by Something AwfulLas Vegas Bloodbath is a 1989 Slasher Movie featuring a killing spree in, you guessed it, Las Vegas.
After successfully scoring a big deal while away on business in Sacramento, a man named Sam Butler decides to surprise his wife Ruth by returning to their Las Vegas home early, in a shiny new red car. Upon arriving at the homestead, Sam discovers Ruth in bed with another man, a sheriff's deputy, and snaps, shooting them both to death with the deputy's carelessly discarded gun. After cutting off Ruth's head, Sam (who keeps having conversations with it) stores it in his car and begins wandering the city in a misogynistic psychosis that leads him to murder a daytime hooker named Tina, whose jaw he mutilates with a knife before tying her up and ripping her leg off with the car, dumping the severed appendage in a dumpster a little later.
After randomly blowing a bartender's brains out, Sam happens to spot a car advertising the Beautiful Lady Oil Wrestlers and follows it to an apartment, where the lady wrestlers have gathered for a baby shower being held for their friend Barbara. Skulking around the apartment (and killing a gardener who asks what he is doing) Sam observes the women as they watch themselves on TV, play cards and Truth or Dare, try on bikinis, and eat pizza for a while, before barging in and tying them all up at gunpoint, ready to enact the titular bloodbath with everything from blades to firearms to tools to his bare hands.
Noted for being the movie Brad Jones (of The Cinema Snob fame) hated the most before Nukie came along.
We try to do our best here at (inexplicable voice change) Tropey's:
- An Arm and a Leg: Tina gets one of her legs ripped off with a length of rope attached to the back of a car, and later Sam somehow rips one of Cherry's arms off with his bare hands.
- Blood Bath: The film ends with Sam being found in a gore-drenched washroom, lying in a bathtub filled with blood and a random assortment of body parts.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Just before the credits, Sam glares at the camera.
- Driven to Villainy: Sam was quite a decent guy before finding out his wife's affair. This causes him to go insane and becoming a misogynist murderer.
- Fanservice: The oil wrestling sequence is possibly one of the most gratuitous instances of this in film history.
- Femme Fatalons: Barbara's nails, which her friends jokingly suggest could kill someone.
- Fingore: Sam shoots a man's middle finger off mid-gesture."Let's see you pick your nose with that now."
- From Nobody to Nightmare: Sam starts as a regular business man before turning into an homicidal mysoginist murderer.
- Fun with Acronyms: Beautiful Lady Oil Wrestlers.
- Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Cherry grabs a stuffed bunny for comfort, only for Sam to yank it from her grasp and start bashing it against the wall.
- Groin Attack: Wendy briefly escapes by kicking Sam in the nads.
- Hallucinations: While trying to rape Barbara, Sam starts seeing her as his wife.
- I Lied: Actually said by Sam, when he reveals to an officer that no, those aren't his own hands that he's put up.
- Karma Houdini: Sam makes it through the film without any comeuppance for his murders,
- Kick the Dog: Sam screaming at a "damn brat" who asks for the time.
- Leave the Camera Running: Sam spends a lot of time just... wandering around.
- Mummies at the Dinner Table: Sam carries around Ruth's severed head, and has conversations with it, usually blaming everything on it.
- Offscreen Teleportation: When Cherry tries to escape, Sam (who was last seen in the bathroom) is right there when she opens the front door.
- Peek-a-Boo Corpse: An investigating officer finds bodies and parts of them strewn throughout the house.
- Plot-Inciting Infidelity: The film is kicked off by a man coming home to find his wife in bed with another man, causing him to snap and proceed to go on a mass-murdering rampage, targeting mainly women in particular.
- Public Domain Feature Films: Ever since it was covered on The Cinema Snob, the movie fell into this and can be found on several Public Domain box sets.
- Shovel Strike: Sam takes a gardener's shovel and beats him to death with it.
- Spree Killer: A man loses his mind when he discovers his wife's infidelity, then proceeds to go on a murderous rampage across Las Vegas, killing people (particularly women) in bars, on the streets, and random sleep-overs over the span of about a single day.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: After pulverizing a gardener's skull with a shovel, Sam briefly pauses, laughs, then keeps smashing away until there's literally nothing left of the guy's head.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The massacre was probably based on Richard Speck's mass murder of eight women, who he systematically killed in different rooms after breaking into their home and tying them up, just like Sam does.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The pizza delivery man never comes back with the second pizza or the bill, leaving us to just assume Sam killed him offscreen.
- Your Head Asplode: The shovel victim's head bursts after just one hit.
