Gutterballs (2008)

Canada….the land of hockey, Maple syrup, poutine, snobby faux-French people, and…bowling-themed slasher movies! This verrrry independent horror pic from the great white north has very good high points, but just as many (if not more) low points.

The story centers around two rival bowling groups at the Excalibur bowling alley. In fact, aside from the proprietor of the lanes, there are no other people in the movie. So there are literally no other people in the movie for the story to center around. Zero other people bowl at this particular alley; I had no idea that bowling was so totally eclipsed by the popularity of hockey in Canada. This is either a sign of how low the budget was or a comment on how sparse the population is in America’s Hat ©.

Anyhoo, these rival ‘teams’ are bowling against each other in a league, I guess (a very small league). One group is 4 douchebags who act like stereotypical crotch-grabbing, braggadocio-infested frat heads and the other group is mostly women and a doughy transvestite (huh?). Well after some friction between the groups, the douchebags gang rape one of the women on the other team, unbeknownst to the rest of her group. The following night is their scheduled match, and the victim doesn’t say anything to her group. Well as luck would have it, the doors get locked and a killer disguised with a bowling ball bag over their head starts knocking off members of both teams, one by one (two-by-two in one case of mutually suffocation by 69 – a first as far as I know). The reveal at the end is way more complicated than necessary, but whatever.

The script was weak, the acting was hyperbolically terrible, and this was clearly a movie filmed over the course of several weeks at a bowling alley after it closed for the night, with NO extras. On the plus side were the pretty gory and well done deaths, and their keeping with the theme of ‘bowling’ in those forced expirations. There was even a part that made me cringe, where the transvestite gets, ahem, bifurcated. There was also ample nudity, although the movie does fall short of a Golden Treehorn.

The other standout detail of the movie which at first was annoying, then became hilarious was the absolute overpackedness of the script with the word ‘fuck’. It was like breathing if one were hyperventilating:
“Hey motherfucker, where’s my fucking beer?”
“I don’t fucking know, get it your fucking self!”
“Whose fucking turn is it to fucking roll?”
“Fuck if I know!”
I would love to see this movie dubbed for television.

So with all that added up, it was a pretty bad movie, but with good effects and skin, and the most egregious use of the word ‘Fuck’. As if the scripts of Deadwood and The Big Lebowski has a baby with Tourette’s. With some non-Euclidiean math, that equals 3 Georges.