Review #291: Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface (2000)
October 2024 Horror Origins Review #8 - Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface (2000)
For many years, Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface (also known as Carnage Road) was the perfect example of what a "bad movie" could be. I showed this movie to many people to illustrate that point, and it wasn't until Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker came along that I had something worse to dethrone this reverse-masterpiece. (Though in recent years I've begun to change my mind on that, considering how Mulva was clearly designed to be intentionally bad, while I firmly believe Carnage... was made entirely in earnest.) To show why this movie is so bad, let me take you through the opening scene (as well as a little introduction that makes the experience ten times better):
The version of this movie that I own came as part of a multi-disc value pack of bad movies, and upon popping Carnage... into my DVD player, I'm greeted with an introduction by Scott Leff, a representative of Brain Damage Pictures. (I have uploaded this intro to YouTube, so you can watch it yourself if you'd like!) Scott Leff is a skinny white dude with spiked hair and a leather jacket, who delivered an introduction for several of the movies we watched around this time (including Terror Toons, though unfortunately the version I have now does not have this intro). The intro consists of Scott standing in front of the camera showing off the Brain Damage logo on the back of his jacket, and then slowly walking around to the other side of a table of candles and sitting down (all the while you hear only the creaking of his leather jacket as he awkwardly gets into position to begin his shpiel). Then, using an unnaturally low and scratchy affect to his voice, he basically reads the blurb from the back of the DVD case, giving a brief description of the movie you're about to watch, before commanding you to "Turn off the lights. Turn UP the volume. And enjoy another twisted tale from the Brain Damage files." In the case of Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface, Scott begins by saying, "Welcome again, Gorehounds. The Legend of Quiltface is true..." starting us right off the bat with an absolutely stupid lie.
Next, the movie picks up on two "college photography students", a guy and a girl, who pull up to a small ruined building in the desert. The guy starts taking photos of the girl posing in front of this ruin, and then she announces that she's horny and takes off her top. (Because of course, these movies need pointless nudity in the first five minutes.) The guy then lays a towel down on the hard dry desert ground, and the two lay down on top of each other and mime sex. It's then revealed that the camera shot we're seeing is... the POV of the killer, who is about twenty feet from the two students, hiding behind literally nothing. He walks forward, the two soon-to-be-victims see him, they scream (but don't get up or anything) and then there's some shaky shots of a gimmick machete and one or two shots of our eponymous villain, Quiltface, as he kills them.
The rest of the movie becomes pretty self-explanatory. Four more college photography students in Las Vegas (Robert, Linda, Amy, and Mike) go out on a trip to the desert to take pictures for a class project, and on the ride there are told by their driver about a legend of a killer named Quiltface. The group is incredulous, but as they get out in the desert, they find out the legend was in fact true. Mike takes a nap on the desert ground and is never seen again. Quiltface shows up and grabs Amy, somehow subduing her and carrying her off to his hideout where she is killed trying to escape. Robert and Linda stumble around and yell at each other until Quiltface shows up again, then Robert takes a machete to the face and Linda tries seducing the maniac before taking a machete to the side. At that point everyone is dead, so the movie resurrects Robert and he walks off his grievous head wound. Robert meets a weird hillbilly war veteran who (like two minutes later) turns out to be working with Quiltface, Robert kills or maybe just knocks both of them out, and then he gets a ride back home. Except Quiltface somehow catches up to him and then it's over, or is it?
This movie is terrible. As I said earlier, it was my favorite example of how bad a movie could be while still being able to be called "a movie".
1. The characters are all terrible, with all of the dialogue clearly improvised. The main character (Robert) goes the entire movie flipping back and forth between all of his lines spoken as a sarcastic groan, and all of his lines breathlessly screamed in hysterics. At no point is he understandable and it boggles my mind why the director never bothered to get him to speak his lines in a manner that could actually be picked up on camera.
2. The killer is constantly hiding in plain sight, in the desert. You know, the desert- that place famous for being empty, barren, and devoid of anywhere for anyone to take shelter. Many times he'll be standing in plain view, a character will see or hear him (I swear this guy carries broken bottles in his pockets because every time the script calls for someone to notice him, he shifts his stance slightly and that same audio of a broken bottle is heard) and then the camera will cut and he just won't be there anymore. He's given a shred of backstory at the very end of the movie (delivered by quite possibly the worst actor in the entire picture) but it's much too little, much too late.
3. Way too many shots in this movie go on for way too long. It's very clear the director was trying to meet some minimum length requirement, because several times a shot will just linger on the protagonists walking and walking and walking for three to four minutes with no dialogue. One confrontation with Quiltface has Robert and Linda see him way off in the distance, yell intentionally to get his attention, and then stand there angrily bickering until he gets near, and THEN the two of them try to run away.
4. Also, if Camp Blood 2 presented a caricature of making a movie and Within the Woods presented a caricature of making a reality show, Carnage... presents a caricature of what photography class is. These "four students on a group project" go out to the desert for the day with no water, no food, no cover, and one camera, and then walk around until they find a pile of garbage, and Robert takes vacation-style photos of the two girls standing and hugging or smiling in front of the pile of garbage and THAT is what they're doing for extra credit in their photography class. It would have been cool if maybe the camera ends up playing into the plot (like, maybe they escape and because they have photos of Quiltface the cops are able to catch him or something?) but nope, it's completely forgotten the moment the killer shows up, which really makes you wonder why they even bothered with that motivation in the first place if it wasn't going to be relevant and nobody in the cast or crew knew anything about it.
Speaking of Camp Blood: this movie feels SO MUCH like a carbon copy of Camp Blood for most of its runtime.
It starts out with two horny twenty-somethings pretending to be doing official work out in the wilderness until they get overcome with horny and then a killer wielding a machete and wearing a Halloween store rubber mask shows up and kills them. Then four more twenty-somethings go out to the wilderness (after a brief shower scene and an introduction where one of the four characters is shown to be outright hostile to everyone else), a local tells them a story of a psychopathic killer, then they wander in the wilderness as the killer picks them off. An outdoorsman shares some backstory on the killer but then turns out to be in league with said killer, and then the surviving protagonist spends a while running away from the killer until they come in contact with the local from earlier in the film. But then a last-minute twist has the killer show up and the ending is left sort of ambiguous.
I swear, it's like they're the same movie but set in different locations and with a couple details switched around. I don't think Carnage... actually stole anything from Camp Blood (they were released in the same year, not that I think much time was put into making either film) but the two were clearly reading out of the same playbook. And in both cases, the result was pretty terrible.
Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface is terrible, but seriously, there's some sort of charm in it that I can't discount. The music in this movie is actually pretty good (the one good thing about the long boring shots of people walking is that they're usually overlaid with this charming synthesizer music) and Mack Hail absolutely steals the show as the foul-mouthed van driver. He sings a little song to himself during one of the interstitial scenes that Lisa and I still quote to this day.
So, don't watch Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface. Unless you have a bunch of friends over and want to show them the worst movie you'll ever see.
Overall Rating: 2/10 Days Like Game Day
Nostalgic Rating: 9/10 Killers Hiding Behind NOTHING
Please Respond to My Friend Request: I found Mack Hail on Facebook a while back! Still waiting for him to respond to my friend request.
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