or just Spoony, as I and most have always called him. I started watching him nearly a year after he first began uploading videos, specifically at the end of 2007 and early 2008, and instantly became a fan, as his early video game reviews often had me on the floor. One that especially had me dying was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance, for the NES, which I think was possibly his second ever video, and he followed it up several months later with the sequel, Dragons of Flame. Although it still wasn't a great game by any means, it was much better than the first one, and unlike the first, he was actually able to beat it. However, that video ended with him learning there was yet another of these games (which I don't think he ever actually reviewed), which led him to have a meltdown where he yelled, "KHAN!", up to the high heavens, followed by the Earth exploding. I'm talking about this because that's how I felt when I learned there was a third Killer Shrews movie. Yeah, who would've ever thought that little low-rent B-movie from the 50's would, decades after its release, spawn something of a franchise? Technically, I learned of Attack of the Killer Shrews! from that booklet that came with that Film Masters Blu-Ray of the original, and it was probably also mentioned in Jason Ney's audio commentary, but it completely fell out of my head by the time I was preparing for Schlocktober 2. I did remember Return of the Killer Shrews, mainly because of how it's a decades-later sequel with James Best returning, but I'd forgotten about Attack until I looked up the original on Wikipedia. There, it was only described as "a remake and parody of the original movie... with 'deliberately awful... horrible shrew puppets' and a different cast of characters." That booklet, meanwhile, simply says it's, "A goofy $3,000 remake that used the original movie's working title." None of that sounded very promising, and I'll admit that I didn't watch Attack for quite a while after I first watched Return. And when I finally did bite the bullet and stream it one night, it was everything I feared it would be.

Return of the Killer Shrews may have been very low budget, with most of the cast giving exaggerated, and not so good, performances, crappy special effects, and was played almost entirely for laughs, but Attack makes that flick look like a deadly serious, major budget, full-blown Hollywood production with all the bells and whistles. It's not only extremely cheap, with a look to it that's only slightly above most shot-on-video movies, and effects that are deliberately awful and often inconsistent, but every... single... character is a complete caricature, with the actors giving performances and expressions so over-the-top that they make Jim Carrey and Robin Williams' craziest performances seem positively subtle and nuanced by comparison. And as you might expect, the dialogue they're given just adds to the pain. Plus, while Return may have taken little seriously, save for its connection to the original Killer Shrews, this thing takes nothing seriously, and has a style of comedy about it that runs the gambit from baffling and weird, and unnecessarily crude, to just stupid, annoying, and cringe. And it just keeps going and going with that same vibe for the entire duration, making for a very painful 85 minutes.

To commemorate the imminent publishing of his book, Prof. Charles Perry has his agent, Lewis, along with his wife, Cassandra, over to his house on Mulberry Street for drinks. Also invited over is Fiona Rae, a popular movie star, but her arrival is delayed by her car's engine blowing a gasket. Fortunately for her, Sheriff Martin Blake comes by and offers to give her a ride. After arriving, Blake is invited inside along with her, and joins them for a bit, but then opts to leave. Just as he opens the door, a man in a blood-splattered lab-coat, Dr. Murdock, bursts in, claiming that there are giant killer shrews roaming the countryside, an unexpected byproduct of his attempting to find a cure for rabies. Naturally, none of them take him seriously, and Blake goes to take him home, when one of the killer shrews appears at the front door. It attacks Murdock, pinning him down and biting into his neck, but Blake and Perry manage to kill it. Though seriously injured, Murdock manages to hold on and warn the others that there are thirty shrews in all. Blake calls for backup, though the only other officer on duty at the moment is Wayne, his deputy and cousin. Everyone begins getting nervous and anxious to leave, particularly Fiona, who has to be on a set in Franklinville the next morning. When Wayne arrives on the scene, he's attacked by a shrew, which manages to bite a chunk out of his left ear, although he's able to kill it. He and Blake opt to take Murdock to the hospital, with Fiona joining them. Blake tells Perry and the others to stay behind and wait for help, but when more shrews get into the house, they're forced to escape in Perry's truck. Blake's car, meanwhile, ends up crashing, throwing Murdock's body into a nearby field and apparently killing Wayne. Blake and Fiona walk to Franklinville and, the next day, the situation grows worse to the point where the military gets involved. Moreover, Murdock is not only still alive but transforming into a shrew-like monster, and the shrews' own creation may not have been as accidental as he claimed.

Like Steve Latshaw, Attack of the Killer Shrews!'s writer/director, Niagara Falls-based Ken Consentino, isn't exactly known for making glamorous, high-brow movies. Running his own production company, White Lion Studios, his previous directing credits include movies I've never heard of, and most are direct-to-video: Break the Sky (which has no IMDB rating), Crimson: The Motion Picture, Big Tim's Cool Whip, and Don't Let Me Walk Away (if anybody has seen even one of those flicks, let me know, because I'm curious). Before Attack, he directed a movie for Troma called Dead Inside, and has also done behind-the-scenes work for a couple of the Nuke 'Em High movies, which likely explains how he was able to get Lloyd Kaufman to appear in this. From what I've read, Attack came about because White Lion raised some money for another movie, only for that to fall through. Not wanting to waste the funds (most of which would be spent on providing catering for the cast and crew), they opted to do this instead, having been inspired by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode on the original Killer Shrews. Even though the whole thing was conceived and shot in just two weeks, it was in the editing room for two years. It actually played in one theater in New York, and won a couple of awards at the Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival (for whatever that's worth).

