THE MAD BUTCHER
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
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Odds are, you'll never find this one in any video store, but even if you do, don't let the hilarious cover fool you. Yes, it looks like high camp comedy, with Victor "King Tut" Buono wearing a blood-stained apron and wielding a menacing meat cleaver while an innocent woman holds her arms out defensively, but THE MAD BUTCHER doesn't live up to the legend of other cut-rate horror movies where inadvertent laughs abound.
The back cover reads "Meat is meat but this sausage is special!" which sounds like third-rate porno copy. THE MAD BUTCHER is far below third-rate, and you know from the beginning where the movie is heading. As with SOYLENT GREEN and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, the special sausage everyone is raving about is made out of people. That's all Mad Butcher Buono can do when they raise the price of pork to five dollars a pound wholesale, and his bitchy wife is the first to go.
But that's not until about thirty minutes into the movie. First we have to hear the story of how Buono went crazy a few years ago and beat an old lady senseless with "two pounds of liver." (He also assaulted her with some fava beans and a nice chianti but that part was cleverly concealed from the press.)
Now he's out of the sanitarium and back into the meat game, in more ways than one. You see, he also regularly ogles the beautiful woman across the street as she undresses. He gets caught after awhile, when a woman comes up behind him, sees him watching the woman, and yells out, "Pig!" but a confused Buono, thinking she's just a customer, asks her what cut of pig she wants.
Buono eventually assaults the beautiful woman, but the next victim is a hooker who had sex with his assistant (one of those Victor Lorre look- and sound-alikes). As Buono leads her up to his room, she tells him, "This is gonna cost you fifty bucks," to which he cleverly replies, "And it'll cost my customers five bucks a pound," before choking her to death.
No, of course he doesn't cleverly reply anything. If this movie had a sense of humor it wouldn't get a zero-star rating. Instead it just goes for a surreal kind of look while playing the same bizarre player piano theme over and over again. The music sounds so intrusive I was waiting for Buono to break into song ("I'm the ma-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ad butcher!"). But there's no MAD BUTCHER: BROADWAY STYLE, although the movie is dubbed from German to English, with the exception of Buono.
It's not scary, it's not funny (intentionally or unintentionally), it's probably not even a real movie. It's not listed in the Leonard Maltin movie guide, so I'm starting to think I might have dreamed it, except that my dreams are more entertaining and coherent than THE MAD BUTCHER, the movie that proves once and for all that the 60's "Batman" show was a career-killer for everyone involved. I don't think Burt "Robin" Ward's stint in ASSAULT OF THE PARTY NERDS 2 was a step up the career ladder.
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