User Reviews

Hatchetman is set in Los Angeles where wannabe lawyer Claudia (Cheryl Wagner) makes ends meat by working in a strip club at night, one ordinary night fellow stripper Brittany (Fonta Sawyer) is brutally murdered by a hatchet wielding maniac. Soon after another stripper named Michele (Elizabeth Ryan) is murdered in the same fashion, Claudia's cop boyfriend Sonny (Jon Briddell) is on the case which makes everyone feel better although all he seems to do is to tell the girls to stay indoors. Anyway, the murders continue & the killer is dubbed 'Hatchetman' by the police as they franticly try to discover they're identity before anymore bodies turn up...

Written & directed by Robert Tiffi this is pretty bottom of the barrel stuff that I didn't like, at all. The extremely repetitive script which takes itself very seriously is rubbish, the mystery elements are awful & it tries so hard to point he finger in the direction of one character & it's painfully obvious it isn't them, since there are only two other suspects you've a 50/50 chance of getting it right, it's no surprise when the killer is revealed & their lame motives are given a whole one line of dialogue, I don't think much effort or thought went into the story which plays more like a murder mystery than out-and-out slasher that it's deceptively exploitative title might lead you to expect. The character's & dialogue are equally awful, all these girls seem to do is give each other advice about stripping. Their actions are stupid, I mean if there'a killer running around murdering all your mates would walk around late at night on your own? The cops are clueless, there is no motive given to the suspects so it's impossible to care & I wasn't really bothered who did it because I wasn't given any reason to care. There's no imagination in the murders, there's not enough of them & one felt while watching Hatchetman the filmmakers weren't trying anything more ambitious than to make a gory slasher with plenty of nudity & they even failed to do that.

Director Tiffi does OK actually & you get the impression there was some money behind this as it looks professional if nothing else, however there are no scares, no tension or atmosphere & the exploitation elements are disappointing. You know just having girls go topless every five minutes doesn't mean it's erotic or sexy as despite all the nudity & breasts on show it gets boring to watch, the gore is none existent really with lots of blood splashing over nearby objects but apart from a brief slit throat there's no actually special make-up effects here. Overall I was expecting more from a film called Hatchetman.

The budget probably wasn't big but it looks alright & is quite well made, at least they saved some money on the costume budget because the girls don't often wear many clothes. They probably saved a load on special effects too as there aren't any. The acting is poor from just about everyone.

Hatchetman is a terrible slasher that piles on the nudity but is still as bad as most of these straight-to-video potboilers, definitely not recommended.

*SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT*

The filmmakers of "Hatchetman" don't know anything about making a slasher film but they know a lot about making an exploitation movie. "Hatchetman" is about a psycho with a cheap mask and an even cheaper hatchet attacking strippers. A cop shows up to investigate all of these dastardly stripper murders. Will he solve the case and make up with his stripper girlfriend? Do we care? Bring on the breasts!

Speaking of breasts, I must take a moment and praise Mia Zottoli AKA Ava Lake. The filmmakers had the good sense to keep Mia around for as long as possible. The first time I saw her topless, I started singing "Some kind of wonderful!". After seeing her shower scene, it was time to sing "She's a brick...house!". Mia's wonderful brick house makes "Hatchetman" worth seeing.

Any movie that starts off in a strip club has got to be good on some level. Strippers and slashers are a potent exploitation movie mix. As a slasher movie, "Hatchetman" is pretty weak. There's nothing scary happening here. But for a bountiful harvest of breasts, "Hatchetman" has a bumper crop.

The best compliment I can give to this movie is that I was so bored watching it that I started to clean my room. Other than that, I can't think of any positives. This has all the hallmarks of Boxom B Badness, but everything is so dull. The story is hacked from better movies, the revelation of the killer is unsatisfying, and the movie is about ninety-seven minutes too long. I liked the ketchup style blood, and the strip club setting, and I really enjoyed watching Rob the manager die a horrible death and the killer's dumb motivation monologue. Mia Zottoli, whose breasts you may remember, and the mostly topless female ensemble are vapid as they are pretty. The males in these Showtime movies are always grey haired quasi tough guys and the girls are large breasted bimbos. Not bad enough to have a laugh fest, but certainly nothing to be proud of either. Bored now.

Some deranged hatchet-wielding nutcase wearing a skull mask brutally bags a bunch of sexy strippers in good ol' Los Angeles. Our wacko is one real sick puppy who cuts off the hands of his victims. Our heroine is some busty brunette who's planning on going to law school, but alas is forced to peel her clothes off to make money to pay for her tuition. Alas, we never get to see this particular hot babe naked. Moreover, this gal winds up falling in love with the tough detective who's investigating the grisly killings. Fortunately, we do get to see several other foxy young ladies dancing and prancing on stage in skimpy g-strings. Mia Zottoli in particular makes for a most lovely sight sans clothes. Ditto ravishing redhead cutie Nina Tapanin. As for the film itself, well it's total unmitigated junk, complete with poor direction, a laughably ridiculous script, cardboard characters, terrible acting from a non-star cast, the ever-popular "killer in the backseat of the car" cliché, shoddy gore, and a crummy "it ain't over yet!" non-ending. But this honey certainly delivers an ample abundance of gut-busting unintentional belly laughs and oodles of gratuitous nudity, which means it's an enjoyably brainless piece of blithely low-rent straight-to-video slasher schlock.