Going back to IMDB, I was really surprised when I first looked this film up and found it actually has a higher rating than either the original Killer Shrews or Return. In fact, Return has a dismal 2.9 rating, which is what I expected for Attack, only to find it has close to a 6.0 rating! Granted, it only has ten reviews, and a few of them did absolutely trash it, but there were seven that gave it at least a 7/10, and five that gave it either a 9 or a 10. As I always say, I try not to mock or insult anyone's tastes or opinions, because you like what you like, and if you genuinely enjoy Attack of the Killer Shrews!, good on you. Still, that just blew my mind, as I've seen plenty of other movies like this get the dismal kinds of reviews and ratings you'd expect. The most recent review on there, from November 2024, has accused those positive ones of being from people involved with the movie attempting to give it a boost. Now, I'm not accusing anybody of anything, but I did look into it and, yeah, many of the accounts who gave those positive reviews only rated and reviewed Attack and never talked about anything else, so it is suspicious. If the people behind the movie were the ones who gave it those reviews, it may not be as egregious as when Kirk Cameron actively tried to boost Saving Christmas' rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it's still low and a sign of major insecurity on their part.

I was going to say this at the start of a planned review of Coons! Night of the Bandits of the Night, but I could never find a stream of that film anywhere, so it never happened. But since Lloyd Kaufman appears at both the beginning and end of this flick, I'll say it right now: I fucking hate him and Troma. I know Troma didn't produce or distribute this movie (I don't think they distributed, anyway), but it sure feels like something they would make and that's already a major strike against it for me. I cannot stand Troma's style of making everything crude, crass, and shocking for the sake of it, not to mention how idiotic their movies tend to be. As for Kaufman, when I saw that credit, "Special Introduction By Lloyd Kaufman," I rolled my eyes so hard, as he's somebody who has always rubbed me the wrong way. Not only do I hate his nasty and cynical sense of humor (that's one of the reasons why I'm not big on that Angry Video Game Nerd episode that he co-stars in), but he comes off as very smarmy and fake. I've also heard plenty of stories of him being a nightmare to either work with or for, and also for being a scammer and con artist. And he's such a whore that he'll appear in just about anything, and here, he can't help but promote Troma, as well as bring up how he's both it's president and the creator of The Toxic Avenger (a poster of which is on the wall behind him). He also talks about the original film and the time period it was released in, commenting, "Eisenhower was president, Communism was flourishing, the music was dying, and I... I was getting out of prison. I'll never forget it." He adds, "Killer shrews. Murderous muppets. Yes, there's no business like shrew business," which nearly made me tap out. The only part with him that makes me laugh, and also one of the very few moments in the whole movie that I found funny, is in a post-credits scene where someone drags him out of the house, calling him an, "Old Mel Brooks-looking son of a bitch."

There's no real main character here, as the movie goes back and forth between the two groups of people, but the closest thing we get to a lead is Sheriff Martin Blake (Bill Kennedy), who stumbles into the situation when he gives Fiona Rae a lift to Prof. Perry's home, right before Dr. Murdock stumbles in and the shrews start attacking. Calling for backup, which turns out to be just his deputy, and cousin (I say that because he reminds everyone of this every chance he gets), Wayne, Blake then attempts to transport Dr. Murdock to the hospital and get Fiona to where she needs to be, only for them to crash the car. Devastated when it seems as though Wayne was killed, as well as about his car getting banged up and his radio being lost, which he says is going to come out his of pay (he goes on and on about this), he and Fiona walk to Franklinville. They get there by morning, only to find that the shrews have made it there as well. After the two of them each deal with some shrews in different parts of town, with Blake killing one at the Sunshine Cafe, they then get caught up in the military's attempt to destroy the shrews and become closer over time. I'll admit, I do think that Kennedy's performance is kind of funny whenever he's genuinely exasperated. When he first calls for backup, asking for an ambulance, only to learn it's over in Springville and exclaim, "Did you say Springville? That's two hours away! Don't they have their own ambulance?!" And the answer he gets to that last question is a simple, "No." When he and Fiona first make it to Franklinville and Blake makes a call using this diner's phone, he grumbles, "Hello. This is Sheriff Blake... No, the other one." The way Kennedy delivered that was pretty funny, as it is when he's back in his office with Fiona and his chair falls out from under him, to which he yells, "Dewey! Dammit!", thinking the officer in question was behind it. And some of his overacting is funny, like when he's getting hocked up on a glass of water at the cafe, and at the end, when he looks right at a nuclear explosion and pays the price for it. But for the most part, he, like nearly all of the characters, gets on my nerves.

Fiona Rae's (Elizabeth Houlihan) defining trait is that she's this big movie star whom everybody loves and fawns over, both men and women, and including the military when they roll in. There's one moment where some soldiers are taking multiple pictures of and with her, although I personally don't see what the big deal is. She's fairly good-looking, but she's hardly Helen of Troy, and her movies sound like utter trash, given how people describe them. When the shrews start attacking, Fiona's biggest concern is getting to the movie set that's waiting for her in Franklinville. Not allowed to go out by herself, Sheriff Blake ops to take her there, but after the wreck, they have to walk. Reaching the town the next morning and walking into the Sunshine Cafe, Fiona, realizing she missed her call-time, attempts to call her agent, but some guy on the diner's phone won't get off. She has to walk over to the nearby barbershop and use their phone. She manages to make her call, but then has to kill a shrew that comes in and threatens the barber and his customer. By the time she and Blake make it back to his office, Fiona learns that she's been fired from the film, which has never happened to her before. Not that she's lacking for attention, though, especially when the military rolls in and they're fawning over her. However, when they're guarding her in a house, they prove that they don't respect her, as they refuse to give her a gun, despite her having firearms training, clearly because she's a woman. And then, the rest of the movie involves her, Blake, and everyone left trying to stop a nuke that's been fired at the town to destroy the shrews.

