John’s Horror Corner: Smothered (2014), an honest, campy, bad, fun horror comedy featuring murder by breast smothering.

MY CALL: This film doesn’t masquerade as anything it isn’t. It’s honest, campy, bad, fun…and breasty. MOVIES LIKE Smothered: While tasteless and much more raunchy, I’d consider films like The Killer Eye (1999), Breeders (1986), Chillerama (2011), Head of the Family (1996) and Hideous! (1997) for a combination of boobs, gore and giggles.

Golden Eye‘sXenia Onatopp gave viewers an unexpected sexual thrill when she killed a man with a leg scissorhold mid-coitus. And that was just PG-13. John Schneider has stepped it up a notch and brought us a big-breasted temptress who commits mammary-assisted murder! That’s right. She smothers people to death with her breasts.

Probably inspired by recent news of the near death of a suffocating German lawyer to his amply-endowed girlfriend and the trailer park murder of a redneck who was “boobed” to death by his plus-sized wife, it seems that fatal breast smothering has become something of a new fad and John Schneider has playfully capitalized on this gimmick in bringing us Smothered.

In this horror comedy, we find Kane Hodder (Chillerama, Hatchet, Wishmaster), R. A. Mihailoff (Hatchet II, Texas Chainsaw Massacre III: Leatherface), Don Shanks (I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary) and Bill Mosely (The Devil’s Rejects, Texas Chainsaw 3D) play themselves for the most part at a Louisiana horror convention.

A glimpse into the horror con scene.

The cast is accompanied by a few others including Trixie (Shanna Forrestall; The Last Exorcism, Feral) and the murderess DeeDee (Brea Grant; Halloween II, Dexter, Heroes)…aptly named given her ummmmm virtues.

Embittered with a weak turnout in autograph sales (largely due to a cameo by John Schneider stealing the show), Kane accepts a gig to “haunt” a trailer park as Jason Voorhees. So he recruits his fellow unpopular horror icon friends to help him with this task. Upon arriving to the site of the RV park, they start dying one by one under strange accidental circumstances…and, of course given the title, a few breast smotherings for the sake of comedic T’n’A.

What’s odd is that the title and the opening breasticide set a standard that the rest of the movie doesn’t at all follow. We’d expect several more breasty assaults picking off our victims–making the title and opening scene more of a marketing strategy than a premise. Of course, a bunch of smothering cleavage murders would result in about zero gore and that obviously would leave the audience wanting more. That said, this film remained entertaining in a deliberately goofy way and those femme fatale weapons do enough appearances to rile up randy viewers. I had a lot of fun watching this cheeky horror comedy and the occasional non-breast-based murder turned out to be most welcome.

R. A. Mihailoff awkwardly attempting to be scary and Leatherface-y to scare the locals.

There were some solid efforts in the gore department. Some of the more fun gory scenes involve a razor wire snare trap producing some floppy flesh-rending gore, someone self-mutilating themselves to death basically by accident, and a slapstick “face peel” scene followed by an improvised first aid treatment that had me howling. Another effect I was especially fond of was the CGI ants–they actually looked kind of cute in one of the scenes.

This film was written and directed by John Schneider. Yes, the very same John Schneider you knew as Bo (The Dukes of Hazard) and Jonathan Kent (Smallville)! I guess his more recent work in Snow Beast, Return of the Killer Shrews and Super Shark give him a taste of playfully “bad” horror. I’m glad he’s taken this step in his career. I was certainly entertained.

This film doesn’t masquerade as anything it isn’t. It’s honest, campy, bad and fun.