Raquel (Gigi Gustin) and June (Bianca Jade Montalvo) are on their way to a photoshoot when their car breaks down in the desert. Looking for help, the couple find a cave and as they get distracted with their attraction to one another, they find themselves targeted by nefarious masked killers. As one of the women is taken hostage, the rest of the photoshoot crew arrives in a campervan unaware of what they’re about to walk into.
‘Brute 1976’ is directed by Marcel Walz (‘Blind’) and written by Joe Knetter (‘Blind’), and it’s an homage to the horror flicks of the ‘70s. Think ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ and you’re in the right ballpark. Director Walz has previously shown promise with his eerie stalker flicks ‘Blind’ and ‘Pretty Boy’, so I was interested to see what he has up his sleeve for ‘Brute 1976’. Walz’s love of horror shines through everything he does, and that’s definitely the case here. He captures the ‘70s nicely and the film has a nostalgic throwback vibe to the gritty horrors of that era.
The film starts off solidly enough with two women finding themselves in danger and the film’s threat revealing itself fairly quickly. As is standard with the slasher genre, the audience is then introduced to a colourful cast of characters and it becomes part of the fun trying to figure out who is going to get picked off first. There’s a cursory attempt to give the characters some fleshing out but this is soon abandoned in favour of gruesome deaths and plenty of gore. You could argue that horror has never really been about characterisation but given that ‘Brute 1976’ is trying to sit somewhere between grindhouse and elevated horror, there’s an expectation that more characterisation would have been welcome.
As the group begins getting picked off one-by-one, the gore amps up and there are a few scenes that will make the viewer squirm. One that comes to mind is a gloryhole murder that will most definitely be hard to watch for the men in the audience. Of course, in true horror-style there are some twists and revelations along the way and the climax is the kind of bloody face-off you’ll be expecting. Walz hits all of the markers well enough but the film struggles to rise above being more than a pastiche to the films it’s paying homage to. The story is fairly thin too, feeling more like an assembly line of kills than a fully-fledged story that will engage the audience.
The performances from the cast vary. Mark Justice is the standout as the libido-driven Ray. I wish he was given more to do as his character is a lot of fun and brightens up the screen every time he appears. Walz’s frequent collaborator Sarah French gives another good turn as Sunshine and Adriane McLean impresses as the potential final girl Roxy. All of the actors do their best with a script that could have been finessed a little more, but in some ways the clunkier parts do nicely recall the films ‘Brute 1976’ is trying to emulate.
‘Brute 1976’ is clearly made with a lot of love and aesthetically, it’s a strong effort. More development of the story and script, and a fleshing out the characters would have benefitted it. While the film delivers on the gore, it’s never particularly scary and the killers aren’t anything we haven’t seen in the genre before. ‘Brute 1976’ could have been amazing but the final product doesn’t quite hit the highs you hope it will from the opening. With a sequel set in the 80s on the way, it’ll be interesting to see if that’s a stronger effort.
Cast: Adriane McLean, Sarah French, Gigi Gustin, Bianca Jade Montalvo, Dazelle Yvette, Adam Bucci, Mark Justice, Alex Dundas, Jed Rowen Director: Marcel Walz Writer: Joe Knetter Certificate: Unrated Duration: 105 mins Released by: Cinephobia Release date: 30th September 2025 (VOD)