First off, i'm shocked that this crapfest isn't made by lionsgate. but oh, that's right. in lionsgate strippers don't actually strip (see grim reaper review). Instead we got a film created by showtime. oh boy, we're in for some fun. The only thing that saved this movie from getting a one is the fact that the strippers actually do get naked.... well...mostly. it's only top nudity. what is it with strippers and not fully stripping in these movies? whatever. i guess it would have had to have been rated x then. anywho, onto the plot.

Basic overall story is this stripper girl wants to get into law school. cause, you know, that's the first thing they look for on a resume. she keeps getting rejected and has to work in a strip club after college hours. after some of the stupidest stripping scenes ever, one of her friends gets killed in a car, complete with a blood spray that came straight from a heinz bottle. the gang, none the wiser, head home and one of their friends stops in to say hi, leaves and gets axed while sitting there doing nothing. i swear. what is wrong with people in these movies? do they not understand that you can run away or fight back the men in the walmart masks? that maybe holding up your hands saying "no" will make them stop? i have a secret for you ladies, (whispers) that never works.

After a while, the main girl's police boyfriend, who, just like the guy in fear of clowns, looks like he was late to a business meeting finds the dead bodies. they blame it on a guy who threatened one of the girls who just got out on parole and they go look for him. of course though the girls go back to their regular lives of stripping (just their tops of course) and the killer goes on some more fun sprees killing everyone. this is the point in the movie where i actually fell asleep for about 10 minutes. yes. a movie about murdering strippers put me to sleep. that's incredibly depressing. you know you have a crappy movie on your hands when you can't even make THAT interesting.

So after some more useless killings and when police kill a guy fixing his car (no repercussions from that btw) the killer finally shows up when there are two girls left and the main girl stabs him several times and it looks like he's dead so when she goes to get her boyfriend policeman, when they come back, he's run away. and we never see him again. no doubt looking at a sequel. please god no. the killer is someone i didn't even know was part of the movie. at first i thought when they revealed him i missed something from earlier, but i actually think a random person came in from off the street and they just decided to go with it and film him. oh. and she got into law school. yays.

This movie is stupid. it's boring, pointless, and goes on WAYYY too long. it's only 96 minutes long, but it feels a LOT longer than that. this movie has the unique ability to distort time so that 1 1/2 hours transforms into a myriad of torture and neverending pain. or sleep. whichever comes first. the only enjoyment you might get out of it is boobs. however they don't really do anything with the nudity. it's just kind of....there.

This does have the distinct honor of being the only movie that starts several hot half naked girls that can make me fall asleep from the sheer boring longness of it. so here's your golden crappy for "most boring movie with boobs in it" If you have the opportunity, don't watch this movie. unless you want to question the theory of the passage of time, in that case, be my guest.

Hatchetman gets 2 stripper boobs, out of 10.

There have been many sub-genres of the slasher movie throughout the ages. From the madman next door to the campfire tales of the local psychopath, slashers have popped up in various forms throughout the ages. One of the least successful, surprisingly enough, is the variation on the Jack the Ripper theme. While there have been good examples of this( "From Hell", "Jack's Back", "Out of the Dark" to an extent. and yes a couple of guilty pleasures for me "Fear City" and "Edge of Sanity")most films portraying a psychopath stalking a stripper/prostitute have not been able to combine the necessary exploitation elements successfully. "Hatchetman" personifies this trend in all of it's failures.

Managing to be both dull and inept, "Hatchetman" is one of the worst examples of this sub-genre! It's your standard psychopath stalks strippers movie, only done with a lack of suspense and talent. Stultifyingly bad in almost every department, this movie is poorly acted and limply written, with all the clichés present. The mystery is so simplistic that you figure out the identity of the murderer five seconds after you first meet him. And, as is required for this type of film, all characters act like complete, blithering idiots. In fact both the writers and the actors seem to have no sense of character development or motivation. All of the situations that should seem normal to each individual character, feel false. Even the dialogue feels forced.Which leads me to ask this question. Why do conversations in movies like this always feel as if they would never happen in the real world? Is there no writer competent enough to make these characters sound and act like normal, intelligent beings? But I guess that's besides the point. I mean , what do expect in these movies except a fair amount of gore, and a bevy of naked bodies. Yet the director doesn't have enough talent to make even that interesting. In fact this movie suffers from the one sin that most movies never recover from. It is incredibly dull!!! The only things that liven up this movie are the crappy but fun fake gore scenes and the beauty of the ladies themselves. And, too often, even that doesn't work.

So what have here is a mess of a movie, one that was made in an attempt to cash in on two exploitation elements that should go hand-in-hand with each other. Still, it can't even get that right. So it ends up creating a new low for this genre of slasher films. And believe me, that is truly horrifying.