Death Stop Holocaust (2009)

The plot of Death Stop Holocaust centers around Liz (Lisa Krenisky) and Taylor (Jenna Fournier), two young women who travel to a remote island for a vacation only to be followed and eventually run off the road by a white van. When the girls stop at a convenience store for gas, the driver and passengers reveal themselves and the nightmare begins.

Now, there are two things I want to make clear. The first is that this '70s grindhouse throwback is not just your average torture porn, if you look at the cover and go into this expecting a brutal torture film with an abundance of cruel, sadistic and nasty torture (like I was), then you will probably be pretty disappointed (even though it does have it's moments). The second is that if you look up the definition of the word "Holocaust" in the dictionary, you should get a definition similar to "a great or complete devastation or destruction" or "any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life", which is another reason you may be misled into thinking this movie is something it's not. Without spoiling too much, there are only about four victims in the entirety of the movie, I'm not sure if I would call that a holocaust.

Now, I say that the movie veered from my expectations, is that a bad thing? In this case, not really. The kill count is pretty low, but the suspense level is pretty high. The movie takes a while to get going, for a while it adds to the tension, but after a while it just starts getting slow.

When it does pick up, the movie spends most of it's time showing one of the main females (I won't tell you which one because of spoilers) trying to evade her masked pursuers, who always seem to be one step ahead of her. Most of these scenes seem to only be there as filler, as the bad guys repeatedly grab the girl only to let her escape (while standing and watching as she does so) and she drives to another location. Eventually she ends up at her dad's summer home, which is when it really starts getting intense as the bad guys finally take her car keys.

This is about when the gore meter goes up a notch, as a young couple appear on screen only to be disemboweled and strangled with barbed wire.

The bad guys eventually do get her in the last 15 minutes of the movie, and I can tell you the ending is probably not what you would be expecting, so I will stop there.

The movie succeeds at replicating the old, grainy look of the films it's paying homage to, complete with missing reels and the classic "Feature Presentation" stamp (you know, the one from Tarantino/Rodriguez's Grindhouse).

This one wasn't bad. As I said earlier, I was expecting a gritty and nasty torture porn, but what I got was more of a gritty suspense-thriller with some gore. A very admirable effort with a good style, but could have been better.

Gore Meter: 1/5

Nudity Meter: 0/5

6 out of 10 garbage bags