There’s just something about long, unrepentant desert highways that seem to attract both families of murderous and cannibals and cars full of unsuspecting victims.
Jump Scare is a horror comedy and metal tinged grindhouse throwback that wears its bloody heart proudly stapled to its sleeve. The movie follows an all-girl heavy metal band named ‘Jump Scare’ circa 1990 as they take a sojourn to a cabin in the middle of nowhere in order to try and find their sound and write a new album. But things start to take a weird turn as they notice things being off about their rented cabin and strange doings nearby from their sole neighbors in a strange compound. While the musicians struggle to find whether metal is dead or not, someone or some things may try to take it literally.
Right off the bat, I was hooked by Jump Scare‘s visceral gore and style. Featuring a lot of animated jump cuts and twists of editing that made it feel like a full blown punk zine come to life. As AC/DC said, “Do you want blood? You got it!” with Jump Scare delivering the bloody mayhem in spades. Including a particularly memorable scene of a character basically blowing up, or rupturing as they argue the semantics of the exact terminology of the gory explosion. Flooding their room with a river of organs and viscera. Culminating in an impressive brawl between flesh eating ghouls and pissed off metal heads with fountains of blood with every chainsaw slice and metal pipe hit.
Visually, the movie has a fun grindhouse style throwback with purposefully saturated colors and scratchiness to the quality. And it’s not afraid to get weird with it, especially in some drug induced hallucination scenes with all manner of cycloptic demons and space travel. The cast is made up largely of the backwoods killers nad their hesher would be victims. Jump Scare as a band operate as a largely dysfunctional bunch with frequent arguments between bandmates and despair at their lot. Conversely, the cannibal clan is shown to be a less than metaphorically nuclear family. Mutants frequently hitting each other around and an argument over a chainsaw leads to bloody dismemberment.
Overall, if you’re looking for a hell of a throwback with plenty of bloodshed and action, Jump Scare is well worth checking out.
