DUDE BRO PARTY MASSACRE III: The Best Retro 80s Horror You Can Imagine

Invite your friends. Take acid (for example, citric), mushrooms (for example, boletes), pour beer over it (non-alcoholic), and play one of the later parts of Friday 13th – necessarily from the VHS. During the screening, allow yourselves all the jokes that a group of people opening the weekend in this ritualistic way can think of. Thanks to these measures, you have a chance to create an atmosphere similar to the one permeating Dude Bro Party Massacre III. You can also start with the title mentioned alongside, but then ordinary peanuts will suffice as treats – the rest of the reality-enhancing will be handled by the filmmakers.

The production was created by the artistic collective 5 Seconds, specialized in making ultra-short clips. The themes? All kinds. A shootout after a sperm bank robbery, or a magician who makes the child of a pregnant woman disappear from her belly, only for it to come out of his mouth. After the creators contained a trailer for a non-existent horror in a few seconds, the idea emerged to expand the topic. And we have DBPM3 – a parodic, psychedelic, and wild ode to slashers.

Members of a fraternity head to a lake. They do not know that they are being tracked by Motherface – a ghostly woman whose family suffered due to their irresponsible actions. Among the fraternity members is also Brent, whose twin brother was killed by the vengeful monster. Haven’t seen the previous parts? Do not worry. They never existed. The creators of Dude Bro Party Massacre III went straight to the third installment.

And they offer us a dense concentration of slasher elements. Stacked genre tropes gush from the film like beer from a tossed can. Familiar gestures, words, figures, and conventions are emphasized, accentuated, and take on an almost maniacal clarity. We enter a reality fixed in our minds by images like the aforementioned Friday 13th or Sleepaway Camp, as well as their sequels. Yes, the sequels are remarkably significant here. Because if there is a machete blow to the head, there must be blood. And if there are dollars from the film, there must be additional parts. And even if evil is destroyed, it probably had a family that can seek revenge.

Best experienced with youth, for whom camp productions usually issue the worst report card. Many viewers had already had enough of those screen series that did not want to die but kept coming back for more. Yet one must admit over the years that this lack of restraint, pregnant with absurd consequences (vide: Jason Voorhees visiting a spaceship), could also be entertaining.

Ostentation is expressed in Dude Bro Party Massacre III both at the level of the plot’s stench of “reheated minced meat” and at the level of cinematic detail. So if the screen depicts the 1980s, portraits of Ronald Reagan hang in almost every room, and the fraternity members are so loud, narcissistic, and hedonistic that at one point one of them punctuates it with the key sentence: We are Americans – we do not care about the consequences of our actions.

And so one of the characters’ jokes leads to an airplane disaster with a considerable number of victims, but the interior of this cinematic world is governed by cartoonish grotesque, so the only formal punishment for the perpetrators is a forced trip out of town.

Here arises the question: does such a high degree of story unreality still make it attractive for an adult viewer? Absolutely, because the film is a parody not only intelligent but also genuinely funny, bathed in a tasty sauce of “persistent eighties-ness.” Dude Bro Party Massacre III pays homage to grimy slashers in a similar way that the recently discussed Commando Ninja immersed itself in the atmospheres of old-school action cinema.

Which means it not only presents overused motifs on screen but also places them in a stylization of a VHS screening. We have dimmed footage with green outlines around characters and strong interference – strips “moving” across the screen, blurs, and even numerous fragments of ads (for example, pizza) suddenly interrupting the screening, but cut in the middle, which further disorients the viewer. And in terms of visuals, it looks as interesting as the recently reviewed The Barn, where the stylization was also successful but, mixing 1970s and 1980s influences, remained more autumnal.

Here we have full-fledged eighties – a colorful era full of cheerful T-shirts and cassette players. This is the best cinematic retro I have seen recently. Not cinema like before, but a nostalgic dream of the 1980s – caricatured, at times misty. This approach resembles the convention explored by new retro electro musicians; their album covers or clips are more like a longing for the era than the era itself. The exotic world of student fraternities looks here – as usual in slashers – like a hatchery of the lowest herd behaviors, but the film also proposes a certain shift of emphasis.

The guys are so absorbed in mutual male adoration that in Dude Bro Party Massacre III there are almost no women. They have always been trophies and guarantees of attraction for slasher studs and all kinds of jerks, even more than beer drinking and tormenting the weak. The only woman who – besides the bloodthirsty Motherface – appears in the production for longer is Samantha, who wants to become a member of the fraternity.

So much so that she is ready to rush across the country to deliver the boys a six-pack and apologize for being a girl. The film does not concern itself with political correctness. The fraternity does not hesitate to leave a friend in a wheelchair in the forest – when they need to cross water by boat – suggesting a solitary walk through the wilderness. A drugged policeman tracking the students tries to flirt with his colleague on the fact that… he is a pedophile.

The acting is appropriately over the top. The characters sometimes wallow in pathetic introspections or flashbacks. They deliver lines so stale that listening to them makes your fillings fall out. They writhe in dramatic exaggeration – screaming in slow motion, tearing their undershirts on their bodies. The screenwriters added phobias or problems (for example, beer addiction, fear of power tools), which allow these mental rays to bulge slightly above the level of subdued stereotypes. It is worth noting that in one supporting role, Greg Sestero, known from the legendaryThe Room, shines in the film.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned President Reagan appears already in the opening note of the screening, suggesting that his people confiscated the tapes of the immoral DBRM3, and we are watching a miraculously preserved copy. This prologue, of course, alludes to the opening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974.

It may all sound silly and indigestible, but the creators of this parody know the genre they grill on the rack, and with great sensitivity – and its obligatory lack thereof when needed – combine all components. Juicy, numerous, and inventive murder scenes (like a head exploding no worse than in Cronenberg’s Scanners) guarantee plenty of attractions. Brilliant slow motion turns some sequences – such as the opening pool sequence or the joyful splashing in the lake – into little gems of unreality.

The film is filled with frenetic energy and fully mature consistency in style and plot. This low-budget production, launched thanks to a Kickstarter campaign, has hot blood and a heart beating in the nervous rhythm of healthy exaggeration and a ride through pop culture bumps. The film could be slightly shortened, because not every second is as dynamic and inventive as in its best moments, but essentially it is top-shelf rental entertainment. Close to the nonchalance of the first Raimi films. Yet the film does not break any new ground.

It rather smoothly fits into the retro trend. But not cynically and mechanically, rather genuinely, from the heart. Perhaps this is what Evil Dead of the new millennium looks like. Time will tell if we are dealing with a classic. Certainly, a sensual gem has been created, one that will ignite the passion of many genre enthusiasts.