Census Bloodbath: Can't We All Just Get A Lawn?

Year:
1985
Director:
Nathan Schiff
Cast:
John Smihula, Adam Berke, Mary Spadaro
Run Time:
1 hour 10 minutes

Plot: They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore follows Texas gardeners Billy Buck (John Smihula of director Nathan Schiff's previous slasher The Long Island Cannibal Massacre) and Jacob (Adam Berke) moving to Long Island, where they proceed to murder the shit out of a bunch of people, mostly women, while occasionally complaining about rich Northerners often enough that the movie can pretend it has a theme.

Analysis: 1980's The Long Island Cannibal Massacre is a movie that is bad but exuberantly bloody in a way that only a teenage filmmaker could bring to life. This is indeed what writer-director-producer-cinematographer-editor Nathan Schiff was at the time. However, as we catch up with him five years later for his follow-up slasher, he is now in his early twenties and we can begin to expect at least a little more from him. Unfortunately, with They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore, we get even less.

Oh, it tries to do things. It really does. It even makes a stab at having arthouse themes. Or at least that's what I assume the monologue over a shot of a dismembered Barbie doll is meant to be doing at the beginning of the movie. 

Unfortunately, the end result is completely incoherent. For instance, if this is meant to be about a war between the classes, why are the gardeners such cartoons? (Billy has on Alice Cooper eye makeup and a dark black fright wig, whereas Jacob's meant to have a disfigured face that is brought to life by what seems for all the world to be a dime store witch mask.) 

But forget about the macro level of themes, the movie doesn't even have a grip on the micro level of scenes. There is a baffling moment in the third act where the gardeners kidnap one dark-haired woman, only to have the next scene feature two identical women tied up in a room while Billy proceeds to murder other women who look exactly like them outside, and it is dazzlingly unclear if he is attacking multiple women one at a time or a couple women over and over again.

On top of being incoherent, it is also boring. Even with a 70 minute run time, it finds ample opportunity to show us long scenes of, say, Billy messily eating from a can. Plus, The filmmaking is top-to-bottom amateurish (which, again, makes sense from amateurs, but you don't have to like it). Smihula and Berke's performances aren't exactly groundbreaking, but any time anybody else opened their mouth I felt a profound sense of relief that the gardeners were the characters we spent the most time with. Every other performance is as flat as the Long Island lawns that they have tended to so lovingly.

They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore at least retains the unrestrained Herschell Gordon Lewis messiness of the kills in Long Island Cannibal Massacre. They are uniformly poorly rendered (intestines look like shoelaces, somebody pulls a spleen out of a skull, and so on), but that sense of low-budget glee is still palpable. And, poorly rendered or not, some of the grotesque acts depicted onscreen truly are stomach churning (including multiple women having their faces peeled from their skulls - which seems to be the only bone that the filmmakers are aware of in the human body).

I think it goes without saying that the manner in which the plays out is also grossly misogynistic, in a variety of repellently ugly ways (including - be warned - the line that I chose for Champion Dialogue, which is vile but also too hilariously unhinged to ignore). But that is just one sin of many that this movie commits, a list that also includes having a complete lack of narrative thrust (there is no rhyme or reason to the murders, and at one point the killers literally just take a break to go to the movies) and boasting characters that fail so hard to even be one-dimensional that they might as well just collapse into black holes.

I suppose I should close out with a few nice things, just for fairness' sake. First and foremost, the theme that plays over the opening credits is pretty neat, showing off the same deft hand with picking library music that The Long Island Cannibal Massacre had. And the gag that [SPOILER ALERT] the gardeners end the movie by giving up and getting corporate jobs is actually pretty amusing. But beyond that, this is a blighted wasteland that is not worth spending a second of your precious time on.

Killer: Billy Buck (John Smihula) and Jacob (Adam Berke)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: After knocking one of his employers out with a wrench, Billy puts dynamite in her mouth (well, the mouth of the doll that has suddenly replaced her), which is a move that I appreciated for its sheer Wile E. Coyote-ness.

Sign of the Times: One character is solely (and repeatedly) defined by her relationship to cocaine.

Scariest Moment: The first time Jacob is revealed, while peeping on a necking couple, his tongue is poking out of the witch mask and copious drool is pouring out.

Weirdest Moment: A woman who has been captured by the gardeners insists that she can get herself and her fellow captive out of the situation because of her skills as a psychiatrist. She then proceeds to tell Jacob to look at himself in a mirror and informs him that he's "fuckin' ugly." This works!

Champion Dialogue: “I ain't gonna rape you, bitch, you smell like fish."

Body Count: 14; or somewhere thereabouts - I'm unclear exactly how many dark-haired women there actually were in the final act. I suppose it's possible he propped some of them back up to shoot them again.

1. Ricky is smacked in the back repeatedly with a machete.
2. Sally has her intestines pulled out.
3. Movie Woman is stabbed.
4. Alan is impaled in the ass with a hot metal spike and then he's shot in the back.
5. Alan's Girlfriend is dismembered with a saw.
6. Sunbather is drowned.
7. Barbecue Girl is disemboweled.
8. Ms. Reynolds has her head battered with a wrench, and then her head is exploded with dynamite.
9. Dark-Haired Woman #1 is shot.
10. Dark Haired Woman #2 is shot.
11. Dark-Haired Woman #3 is chainsawed.
12. Dark-Haired Woman #4 is shot.
13. Dark-Haired Woman #5 is decapitated with a machete.
14. Dark-Haired Psychiatrist is chainsawed in the torso.

TL;DR: They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore has some moments of handmade charm, but they don't redeem its bottom-of-the-barrel storytelling.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1103