From the outset, Prof. Charles Perry (Jonathan Rogers) is meant to come off as a brilliant, worldly old scientist who's reached the zenith of his life by publishing his book. But, as accommodating as he is towards Lewis and Cassandra, as well as Fiona Rae and Sheriff Blake, when he has them over to his house, he's actually about as strange as he looks, as well as high on himself. While he proves to be fairly good with a rifle when the shrews start attacking, he's also a dirty old man. After seeing Blake, Fiona, Dr. Murdock, and Wayne off, he goes back inside and confronts a crying Cassandra, only to cop a feel on her butt. Then, when a shrew gets into the house and attacks Lewis, Perry spends a good chunk of time melodramatically flailing around on the floor after being pushed aside. And when he finally does get up, he shoots at the shrew, only to miss by a mile, and has to go into the next room and reload. Early on, a running gag is established with Perry continually looking offscreen and asking, "What the fuck is that?" The first few times, you get no payoff to it, but when you finally do... well, I'll elaborate on it later but for now, let's just say that Perry's way of dealing with it leads to the squad car with Blake, Fiona, Wayne, and Murdock wrecking. After they deal with the shrews at the house, Perry, Lewis, and Cassandra drive away and wind up at a seemingly abandoned old sawmill. While looking for gas for the truck, Perry comes upon Mr. Wilkens, an old Scotsman, as well as more shrews. Fighting them off, they have to make a run for it, and Perry opts to stay and hold the shrews back. He makes his last stand against them next to a small creek, first shooting them, and then beating them with his rifle when he runs out of shells. When the rifle itself gets taken away from him, he backs up into the shallows, saying that he went to Julliard and actually he wanted to be a dancer. He tries to be all badass and tells the shrews, "Let's dance," but that goes about as well as you'd expect.

Though ostensibly over at his house to celebrate his book publishing, Lewis (Marcus Ganci-Rotella), Prof. Perry's agent, and Cassandra (Cheryl Szymczak), Lewis' wife, are really there to find his safe and steal his money, as Lewis only represents him because he's rich. In fact, Lewis feels that the killer shrews have provided them with a better opportunity to do so, and attempts to crack the safe while Perry walks the others out to Blake's car. However, when shrews get into the house, one of them takes a special interest in

Lewis, as it rips his pants off and appears to try to hump him, then drag him away, while Cassandra locks herself in the bathroom. After Perry kills the shrews, Lewis and Cassandra go with him, and they wind up at the sawmill. There, Cassandra gets attacked while sleeping in the truck and can't figure out how to use the rifle to defend herself. Lewis decides to save her by distracting the shrews, one of which chases him around and, like before, tries to hump him when it catches him. Though Perry manages to get rid of the other shrew at the truck, when the one chases Lewis all the way back to it, Cassandra finally figures out how to use the rifle and kills it herself. Following Perry's sacrifice, Lewis and Cassandra wander around with Wilkens, who admits that he doesn't know the area and was following them around! They take refuge inside an old mine-shaft, where Wilkens tells them something that leads to the revelation that Dr. Murdock may not have created the shrews accidentally. After Wilkens, like Perry, sacrifices himself so they can escape, Lewis and Cassandra are rescued by Blake and the army. Lewis has Blake come with him to Wilkens' office at the sawmill, where they learn about Murdock's past. Although Lewis and Cassandra do make it to the third act, they end up dying minutes before the end, when Cassandra gets attacked and Lewis rushes in to save her, dying as well.

One character whom I do kind of like is Wayne (Baird Hageman), Blake's deputy and cousin. Like just about everybody else, his acting is really exaggerated, but there's something endearing about him, with his gruff voice and amazing "can do" attitude during the movie's latter half. When he arrives at Prof. Perry's house, he initially doesn't take Blake's claims about killer shrews seriously. What's nice, though, is, while that would normally lead to him getting killed when he comes upon a shrew on the front porch, he insted pulls out a taser and gets a maniacal grin on his face. Blake then opens the door to find Wayne shooting the shrew with a happy expression on his face, even though it tore off a chunk of his left ear. In fact, he comes off as more excited than mad about that, although he does later say he wants the doctors at the hospital to sew his ear back together. Though Wayne is seemingly killed when they wreck their car, he regains consciousness the next day and is determined to find his cousin and help him. He gets there any way he can: first by driving the beat up police car, only to crash it again, then gets out and runs to a nearby stream, where there just happens to be a motorboat waiting for him. And when it runs out of fuel, he jumps back onto shore, runs to a nearby building, and takes off on a dirt-bike. He arrives in town near the end on that bike, and stops the nuclear missile from hitting by driving down the railroad tracks, flying off a ridge, catching it in midair, and then continuing on down the tracks until it explodes. Even after that, Wayne is still be alive, although it's suggested that he may ultimately suffer Murdock's fate.

If the opening credits sequence and Lloyd Kaufman's introduction wasn't enough to clue you in as to what kind of movie you're in for, the first actual scene, with Dr. Murdock (Mick O'Keefe) and his assistant, Svenson (Joseph Giambra), leaves no doubt. In their over-the-top acting (O'Keefe puts on an accent, though what it's supposed to be is anyone's guess) and "closeness," the two of them celebrate the success of Murdock's experiments, until the first killer shrew, whom he names Nibbles, attacks and kills Svenson. Murdock runs out of his lab and finds his way to Prof. Perry's home, where he tries to warn everyone about the shrews. They don't believe him until, while Sheriff Blake is escorting him out the door, a shrew appears and attacks him. It doesn't kill him, but it leaves him bleeding profusely from his neck, as he lies on the floor. Even in this condition, he still has to try to make the others, namely Lewis and Cassandra, understand the danger, and also explain how the creatures came about. His condition gets worse, and while being transported to the hospital, he gets thrown out of the squad car when they wreck. For the rest of the movie, Murdock is basically a wereshrew, becoming more and more beastly each time he appears. Also, thanks to Wilkens, it's revealed that Murdock's grandfather lived in the same Scottish village as him, and created killer shrews in his time as well. Blake figures that Murdock was following in his grandfather's footsteps and may have been attempting world domination with his shrews. However, at the beginning of the movie, Murdock tells Svenson that the shrews are going to make them rich. Either way, when Murdock finally catches up with Blake and Fiona near the end, Blake promptly blows his brains out, telling him, "Say hello to your grandpa."

