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:
- Ambiguously Jewish: Sam, according to Something Awful.
- 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.
- Ax-Crazy: After his wife cheats on him, Sam goes completely, utterly and violently insane.
- Batter Up!: Sam (really just
a barely offscreen mat) gets walloped with one.
- 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 bodyparts.
- Boom, Headshot!: The bartender and Tiffany's deaths.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Just before the credits, Sam glares at the camera.
- The Cavalry Arrives Late: The police officer who enters the house in the end.
- Cover Drop: Sam glaring at the camera.
- Creator Cameo: Several behind the scenes personnel had bit parts.
- Daylight Horror: Most of the film.
- Dedication: To special effects artist Craig Sadler.
- Developing Doomed Characters: Oddly featured in the middle of the film, instead of the beginning.
- Evil Is Hammy: When Sam went off the deep end, he fell hard.
- Eye Open: Sam is only briefly downed by Man With Bat.
- 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."
- Flipping the Bird: Sam gets it from two passing motorists. As noted above, he shoots it off the second one.
- 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.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: Sam uncovering his wife's affair.
- Groin Attack: Wendy briefly escapes by kicking Sam in the nads.
- Hallucinations: While trying to rape Barbara, Sam starts seeing her as his wife.
- Hollywood Jehovah's Witness/Knocking on Heathens' Door: He gets decapitated.
- Hope Spot: Wendy escaping, Tiffany getting to a phone, Cherry escaping, and Man With Bat stopping by.
- Identical Stranger: Sam and Nicolas Cage.
- 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.
- Kubrick Stare: Given by Sam at the very end.
- Leave the Camera Running: Sam spends a lot of time just... wandering around.
- Monster Misogyny: Despite this, Sam kills a decent number of men.
- Mummies at the Dinner Table: Sam carries around Ruth's severed head, and has conversations with it, usually blaming everything on it.
- No Name Given: Several characters, most of them victims.
- Offscreen Teleportation: When Cherry tries to escape, Sam (who was last seen in the bathroom) is right there when she opens the front door.
- Off with His Head!: Happens offscreen to Ruth, and done with a slamming door to a Jehovah's Witness.
- Peek-a-Boo Corpse: An investigating officer finding bodies and parts of them strewn throughout the house.
- Pistol-Whipping: Done to Bambi.
- 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.
- Porn Stache: Most of the male characters look like they just wandered off the set of a porno.
- Power Born of Madness: The only viable explanation for how Sam can rip people's limbs off with his bare hands.
- 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.
- Recut: There's a few versions floating around.
- Recycled In Space: Truth or Dare?: A Critical Madness IN LAS VEGAS!
- Shovel Strike: Sam takes a gardener's shovel and beats him to death with it.
- Single Tear: Shed by one of the women, when tied up.
- 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.
- Sound-Only Death: Ruth, her lover and Wendy getting shot.
- Stage Names: Honeydew Mellon, Tuff Tiff, Wild Cherry, and Wet & Wild Wendy.
- 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.
- Title In:
- Sacremento, California, 5:00pm
- Las Vegas, Nevada, 10pm
- Later on Las Vegas Strip
- Traumatic C-Section: Barbara's death.
- Twitchy Eye: Sam, when Tina starts soliciting him.
- Unusual Euphemism: "Look at the size of those silver dollars."
- 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.
- Villain Song: Las Vegas Blood Bath, which plays over the credits.
- 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.
- Would Hurt a Child: Both Ruth and Barbara were pregnant.
- Your Head Asplode: The shovel victim's head bursts after just one hit.
