Mutilator 2 review: A comic satire and a slice-and-dice shocker

Buddy Cooper and John S. Douglass’ The Mutilator first screened in January 1984 in North Carolina (where it was also shot and set) under the title Fall Break, and was retitled towards the end of that year, even as – ironically enough – the MPAA was insisting that Cooper mutilate his submitted version to secure the R-rating required by middle-American cinemas. While in many ways The Mutilator instantiated and essentialised every trope of a ‘classic’ slasher, it also marked the end of a phase, feeling like a tired rehash of a by-numbers scenario that had been done to death over a run of similar films over the previous four or five years – and it is hardly a coincidence that it came out in the same year that Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street would reinvigorate the moribund subgenre with a new kind of talking, unabashedly supernatural killer. Still, The Mutilator has remained iconic, not only for its genre purity (the flipside of its unoriginality), but also for a couple of very unpleasant kills, including a particularly misogynistic one involving the use of a fishing hook on a woman’s genitalia. Forty years later, that nautical tool knowingly forms the ‘2’ in the title of Cooper’s meta requel, becoming, both literally and metaphorically, the film’s hook.

In fully reflexive mode, Mutilator 2 takes place behind the scenes of a modernised remake of The Mutilator, whose director Jon (Mark Francis) is murdered on set just before filming ends. Jon’s brother Julian (Dan Grogan) persuades the investigating police detective Columbo (Damian Maffei) – the absurdity of whose name is noted by several characters – to hold off interviewing cast and crew until the wrap party the following night, when everyone will be more relaxed. That party – also a horror festival – attracts several stars of the original film (Ruth Martinez and Bill Hitchcock playing themselves, and Terry Kiser appearing as actor Jack Chatham, who played the killer Big Ed), while the cop from the film’s final scene appears with a prosthetic leg as though he really had been mutilated as much in real life as in the film’s invented world. Even Cooper has a cameo, also playing himself but as the film’s executive producer, and expressing relief both that he is not the returned director (even though in fact he is), and that in the original film, “the director did not get murdered” (even though the director never appeared as a character in The Mutilator as he does here). This playful slippage between a film’s fictions and its making culminates in a scene where Hitchcock, rewatching his death scene from the original film and quoting along with it, is then killed in real life in much the same way – and will also be crucial in the (very well telegraphed and hardly surprising) reveal of the killer’s identity, with life imitating art and an actor getting lost in a rôle.

Also lurking at the wrap party, amid various genre geeks, stoners and Gore Times livestreamer Zine (Ryan James), are people cosplaying different iconic horror villains that are all either influences on, or influenced by, Cooper’s own work. Clearly The Mutilator’s Big Ed would not have existed without Halloween’s Michael Myers or Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees before him, and Mutilator 2’s postmodern approach to horror filmmaking owes a debt to the Scream franchise (whose Ghostface is seen several times mingling with other partygoers). Conversely, without Big Ed’s unconventional use of tools to penetrate women’s sexual parts, Terrifier’s Art the Clown (also spotted in the background) would never have picked up this sadistic motif and rolled even harder with it. The kills in this belated sequel are indeed very nasty, and more graphic than in the original, but they are also decidedly silly (a dead marlin used as a weapon), and distributed with equal zeal between male and female victims, while carefully deconstructed – and reduced to fun – over the closing credits.

Like Marcel Walz’s That’s A Wrap (2023), Mutilator 2 is all at once a slasher and a constant commentary on the industry that creates slashers, turning the tables on the casting couch in a post-#MeToo generation while ringing the changes on the strange ecosystem in which low-budget independent horror was, and still is, made. Despite all the grotesque murder set-pieces, the tone remains light, making this as much a comic satire as a slice-and-dice shocker, with the constant goofiness no less gratuitous than the gore.

Mutilator 2 had its international première at FrightFest 2024, 23 Aug