FILM GUTTER REVIEWS: DOCTOR BLOODBATH AKA BUTCHER KNIFE (1987)

Dir. Nick Philips, USA, 56 mins
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Oh no, it's that time again...

A couple of months ago we had the 'pleasure' of acquainting ourselves with the work of Nick Philips, a busy director throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s covering everything from sex films, action films, a range of slashers and more besides. Last time around we explored both parts of Criminally Insane, a pretty lousy slasher in the first place that doubled down on the insult by making a sequel that recycled about half of the material of the original, and I'm not exaggerating – 25 minutes of the 61 were taken from the first film.

And so we come to Doctor Bloodbath, or should that be Butcher Knife, one of those random double-titled movies that seemed to prevail in the 80s. Imagine watching a movie like this once and then discovering that you're accidentally watching it again without realising? Despite the fact this was made much later than Criminally Insane, it scarcely looks any better in terms of budget and production values – in fact I would argue the only slight visual upgrades were in a less disjointed editing style (which is welcome) and some blood that actually looked rather more like blood than I might have predicted.

(Butcher Knife is the title given in the opening credits here, although IMDB only refers to it as Doctor Bloodbath, so from here I'm just going to refer to it as Butcher Knife for the sake of ease.)

Butcher Knife is the tale of Dr Thorn, a lead consultant in an abortion clinic who – unfortunately for someone in his profession – consider the very act to be evil. And he uses the information he has on these women to make his way into their houses before killing them. That's a large portion of what the movie is about really, with the killings being pretty random and fairly unspectacular – the effects again look pretty ropey, with none of the slasher-style murders looking persuasive in the least. The second thread to the story is about Thorn's uneasy relationship with his wife, with the two of them spending little time together – in fact Mrs Thorn prefers to spend her time with a poet in his tiny apartment above a chip shop. Yes, the locations are fairly random – in fact I'm reasonably sure that the house that Thorn lives in is the self-same house from Criminally Insane 2. But of course it's not long before Mrs Thorn reveals that she is pregnant – not by her husband, of course, but by the very dodgy-accented poet she has been having an affair with. And she asks her husband to give her an abortion – not a wise move given what we know about him...

All the Nick Philips trademarks that we came to know are found here, including an awful lot of the same cast – the only person conspicuous by her absence is Priscilla Alden, Ethel Janwoski herself. In fact the cast is so similar it uses the same title card for them as both Criminally Insane movies – I'm not 100% sure that the first and third victim aren't the same actress with a different haircut either. The acting is wooden, the sound quality is poor, the plot is plodding and pedestrian and there's nothing to really scare, thrill or shock at all throughout. Worse than that, this apparently also reuses footage from another Philips film, Satan's Black Wedding – which I might just have to get around to at some point...

RATING: 1/10. I don't know why or how I had been expecting any improvement here – maybe it's because I felt like there was a hint of promise in Criminally Insane, and maybe that could be delivered on. Maybe time advancing and filming techniques coming on could deliver something better. Again, the central concept could work, but it's simply not done well enough to deliver on any of the potential promise in it. Everything here is badly done, and this one doesn't feel like it even has that splash of accidental humour to lighten it at all. Not the poorest of the three so far, but still a cutting 1/10 is the final score.

​If you want to see this disaster for yourself you'll have to go hunting for it a little, but hey maybe you'll like it more than me. After all, IMDB gives it 2/5 stars so apparently someone does."