Cinephobia
Coming to VOD Sept 30, 2025
When your car breaks down near Death Valley, get out fast! Marcel Walz’s Brute 1976 is a throwback for fans of 70s grindhouse and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—so buckle up and prepare for splatter. If that film isn’t enough to scare or intrigue you, only fans of House of 1000 Corpses need to enter here. This movie wastes no time setting the mood and delivering a gruesome spectacle. It’s hot in them thar hills, and I swear they have eyes too!
Although the setup is clever—three models hired for a desert photo shoot—what follows is painfully familiar. Raquel (Gigi Gustin) and her girlfriend Roxy (Adriane McLean) are quickly stranded in Death Valley’s heat. Their introduction checks every slasher box: a sign to a mine, masked miners, and death lurking in the shadows. It works, but it also feels like déjà vu.
A second team, including the Black model Sunshine (Sarah French), searches for the missing women, only to stumble into Savage, California—a town that lives up to its name. The locals aren’t menacing so much as apathetic, resigned to the violence. That indifference undermines the horror instead of intensifying it.
Calling this a clambake barely covers it! The film delivers a John Carpenter-level fright fest in atmosphere, but it never explains the Birdy family’s hunger for carnage. They’ve supposedly been killing for years, yet the script shrugs off the why. Route 66 becomes a death trap with no deeper meaning than “don’t stop here.” The lack of substance makes the horror feel hollow.
The script flirts with bigger ideas—hinting at a North vs. South conflict, as if the Civil War never ended—but it never follows through. Early scenes meander, and the allegory collapses under its own weight. When Mama Birdy (Dazelle Yvette) leads the clan with a Southern drawl, it’s obvious the film wants commentary. But instead of biting social critique, we get masks that range from theatrical to nonsensical. One killer wears rotted flesh, another resembles a goat, another sports a bird motif—yet none of these visuals add up. The suggestion of symbolism is there, but without explanation, it’s window dressing. Horror that toys with meaning but refuses to commit risks becoming parody.
In short, when two of the brutes look like WWE wrestlers dropped into a Mad Max wasteland, it’s tough to decide whether I like this film or not. Their presence recalls a well-worn “good guy turned bad” trope, and no surprise, it gets plenty of play here. The movie is stylish and loud, but thin on purpose.
Still, the next time I’m road-tripping through a scorching desert and spot curiosities off the highway, I’ll remember Brute 1976—and tell my driver to gun it. I’m not stopping to help anyone stranded, especially not with a pig-nosed brute creeping up from behind! Rumor has it a sequel is already in development, so there’s more chaos to look forward to once this nightmarish world expands.
3 Stars out of 5
Screenings at:
Brute 1976 Movie Trailer
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