Aside from Wayne, the only other character I actually like is Wilkens (Bill Brown), mainly because, despite being a random Scotsman in the middle of the state of New York, he's the only person here who acts halfway normal. It also helps that Brown is actually a decent actor. When Prof. Perry shows up at his home, talking to him in a rather patronizing way, Wilkens breaks it to him that he has no gas for him and tells him to move on. He also tells him that the killer shrews have followed his group there, saying, "Look out the window, son. You gotta be blind not to see them." When things go sideways as they're trying to escape, he saves Perry when he gets attacked by shooting the shrew with a handgun, growling, "I hate shrews." And when Cassandra manages to kill the shrew that's attacking Lewis, Wilkens exclaims, "Damn, girl! You got 'crazy' written all over ya!" And there's even a moment where he and Perry are back-to-back, shooting at shrews that are offscreen, while shouting insults at them, which I actually don't mind, mostly because of Wilkens. After Perry gets killed, Lewis and Cassandra follow Wilkens through the woods, only for him to admit he doesn't know where they're going and figured they knew that. When asked how he could own that sawmill but not know where they are, his answer is simple: "I never come this way." They next take shelter in a mine-shaft that Cassandra ran into in a panic, and Wilkens leads them down a tunnel that's a dead-end. He says it's a good thing, as the shrews won't be able to sneak up on them. As they wait for the shrews to come, he tells them about how, when he was growing up in his home village in Scotland, similar creatures attacked and killed nearly everybody there. Lewis mentions Dr. Murdock and Wilkens notes that there was someone with that name who lived in the village. Unfortunately, like Perry, Wilkens opts to stay behind and sacrifice himself to allow them to get to safety, saying, "Ah, I'm old. I've had my fun." Before he does, he tells Lewis to go to his office at the sawmill and look for a shoe-box, which contains evidence explaining the link between Murdock and what happened in his village. The shrews come at him and he laughs maniacally as he waits for them to reach him, holding a lit stick of dynamite in his hand (the explosion is rather weak, though).

The military guys who come in during the second half are the worst. First, there's Captain Jack Frost (James Ventry), who wears an eye-patch and, like just about everybody else, is fawning over Fiona when he sees her, wanting to talk more about her movies than the situation. To be fair, he does come up with a sensible enough way to handle it, saying they need to impose a town curfew, and close down all the streets leading in and out of Franklinville. But while he and the other soldiers are guarding Fiona in a house they've turned into a command center, he laughs off her request for a firearm, despite being trained in handling one, saying, "Sweetheart, this is not the movies. Leave the heavy stuff for us." He says this right after a shrew got into their supposedly fortified command center and attacked him, despite having just assured her that such a thing wasn't possible. Shortly afterward, when he hears the shrews are breaking through their defenses, Frost gets in contact with the president and tells him that they need to be nuked. He then tells everyone that they're moving out, and warns Blake and the other civilians to do the same. But the shrews break into the house and kill him, along with a number of other soldiers.

Sergeant Stonewall (Jb Aaron) is especially over-the-top. He and some other men accompany Blake to the old sawmill, where they find Lewis and Cassandra. While some of the soldiers, along with Blake, take the two of them back to town, Stonewall and the rest of his men stay behind and attempt to destroy the shrews at the mill the next day. After telling them, "You know what they say: you shrews, you lose," (I swear, I almost tapped out again at that), he adds, "Alright, listen up! This is where I give my big, inspirational speech, lettin' you sissies know that some of you ain't gonna make it. Nobody dies without my permission... We'll drag 'em all into the mill and bring the whole fuckin' thing down on their heads... We're gonna cover this place in shrew blood. It's gonna be biblical!" Naturally, the shrews take them by surprise, but even when one of his men is being attacked, he's yelling at him to get up, yelling, "Cowboy up!", and you then see that Stonewall has that phrase tattooed across his right arm. He and that soldier run upstairs, yelling, "Hut, hut, hut, hut!", only for Stonewall to scream like a girl when a shrew grabs his leg. He shoots at it and, when he runs out of shells, starts hitting it with his helmet. Realizing they're outnumbered, he and the others left alive make a run for it. Stonewall himself throws a grenade into the sawmill behind him, and after it explodes, he looks back and yells, "Yep, biblical!" (That explosion was anything but biblical.) Stonewall shows back up during the climax but runs off in a panic, yelling about the oncoming nuke.

I'm not even sure on many of these guys' names, and not all of the roles are even in the credits list on IMDB. A lot of them are simply listed as "Soldier," but there's also "Feminine Soldier," "Private Puckhaber," and, "Sergeant Beef," none of whom I can pinpoint. There is one, "Crazy Soldier," who I think is this guy in Stonewall's unit who always has that same insane look on his face and yells, "Sir, yes, sir!", even when getting attacked by the shrews. By the end of that scene at the sawmill, he keels over and

Stonewall carries him away over his shoulders. Among the men that Captain Frost has at the command center are Major Falcon (Paul Spitale), who randomly barks at Lewis when he's introduced to him, and Private Mittens (Joe Thompson), who's ordered to take Lewis upstairs to be debriefed. Lewis, naturally, doesn't know anything vital, but that doesn't matter to Mittens, who complains about how he won't talk. After the shrews get into the house, Mittens is left mortally wounded and two of the remaining soldiers try to put him out of his misery, but he proves to be

nigh impossible to kill. One soldier, named Jimmy (Jim Bachwitz), really mugs for the camera when Blake tells Fiona and the others what he learned about Dr. Murdock. When he gets killed by the shrews, this other soldier in a shirt with no sleeves, with a tattoo on his right arm and an officer's cap on his head, freaks out, yelling, "Jimmy, no! Jimmy! They killed Jimmy!" (he looks like he's trying to not laugh). He runs upstairs, behind two other soldiers who hide in the bathroom, whimpering like cowards, and ducks into another room. He later comes out, wearing a gas mask, carrying a smoke bomb in one hand and his rifle in the other, and goes on a slow-motion (as in he's walking really slow) shrew killing spree, even breaking one's neck with his bare hands.

