Crew
Director – Marcel Walz, Screenplay – Joe Knetter, Producers – Sarah French, Joe Knetter & Marcel Walz, Photography – Marcis Friedlander, Music – Klaus Pfreundner, Visual Effects – Maxwell Seiler. Production Company – KWF Productions.
Cast
Adriane McLean (Roxy), Sarah French (Sunshine), Adam Bucci (Jordy), Robert Felsted Jr. (Charlie), Gigi Gustin (Racquel), Ben Kaplan (Adam), Mark Justice (Ray/Paradise), Dazelle Yvette (Mama Birdy), Jed Rowen (Daisy), Bishop Stevens (Brutus), Andreas Robens (Zeus), Alex Dundas (Phoenix), Bianca Jane Montalvo (June)
Plot
August 19, 1976. A group of friends head out into the desert in a van to shoot a modelling campaign. Their attention is drawn by an old mining ghost town nearby. As they stray inside the town, the group fall prey to a group of masked freaks that live in the ruins.
German director Marcel Walz has made a long string of mostly low-budget horror films gradually gaining better budgets. These include the likes of Camp Corpses (2006), Cadaver (2007), Road Rip (2007), Tortura (2008), Hacked to Pieces (2009), Le Petit Mort (2009), Avantgarde (2010), Popular (2010), Candy House (2011), Plastic Surgery Massacre (2012), Raw: The Curse of Grete Muller (2013), Seed 2 (2014), The Diary of Grete Muller (2014), Le Petit Mort II (2014), The Revelation of Grete Muller (2015), the remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (2016), Rootwood (2018), Blind (2019), Pretty Boy (2021), That’s a Wrap (2023), The Anacondas (2025), Garden of Eden (2025), Jurassic Reborn (2025), Ice-Pocalypse (2026), Master of the Universe (2026), The Odyssey (2026) and Shark Thrash (2026).
Brute 1976 seems very much construed as a homage to the 1970s Backwoods Brutality cycle. The opening prologue and desert setting gives strong vibes of The Hills Have Eyes (1977). A few minutes later, we are introduced group to the group on a road trip in a Kombi van, giving off strong associations of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) – we even get the characters asking if they have watched that film at one point. Of course, this is now a retro-1970s setting and is Backwoods Brutality by way of X (2022) with the group on the way to a modelling shoot. The film is also dedicated to Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven, respectively the directors of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes.
Marcel Walz’s films started out fairly low budget and scrappy but by the time of Brute 1976 things have improved considerably, particular on a level of general filmmaking polish. Walz pushes things for grotesque effect – most notedly, Jed Rowen as the cross-dressing Daisy, who taunts the imprisoned Gigi Gustin before standing up to reveal he is wearing a bib made up of her friend’s severed breasts. Later we get another shock scene where a penis is placed through a bathroom gloryhole only to have a power drill driven down through the tip of it by the person on the other side.
The latter third of the show abandons Backwoods Brutality and takes off in a left field Folk Horror kind of way (almost). Here the group of freaks living in the mining town put on masks and reveal they are part of some kind of doomsday cult, which involves sacrifice. The film tilts in the direction of the American Midwest cults of Children of the Corn (1984) et al, but does nothing much with any of this.
Trailer here