When your making a low budget horror film the cheapest venue will always be out in the middle of the woods. This is especially true if your making a splatter film. You can smash, slash and spray blood and junk all over the place without much worry of clean up. Krist Rufty, undoubtedly knew this. His film Psycho Holocaust is about a group of friends who are massacred in and around a cabin in the woods.

Three couples decide to spend a weekend in a remote cabin. They wanted one last bonding trip before their lives changed and moved on to the marriage and kids phase. Talina is pregnant and married to Mark. Her best friend is Laura. These three are the key players. You need not worry about the rest of the gang because they just contribute to the body count. In no particular order they are: Jeff, Sara, and Scotty. As they are all traveling in a family van they decide to stop at a crime scene where some tombs have been desecrated, dug up, or whatever. They want to know if they can help out. Help out doing what? They are not a forensics team or detectives or anything. This scene just serves to show that they are in a dangerous neck of the woods where weird shit is going on. Back on the road they encounter a log blocking the way. A strange guy named Buddy in a pick-up shows up and helps them move it out of the way.

Once at the cabin, Jeff and Sara go for a walk in the woods and Laura and Talina go for a dip in the lake. The other guys are busy unpacking and looking around the place. Jeff finds a creepy shack and wants to investigate but Sara is scared. Once he goes inside he’s strangled with a rope by a man with a potato sack on his head. Sara goes in and is scalped by the same man. There are not one, but three killers roaming the woods. They are all crazed ex-military men. Buddy, whom we met earlier, is their leader. Then we have the hooded killer named Pillowface and the gutsy, Carp. Back at the lake, Carp ambushes the girls and ties them up. He rapes Laura. Scotty and Mark start to wonder why their friends have not returned and they go looking for them. They run into Pillowface, who chases them through the woods with a chainsaw. Scotty gets his leg caught in a bear trap. Pillowface helps him out by amputating it with the chainsaw. Carp has taken the girls to the cabin, where he rapes Talina. They escape because the killer decides to smoke a cigarette outback, leaving the girls untied?!

Near the end, our killers have managed to capture Mark, Talina and Laura and hold them hostage at the cabin, making them listen to their crazy talk about how they became killers because they witnessed war atrocities. In the stupidest, gayest line of the movie Buddy says, "This is no longer your America, it’s MY holocaust". But don’t get me wrong fellow readers, the third act unfolds in gut wrenching, gruesome glory! Sure, the first two acts were cheesy, dumb and lame but everything is reconciled in the final act.

They are all sitting around the dinner table when madness ensues. Talina is sitting in a chair, tied up, with her hands nailed to the arm rests. Buddy brings out a bucket filled with Scotty’s entrails and force feeds Talina in a scene reminiscent of Cannibal Campout. Buddy even says, “Soups Fucking On!”, a line from Cannibal Campout. There are a lot of similarities between this film and Campout, which is excellent. In an act of utter debauchery Mark is sodomized twice by Pillowface. The first time is with a bottle, next Pillowface uses a strap-on hand saw to ass-fuck Mark to death. I have never heard of a hand saw strap-on. It was a fantastic scene! Do you guys remember that Talina is pregnant? She pleads for her life and the life of her unborn child. If you know these guys are far beyond fucked up then keep quiet about your pregnancy. Don’t give them any ideas. But it’s too late. One of the killers preps for an old-fashioned coat hanger abortion.

This film may have started kinda dumb, and the acting is uneven but it is well worth the wait, just for the gruesome final act. The gore is done very well for a low budget flick. These guys had some sick ideas and they put it on tape. I loved the homage to Cannibal Campout, which is one of my top five splatter films. Although not surpassing Campout, Psycho Holocaust proves that one can still break new ground in the homemade splatter genre.

- Jorge Antonio Lopez