Six friends, in their late teens or early twenties, decide to cram into a car and hit the highway. Their destination? Las Vegas, the city of sin. They opt, as many disposable horror movie characters tend to do, to take a short cut and while traveling along the remote desert road they come upon a strange man in a strange truck. One of the male characters coerces one of the female characters to stick herself out of the sun roof and flash the creepy guy, but he decides to counter them by running them off of the road and then, surprise, she's hit by a low tree limb and cut in half. Oops.

They start freaking out soon realize that they'll have to go the rest of the way on foot if they plan on getting anywhere. They get out of their vehicle and start hiking through the woods and soon enough they come upon a creepy old house (that should look very familiar to anyone who has seen The Devil's Rejects) where they hope to seek shelter and maybe find some help. Of course, who should own this house but the creepy guy with the creepy truck who ran them off of the road in the first place.

For a straight to video movie shot on a digital camcorder with an obviously small budget, The Butcher looks and sounds quite good. The gore effects aren't always successful and in fact some are downright fake looking but the cinematography is nice and the score is very strong and quite successful in creating some atmosphere. The performances, all from a bunch of locals one would guess, aren't going to win any awards but they work as well as they need to given the material at hand and no one stands out as particularly horrible, even if no one stands out as particularly great either.

With that said, shouldn't The Butcher rank higher than it does in terms of quality and entertainment? It should, but it doesn't and the main reason why is that we've seen all this before and we've seen it done better than it's done here. The movie borrows shamelessly from seventies classics such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes and doesn't do it nearly as well or with as much style as recent seventies throwbacks like Wolf Creek or The Hills Have Eyes remake that have come out recently. Whereas those films had higher budgets and bigger name talent to work with, obviously assets that, when employed properly, can empower a filmmaker to create a better product, they also put a unique spin on the material whereas The Butcher has neither the production values to gloss over the film's flaws or the originality to overcome its budgetary limitations. In short, it feels like a cheap knock off.

As it stands, the movie delivers enough mild exploitation thrills by way of some gratuitous nudity and a few stylish kill scenes that it's a fun enough diversion to be worth a look for those who don't mind knowing where it's all going to end up ahead of time. The lack of originality really, really hurts the movie but the plot does move at a quick pace and it delivers what you'd expect from the plot synopsis. A few survivalist elements spice things up towards the end though the motivation for those doing the killing is weak and a little nonsensical at best. If you go into this one with low expectations, you might come out surprised but don't let the fancy cover art fool you.

Video:

For a shot on video low budget production the anamorphic 1.78.1 widescreen presentation looks quite nice. There's some heavy shimmering in a few scenes in places where you're used to seeing it such as on clothing textures and patterns and on the grills of cars but other than that the movie looks pretty good. Color reproduction isn't bad, skin tones look alright, and while there is some mild mpeg compression present in a few of the darker moments in the film, they're not overpowering. There are a few scenes where it looks like the filmmakers intentionally muted the colors to give the movie more of a retro-seventies look, so take that into account as it appears to be on purpose and not a fault with the transfer itself.