Party Bus to Hell

I’m starting to think I ain’t no fun no more.

I mean, I can appreciate a cheesy, cheaply-made flick for its inherent absurdity and fun and whatnot.  The first Evil Bong still resonates with me, and let’s not ever forget the off-the-wall shenanigans of Traxx.  Even Pervert! was kinda fun, even if much of the enjoyment that night came courtesy of the liquid refreshment on hand.  But, lately, it seems like the “fun” I hear about doesn’t manifest itself for me.  Is it me?

I’m not entirely sure how the rabbit hole went, but I first heard about Party Bus to Hell in relation to the upcoming film The Outlaw Johnny Black, the newest effort from the makers of Black Dynamite.  I wanna say the film was mentioned on that film’s IndieGoGo page for some reason, but recent views (the campaign is over, FYI) show this to be a mishandled memory.  Still, thanks to my perusal, I somehow found my way to the bus.  I wish I hadn’t.

Here’s what you need to know concerning the plot:  A charter bus on its way to Burning Man “breaks down” in the middle of the desert, leaving the passengers to be set upon by a pack of sadistic Satanists.  Insert gawdy amounts of gratuitous nudity (sorry, screenwriters, but nudity can, indeed, be rather gratuitous), bloody carnage, and nonsense.

I’ve seen a few of writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky’s prior efforts, but they’re all late-night soft-core outings like Sex Files: Alien Erotica (he seems to have been passed over for the sequel?) and the Emmannuelle Through Time series.  Party Bus doesn’t try much harder than those; in fact, Alien Erotica had better sets and more competent camera handling!  The acting there was stronger, too, if for no other reason than the casts knew what they wanted to do: titillate us while telling a story about an alien infiltrating human society.  Here, the cast trudges through things just as aimlessly and meanderingly as the audience is forced to, and with just about as much conviction and purpose.  Lines are delivered as flatly as possible, and “characters” are communicated through broad and obscenely direct exposition.  Tara Reid is given main billing in all of the promotional material, but she’s barely here, popping up in a small handful of scenes with little impact on the rest of the story.  And, at this juncture, it probably speaks volumes that so much emphasis was placed on Reid’s involvement.

The visuals fare even worse.  The camera is a cheap digital thing, and it’s maneuvered about without care or skill.  The editing is atrocious, constantly cutting about as though Frederick Krueger (esquire?) flailed wildly at the various lengths of film (this rhetorical device assumes the use of film, even though it’s clearly not been touched here); several takes are distinguishable from the finished product, including ones that didn’t quite have their visual effects added in, and there’s no rhyme, reason, or coherence surrounding the choices made.  It didn’t need to be so aggravating to watch, but that’s the product they gave us.  The effects are all as cheaply-done and slapdash as possible, many of them making me wonder what the point of them was.

I understand not everyone’s got millions to throw around for producing their movies, but those who don’t need to squeeze as much as they can from what little they’ve got.  Primer was made on a $7,000 budget, and it looks like a proper film; Jesus, Bro! had a crowd-sourced budget of just over fifty grand, and even that looks spectacular compared to Party Bus.  I don’t know the budget here, but it looks like they got some people together over a weekend and filmed a lark, adding some tits and ass in there to try to turn a profit.  As it stands, no amount of meaningless titillation (I mean, there’s a focused-on bit revolving around a lesbian encounter in the bus’s bathroom that doesn’t even bother showing it, even though its build-up takes up a relatively decent amount of time) can redeem this boring, obnoxious bit of nothing.  Maybe I’m just no fun, but this did nothing for me, and I can see it doing very little for most everyone else.