Ken Consentino himself appears briefly as Dewey, this officer whom Blake believes messed with his chair after he falls out of it. Wearing a heavy coat with a fur collar and cap, and walking in a waddling manner, Dewey comes off as a tad... special, and the way he talks reminds me of Tom Everett when he played Alfredo in Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. As you expect, Dewey is enamored with Fiona; both times he comes in to tell Blake something, he leans over to her and says, "Ms. Rae,"

while smiling uncomfortably. The town mayor (Dale Rugg) is similarly taken by her when Blake, Fiona, and Frost burst into his office, where he was napping and apparently having some nightmare involving snakes, as he repeatedly yells that when he wakes up. Aggravated with his assistant, Floyd (Keith Lukowksi), for not telling him ahead of time that Fiona was coming, saying he looks like shit at the moment, the mayor yells for him to get out and bring Fiona a cup of tea. When he's out of earshot, he calls Floyd a "retard." After being told about the shrews

and the impending attack on town, the mayor gets even worse news, in his opinion, when Floyd shows back up to tell him that his dog, Pugsley (whose picture is on his desk and who is, indeed, a pug), just died. The mayor becomes a crying mess, unwilling to listen to Frost trying to tell him how serious the situation is, and they simply leave the room; Frost calls the mayor a "major wuss" outside.

Other memorable characters include this barber (I guess his name is Ron, since the shop is called "Ron's Place For Hair," though I didn't see Ron listed in the credits) and his customer, an older guy who comes in for a "cut," even though, as you can see, it's sure not going to take long. The two of them trade friendly barbs with each other, with Ron talking about the guy's age and baldness, even buffing his head and saying he can see his reflection in it, to which the guy responds, "Fuck you, King Kong." Fiona comes in to

use Ron's phone, when a shrew breaks into the shop and freaks out Ron and his customer, causing Ron to snip off the guy's ear, before he literally shits himself. Fiona manages to kill the shrew with a snapped plastic broom, and after she leaves, Ron says, "That's a bad bitch." At the Sunshine Cafe, there's this one guy in a biker vest (Frank Tedesco) who ties up the phone-line, forcing Fiona to go to the barbershop to begin with; the chef, Seymour (Steve Losey), who's seen dancing around and acting like he's singing into a spatula in the kitchen, while dropping crumbs all

over the floor; and his manager (Michael Hawerbier), who lectures him about it, saying they'll attract rats, before a shrew shows up and attacks. And finally, near the end, when Cassandra ducks into a bar and grill called the Cove, a guy named Zero (Sam Qualiana) finds and attempts to flirt with her, only to get attacked by a shrew afterward. He manages to stab it to death, although he doesn't like doing it, especially when its blood gets all over him, and when Blake tells him of the evacuation, he runs out of the building.

As with another movie that we'll be taking a look at much later, like near the end of the month, I will say that, if nothing else, I do have respect for those who are inspired to make movies with almost no money and very few resources, using their friends and local establishments that they have access to. If you look at the credits, you'll see that a lot of people, including some of the actors, were having to wear multiple hats, with Ken Consentino, in addition to writing, directing, and producing, having to be both the cinematographer and the editor, and Baird Hageman

acting as set designer and stuntman. There is something kind of charming about this sort of "let's put on a show, no matter what" mentality and I would never try to discourage anybody who wants to try. All that said, though, don't expect me to go easy on you just because I know of the limitations you were working with, especially when I find your movie to be downright annoying. I also have to say that I really don't like watching stuff like this in general, as that cheap, shot-on-digital video look automatically turns me off. I may not have liked the way Return of the

Killer Shrews looked, but I would take that over this visual style any day, as it almost always means that I'm in for some pain. Moreover, while I know Consentino had to do it himself, and he's said that filming was of a "run and gun" nature, the movie's camerawork is pretty poor. Much of it is shot handheld, with the camera constantly moving around people and sometimes getting right up in their faces, especially during the scenes where the shrews attack and everything gets frantic. Also, there are moments

where people will run right in front of the camera and obstruct your view of the main actors, or you can see a bit of the other actors from just out of frame, showing a lack of real direction and blocking. The lighting is often inconsistent within a scene, with some shots coming off as overexposed and washed out, while others are more dimly lit. And the audio constantly goes back and forth from being fairly clear to muffled, as if the boom mic, if they used one, couldn't get from one actor to the other in time.

I do kind of like the blue hue to some scenes, like when Dr. Murdock is running through the reeds early on and when Lewis and Cassandra are following Wilkens through the woods. I don't know if it really looked like that when they shot or it was created through a filter (I think the former was a filter), but it appeals to me, as it gives off a nice, summertime dusk feel. While they're not examples of amazing filmmaking by any means, I am impressed by several instances where the camera stays on one shot for a fairly long time, like when Wayne gets off the

motorboat and runs to the building where he gets the dirt-bike, mainly because it's refreshing to see the camera sitting completely still for a change. There's also an attempt to mimic that action movie trope of the camera whirling around characters who are shooting guns, which I kind of like (again, mainly because it involves Wilkens). And when it comes to the stunts, while most aren't much to write home about, I do have to give it to Hageman on a couple, one of which is the wreck that Sheriff Blake, Fiona,

Wayne, and Murdock get into early on. The car actually hits a rise, turns on its side in midair, and actually does a roll along the ground! I didn't think a stunt like that was possible on such a tiny budget but, I guess Hageman is skilled at that kind of thing, as that was quite impressive. The same goes for when, during the climax, he flies off a ridge on his dirt-bike to catch the nuke in midair. While every other part of that sequence is fake, that jump looks pretty cool.

