PARTY BUS TO HELL

2017 | DIR. ROLFE KANEFSKY | REVIEW BY GLENN COCHRANE.

PARTY BUS TO HELL. Yeah, you know what you're getting. With a title that serves as the movie's plot, and when paired with the poster art, you wouldn't bother watching it if you weren't expecting 80-minutes of gratuitous violence, excessive nudity and sub-par acting. And so for the sake of offering a fair and contextualised critique it's important to admit that this is not a good movie. In fact it's a bad movie, and director Rolfe Kanefsky knows it.

Telling the story of a group of revellers on a bus headed for the Burning Man festival in Nevada, the movie has them run into a depraved Satanic cult, and sees them flayed, dismembered and exposed to an assortment of creatively gruesome rituals. What ensues is an abundance of titties (of all shapes and sizes), talking severed heads, and every possible excuse to amp up the horror. Snakes and spiders galore, entrails and heavy metal music... PARTY BUS TO HELL is the definition of exploitation.

​Watching the movie alone at home cannot possibly have the same impact as watching the movie with a cinema full of frenzied genre fans. And while my experience was by way of a media screener, I have experienced enough genre films with audiences to imagine how fun this one would have been in the right environment. Kanefsky's direction is frivolous and satirical, as he applies a kitchen-sink-n-all attitude.​

Tara Reid serves as the headline attraction (and executive produces), with very little screen time. She gives the movie its draw card – if you consider her as such – but doesn't have much purpose. Her scenes are isolated (no doubt shot over the course of one day... two at the most) with the rest of the cast being put through the ringer. Fans of the calibre of gore being pumped out by Troma over the past decade (Poultrygiest, Return to Nuke'Em High) will be the ones who latch on to PARTY BUS TO HELL, and when the film descends into its orgy of hardcore sex and violence, they might just cream their pants.

This movie has no pretensions, and it makes no apologies. It will have its haters, and is destined to be critically maligned... but when the genre and target audience is taken in to account there is no denying that PART BUS TO HELL is fucking insane. It is a no-holds barred demonstration of excess, and an unadulterated gorfest, and when push comes to shove it delivers a shit-tonne of fun. I just wish I could have seen it with an audience of equally insane movie goers.