Summary: Emmy award winning editor Steven Escobar and Cult Movies Magazine editor SCHROEDER bring Castros bizarre style to life in this, over the top, splatter fest.

Hold onto your barf bag. You might need it by the end of the film as you view the slicing, tearing, ripping, gashing, stabbing, impaling, beating, squishing, choking, burning, staking, cutting, hacking, dismembering, decapitating, hanging, bashing, dicing, chopping, crushing, pounding, spearing, scalping, suffocating, deaths the psychotic serial killers hand out to anyone that is in their path of vengeance.

Record Holder for Highest Body Count in a Slasher Film
Reviewed by GregMO ROberts

Do you know what film boasts the Guinness World Record for the “Highest Body Count in a Slasher Flim”? It’s not an Eli Roth film. And it’s neither a Friday the 13th entry nor a Japanese produced effort. Nope. The record is presently held by Joe Castro’s The Summer of Massacre that lists proudly on its DVD casing a body count of 155! Writer/director Joe Castro presents eight individual serial killers that are neatly packaged in a five story slasher anthology that has victims stabbed, sliced, decapitated, chopped and scalped on its way to the inflated homicide total. The first, and arguably the most violent concerns a young jogger who is viciously beaten when out for a morning run. Bloody and left for dead, he arises from his bloody pool and begins a rampage of epic proportions. Random killings using an arsenal of weapons ensue that include everything from television remotes to ice packs to someone being ripped a new asshole (literally!). There is no real motive for his homicidal tear outside of his anger and confusion over his personal endeavor, but he had my attention as he mauled his way through an entire neighborhood. All the kills presented are graphic, but they are also done with cheap CGI, many of the kills looking as if they were stenciled onto the print. Story number two deals with a hermaphrodite paraplegic with a sister looking to rid herself of the burdensome sibling. Story number two is far less violent than the first, but the story is far less interesting as well. The next three stories consist of a group of teenagers being stalked in the woods by two burned gay firemen, a man who finds the biological father that raped his mother years earlier and a small band of serial killers that are held up in a warehouse full of dead bodies. The idea of trying to become the Guinness record holder for the highest body count is an admirable one. But the cheap splurts and splats on the screen presented in such cheap High School project fashion takes away from the accomplished feat. That’s not to suggest that some of the make-up isn’t …ok. The make-up of the jogger that gets beaten in the first chapter (titled, Rampage) isn’t awful. But when sharing the screen with ridiculous Photoshop cut-and-paste, it cheapens the whole experience. We wanted to like The Summer of Massacre. It was a winner for Best Horror Film at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival and won Best Special FX Feature at the Atlanta Horror Film Festivals in 2011. But I would imagine its competition wasn’t exactly The Excorist. Horror fans will likely be split on the final product. Some will gleefully revel in the over-the-top violence no matter how ridiculously displayed. Others will feel like they watched something a horror fan with average editing and effects skills put together in their mother’s basement. We were of the later.