But where I feel the movie shows the most creativity is during the opening credits sequence. Done in both black-and-white and sepia tones, it starts out as something of a homage to the opening credits of Ed Wood, with the camera shooting an obvious miniature castle with gargoyles and a cemetery, with the actors' names carved onto little headstones. Then, some animated lightning strikes the ground, a coffin bursts up through the dirt and falls over, and shrews crawls out of it, as the full moon hangs in the sky behind them. This is followed by a stop-motion of a car

crashing into the side of a building with posters for Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Toxic Avenger on it, and a man, i.e. an action figure, running around, before the shrews come in and get him. They kill some other people, spraying the side of the building with their blood (a prelude to the movie's own gore effects), and that leads into a bit that's meant as an Evil Dead tribute, with the shrews chasing a guy around a room with a clock on the wall, the full moon outside the open window, and one shrew trying to

escape through a chained hatch in the floor. The shrews catch and kill the man in front of a fireplace with a deer head trophy above it, spraying all of that blood, with one shrew then literally flying through the air. Finally, it shows a guy getting attacked while sitting on the toilet, reading a horror magazine, with the bathroom walls again getting sprayed with blood. It ends by cutting to Lloyd Kaufman watching this while munching on some popcorn. That sequence was

really cool, and it took a lot of time to build both the sets and the models (six months), with Cosentino doing the graveyard and the shrews, while Elizabeth Houlihan did everything else. It also has a real charm and sense of affection to it, something I wish the actual movie maintained.

The whole time I was watching the scenes at Prof. Perry's house during the first act, I felt there was something off but I couldn't put my finger on what until just now: they were shot in someone's basement (probably Cosentino's). Note the low ceiling and the obvious basement window, as well as the stairs that you see them walking down in one shot. I wouldn't bring this up were it not that they try to act as though this is actually the living area just beyond the front door. This confirmed in the scene where Sheriff Blake

tries to escort Dr. Murdock out the door, only for a shrew to attack him, as the ceiling isn't as low, and they don't show the characters running up from downstairs to see what's going on; rather, they try to make it seem as though they were in the next room. And afterward, they act as though Murdock is lying on the floor just beyond the door, when everyone is clearly back down in that same basement room. In any case, they try to make this place look like the sophisticated home of someone of high standing, with

the paintings, fancy brass wall decorations, that elegant lampshade, and posh furniture, as well as a poster for Rear Window in a corner. There's another room where Perry keeps his safe, which has a fireplace, an apparently stuffed German shepherd in front of it, and a scenic painting on the wall, and in the corner with the Rear Window poster is a spot where Perry goes to reload his rifle, which is full of all sorts of interesting stuff like an old-fashioned telephone, a guitar, and a little white suit of armor, among others. And yet, the bathroom is the most plain, average room in the whole house.

I'm willing to bet that the town of Franklinville is actually Cosentino's hometown or somewhere nearby, and because the locals know him, he was able to make use of both the streets and alleyways, as well as actual establishments for settings like the barbershop, the Sunshine Cafe, Blake and the mayor's offices, and the Cove, the big, sleek bar and grill where the scenes with Zero take place. The most notable location here is the house that Captain Frost and his men make into their command center. It's a pretty ordinary, two-story, wood-frame house, with a number of scenes taking

place in this cramped room with the characters sitting around a small dining room table, but there is this very nice lounge area with a pool table, a fireplace built within a brick section of wall, and shelves of movies on the right wall. But the environment that appeals to me the most is the lovely New York countryside, which you get to see plenty of in the scenes where Wayne is trying to get to Blake, and when Perry's group join up with Wilkens and flee from the sawmill. I'm a real sucker for picturesque

countryside like this, with the forests, dirt roads, streams, and railroad tracks, and the movie also scratches my itch for abandoned, out-of-the-way locations with Wilkens' old sawmill, which is a very ramshackle place, with all sorts of junk strewn about. Even Wilkens' office is really rundown. Finally, there are some actual sets, like Dr. Murdock's laboratory at the beginning, which you never see a big wide shot of, and is obviously just some room filled with lab equipment, including a microscope and a fake brain in

a jar. And then there's the mine-shaft that Lewis, Cassandra, and Wilkens wander through in the second act, which is probably the best setting in the whole movie. While not perfect, because of the very dark lighting and the glimpses you get of the place, as well as the wooden boxes, including those containing dynamite along the ground, you could buy it as a mine.

As a parody of a movie that, among other things, is well known for crappy-looking monsters, the special effects here are deliberately bad. Moreover, the look of the killer shrews themselves is inconsistent, even in-between shots. Sometimes, they're ratty-looking, moldy puppets, with the camera sometimes shooting them from behind while they attack or chase people, and other times, they're just sitting there inert until someone comes in and "kills" them. In one instance, they use one that has button, glow-in-the-dark eyes when it's supposed to be stalking them in the dark

mine. Other times, they're people in suits and masks, looking more like cheap werewolves than killer shrews. And during the scene at the sawmill where the one shrew chases Lewis around, there's a shot of a dog in a skin. While an homage to the original film, it also feels like a mockery, since you can clearly that it's since a dog, as the skin is tied loosely around his neck. (On a sad note, though, that dog, Masen, got hit by a truck after filming.) I've also read that the filmmakers had planned to do more shots in that manner but they couldn't get the dogs to cooperate.

