GARDEN TOOL MASSACRE

Garden Tool Massacre Movie Review

Charles Scavolini is sent to a mental institution after killing his wife. Seven years later, he escapes, and returns to his home, which is now filled with partying teenage boys. Chuck is none too happy about this new arrangement, and the youths soon pay...in blood! The zero dollar budget film was shot in the UK in 1997, but didn't get an official release until SRS Cinema brought it to the world in 2020. If you are adding zero budget plus 1997, your sum may be "a group of friends shooting something on a camcorder". If this was your calculation, well done! 

Bonus points if you also pictured this

This movie was indeed shot (at least partially) on glorious VHS, and if you remember watching movies this way, you may find yourself searching for the tracking button a time or two while watching this one. If you read my review of City of the Vampires, you know a bit about my own personal experience shooting on VHS. You also know of "parties" my friend Brian would throw, and that they were always nights of guys wondering out loud where all the girls are (the true battle cry of teenage guys at parties)--Garden Tool Massacre has a lot of that going on as well. 

"I swear I invited some!"

This movie starts off surprisingly well--we see Charles killing his wife, and get a very slow moving warning about what is to come. There is little speaking at the start, and the first ten minutes set a wonderful atmosphere. We know this won't last, however, and as soon as the lads living the house are introduced, the interest level plummets. Nobody expects any great acting from a movie such as this, so I won't even touch on that. No, the downfall isn't in the acting, but in the lack of anything of substance happening for much of the movie. The boys wonder where the girls and pizza are. One dances like Crispin Glover in Friday the 13th Part IV. One insists everybody call him "Psycho". They wonder where the girls are. You get the picture--there's a whole lot of filler between the opening and when Scavolini inevitably makes his way to the house to kill the victims with, yes, garden tools. Once he arrives, the death scenes are quite impressive for a group of people with no money to work with. The ending is a bit anti-climatic, but to be honest, your interest has likely left by then anyway. At just 70 minutes, the movie seems much longer, as it is clear they were throwing stuff in just to get to what would be considered a feature-length film. Still, you have to give writer/director/producer/one-man-band David Hinds credit for doing what he did with the limited resources he had--there are many, many similar films that are much worse than this one. 

On A Scale Of One To Ten: 5

Garden Tool Massacre Movie Trailer