Whenever the shrews are onscreen, they use the same chattering and screeching sounds from the original, along with other stock monster sounds. In addition to the shrews, you have Dr. Murdock slowly turning into a "wereshrew" over the course of the film, starting out looking like a traditional werewolf, with claws, sharp teeth, and pointy ears, and growing hairier each time you see him. Though goofy, it's okay makeup, actually, considering the budget. And speaking of makeup, unlike the original or even Return of the

Killer Shrews, this is a full-on gore-fest, with lots of blood spraying everywhere whenever the shrews kill someone. It's obviously going for that "splatstick" approach made popular by Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, except the effects aren't quite up to the level of even their smallest movies. Still, the gore is far better than in some other movies of this type that I've seen, and sometimes, like Wayne's bloody ear and a few of the deaths, like Prof. Perry, Cassandra, and Lewis, it's genuinely gruesome (though Lewis using Cassandra's severed leg to beat the one shrew diffuses the seriousness there)..

Also unlike Return, there aren't nearly as many digital effects here. They mostly consist of some instances of fake explosions, fire, and smoke, gunshots and blood splatters, but none of the major effects elements, like the shrews themselves. And as for the "missile" that's fired at the town during the climax... well, look at it. Do I need to say anything else? Ed Wood would be proud. (The thing has a sticker with "EAT AT BOB'S" written on its side, which must be some local thing that I'm not privy to, as somebody wore a shirt with that symbol on the back in an early scene.) Again, that has to have made to look like that on purpose.

Any compliments I can give the movie don't matter at all in the long run, though, because this thing is excruciating for me to sit through. From the beginning, it's almost nonstop with the loud, over-the-top performances and painfully unfunny attempts at humor. As I've already talked about, just about everyone in this movie has some kind of aggravating quirk to them, as well as a tendency to mug to the camera, like when Blake gushes about having met Fiona, Fiona does an overly silly, "Der, der, der," voice and face when she sees a shrew in the

barbershop (and she won an award for Best WNY Actress at that Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival), Lewis screams like a girl, Cassandra points and screams like one of the Pod People, and Captain Frost and Sergeant Stonewall with their overall over-the-top characterizations, just to name a few. There are also some running jokes that get old really fast, like the characters looking right at the camera and saying killer shrews in a melodramatic manner, with appropriate music to boot (near the end, Blake and Zero do that back and forth between them three

fucking times), Blake's need to specify that Wayne is both his deputy and cousin, or everyone and their mother fawning over Fiona. But the running joke that made me wonder if I'd gone insane is during the first act, when Prof. Perry keeps looking offscreen and asking, "What the fuck is that?" The first time, I thought he heard something that I didn't, but when he kept looking and saying it, I started to get impatient. Then, before he, Lewis, and Cassandra flee the house, he says it again, and you finally see what he's talking

about: out the window, you see an overweight guy dancing in nothing but shorts and a female bunny head with pigtails, as a piece of music that sounds a bit like the first bars to the R&B song, Money, plays on the soundtrack. Perry shoots the guy, but he later runs out in front of Blake and Wayne's car, causing them to crash, as the bunny head flops across the hood and the windshield. And I thought the kid in Cabin Fever shouting, "Pancakes!", before doing karate and biting the guy's hand, as well as the person in the bunny suit giving him pancakes at the hospital later, was random.

In trying to figure out how to describe the tone and attempts at humor here, I realized what it reminds me of: those Channel Awesome movies. Like a lot of people, I did enjoy those movies when they first premiered, as I was a big fan of the Nostalgia Critic and some of the other people on that site (fitting that I started this review out by talking about Spoony) at the time, but when I look back at them now, I realize just how cringe they are. Not only does this look an awful lot like one of those movies, but the performances are very similar, as are the attempts at comedy. Just as

I've come to realize about Doug Walker's idea of comedy, this movie thinks that something is funny when it's drawn out and done as loudly as possible. After Murdock gets attacked by the shrew in Perry's doorway, he lays there bleeding out for a long time, having to talk to the other characters and try to make them understand what's happening. Like I said earlier, a similar gag happens when Private Mittens is badly wounded and his fellow soldiers try to give him a mercy kill but he won't die. Blake's complaining

about Wayne's apparent death after the wreck and how this it's going to affect him personally really overstays its welcome, and particularly annoys me more than some of the others. The scenes with Lewis getting chased and violated by the shrews, both in Perry's house and around the sawmill, also go on and on, and all the other chaos happening at the same time makes it more unbearable. When Perry opts to stay behind and hold the shrews off so Lewis, Cassandra, and Wilkens can escape, Lewis says they won't leave

without him, and he proceeds to say this: "I'm staying, so that you can go. If you go, then I can stay. But if you stay, I'll stay. And if you go, then I can stay, and I'll stay so that you can go." Then, when he runs out of shells for his rifle, he tries to physically fight off the shrews, before going on about how he originally wanted to be a dancer and seems intent on fighting them, only to immediately get killed. Maybe other people aren't bothered by any of this, but these moments annoy the hell out of me.

The humor is also sometimes randomly and unnecessarily crude, like this running gag with Lewis stinking and his palms being so sweaty that you hear wet sounds whenever someone shakes his hand, and Ron the barber crapping himself when the one shrew gets into his shop (with a shot of his butt and a fart sound for emphasis). There's also Perry grabbing Cassandra's rear end while comforting her, Lewis getting sexually assaulted by the shrews whenever they catch him, Cassandra drooling in her sleep, her sometimes hugging Lewis and pulling his head into

her cleavage, and even an ejaculation joke when Fiona, comparing what's happening to the third act in a movie, says, "We're about to reach the climax," and Blake reflexively squeezes his handgun's trigger, causing it to fire up at the ceiling. Also, yeah, they do try to have an instance of meta humor, as Fiona notes, "This is so much like a movie. Giant killer rodents. An evil scientist with a chip on his shoulder. A glamorous leading lady." When they first see one of the shrews after Murdock gets attacked, Lewis

wonders if it's a dog, another possible reference to the original. The shot of everybody running out of the Sunshine Cafe could possibly allude to the famous theater scene from The Blob. And I could be wrong, but that one guy walking in slow motion, mowing down the shrews, might be a reference to the ending of Scarface, when that assassin slowly walks up behind and kills Tony Montana. The only bit of meta humor that I kind of liked is when Lewis tells

Cassandra to go on while he stays behind to talk to Blake and she exclaims, "Anytime anyone's ever said that, they never come back!" The two of them then proceed to kiss all passionately, which Blake rolls his eyes at and Sgt. Stonewall seems confused by. Finally, there are the jokes that, above all else, are just plain stupid. I know, I know, what jokes here aren't stupid, right? But there are some that really go for the lowest hanging fruit, like, "I've never shit so bad in my life!", and, "Coordinates 9er-9er whiskey do the tango." When Lewis says he needs to tell Blake something before that bit of humor I liked, Blake has to spoil it by then saying, "What you talkin' about, Lewis?" And how about this exchange between Fiona and Blake? "How did I even get here?" "Well, your car broke down and..."

Putting the lack of seriousness aside, all of the scenes with the shrews attacking people are a cacophony of exaggerated screaming and facial expressions, gunfire, extremely shaky and constantly moving handheld camerawork, and kinetic editing, which could almost make your head explode. In fact, these scenes are so mind-numbing after a while that I tended to forget things that I literally just saw. During some of these sequences, the attempts to make them funny, like when Fiona kills the shrew in the barbershop and you hear toy squeaking sounds every

time she stabs it, prove to be a hindrance. Other times, the hideous instances of gore can clash with the goofy tone, like when the chef at the Sunshine Cafe stumbles out of the kitchen with a bloody face and falls to the floor, or when Cassandra dies. And sometimes, the shrews aren't even there, and the actors are swinging or shooting just offscreen, and it's clear they're not hitting anything. In fact, those couple of vehicle stunts notwithstanding, just about all of the hits, kicks, and gunshots come off as soft and tepid.

Finally, the last few minutes are nothing but a bunch of chaos, with everybody running around, shooting at the shrews and panicking because of the oncoming nuke, before Wayne shows up and stops it from hitting the town in his own special way. I know, I know, they had no money, and this thing isn't meant to be seriously, but if I find it entertaining rather than annoying, that's just the way it is.

There are lot of stock sound effects throughout the movie, from a bunch of screams and grunts you've heard in countless movies and TV shows, to old-time cartoon sounds, like this crash sound with a clatter at the end of it, which you hear when Wayne first attempts to get to Blake and crashes into a small tree. There's stock footage here as well, like shots of the full moon, and I also recognized some stock pieces of music, like when the title comes up at the very beginning and you hear this intense piece that I've heard in numerous other films and shows (notoriously, Kevin Spacey used it at the end of one of those bizarre Christmas Eve videos he posted after his fall from grace). Much of the scenes at Prof. Perry's home are scored with a constant classic piano piece that, although playing fairly softly, does wear out its welcome. And near the end, when Fiona gets a gun and starts shooting up some shrews, you hear a random bit of stereotypical, epic Japanese music, for some reason. The movie does also have an original music score, courtesy of Jay A. Wollin, who's worked in various different capacities on a handful of films and TV shows (this is his first and, so far, only attempt at scoring). He also makes for another connection to Troma, as he worked in the art department on Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. His music for the main title sequence is pretty cool, starting out with the sound of a classic organ, then transitioning into a fairly fast-paced, playful-sounding main theme that, like that sequence, gives you false hope that this thing might actually be decent. A similar sort of theme plays during the climax, though it's rather low-key for what's going on (again, probably intentionally). Otherwise, the music is a bunch of random silliness that doesn't stick much in my mind.

What did stick in my mind was this song, "Ya Shrews, Ya Lose!", which plays over the ending credits. It's about as loud and dumb as the movie itself, and the movie transitions from its ending straight into it, so it continues assaulting your senses even when it's technically over. Sung by Rizzy Renzo, it serves as something of a goofy summation of the story, with a chorus that goes, "Killer shrews/You shrews, you lose/What you gonna do when they come for you?/They're big, and ugly/They got a taste for blood/Vicious, man-eating shrews." That chorus got stuck in my head for a long time after I watched the movie, and revisiting it has only caused it to do so again. It's definitely catchy but, after everything I've had to sit through, when this song is playing, I'm like, "Would you please just end?"

I'll admit, I didn't expect to give Attack of the Killer Shrews! as many compliments as I did. But, while it may have a couple of characters I kind of like, some appealing locations, a cool opening credits sequence, some shockingly good vehicle stunts, not too bad gore effects, and some moments that I did find funny, this thing is still, as one IMDB reviewer said, "Equal of raw sewage." The movie looks and often sounds as cheap as it was, the characters are like loud and annoying cartoon characters, the killer shrew themselves are purposefully awful-looking, few of the attempts at humor are anything but cringey, crass, and stupid, and it's an almost nonstop assault for its entire running time. As I said earlier, I would never try to discourage anyone who wants to try their hand at making movies, despite a lack of money and resources, but I'm not big on watching them to begin with and I'm not going to cut them any slack just because they didn't have much to worth with (especially if Lloyd Kaufman is involved). All I know is that I'm glad I'm done here and I hope to God there's never another Killer Shrews movie.