When a slasher movie's main drawing card is having porn star Ron Jeremy playing its killer then it'd better not take itself too seriously. Thankfully, Andre The Butcher (previously known as Dead Meat) doesn't at all.

Philip Cruz's tongue-in-cheek low-budgeter (that he co-wrote with James Hyde) gets off to an extremely silly start as an escaped convict is being chased through the woods by a heavily armed FBI agent. They're both killed off, however, when what's got to be one of the dumbest looking killers in slasher movie history (a fat, bloody apron wearing psycho who wears a welding helmet) shows-up and makes quick work of them - one even gets a knife through the eye.

In comes our comic relief narrator, who reminded me of Uncle Jesse from TV's The Dukes Of Hazzard and will continually pop-up to make snarky comments and propel the slender plot forward. He tells us all about a cheerleader squad who are headed off to a competition.

After they're in a fight with some rival cheerleaders and they have an accident with their car, they end-up at a remote house where they decide to hole-up until they can somehow figure out a way to get back on the road. Unluckily for them, the house turns out to be close to Andre's stomping grounds, and on top of that two not-so-bright escaped convicts happen to be lurking around as well.

After Cruz tosses out some nutty lesbian talk (what's with that whole conversation about "sausages" and "peaches" anyway?) and gives us a body double enhances girl-on-girl scene with Vienna sausages and baked beans being used erotically, they end-up being held hostage by the aforementioned cons - only for them all to be stalked and killed off by our pal Andre (who it turns out was once a happy butcher, who's family was murdered, making him go absolutely mental).

Playing like a crossing of a "hostage drama" action movie and crappy slasher flick, Andre The Butcher isn't nearly as horrible as it sounds. Sure, it's packed with goofy sound effects, cheesy gore, and a killer who's mostly thrown in the background to deliver a few fairly junky deaths from time-to-time, but there's just something about this that doesn't make you turn off the DVD player in utter disgust.

Maybe it's the oddity of seeing Jeremy hamming it up (a deleted scene on the disc has one actor say "Holy shit, is that Ron Jeremy?" when Andre is unmasked - it should've stayed in the movie) or the fact the amateur cast does pretty good for the most part (Alan Fessenden steals it as constantly giggling con Tovar, while Faye Canada is pretty awful as a jive talking FBI agent with bad line delivery), but this just never crosses the line into "completely sucks".

It's certainly not for anyone but B-movie trash cinema fans and the finale is completely lame (I mean, c'mon, urine holy water?) but Andre The Butcher makes for a dopey enough timewaster. (Chris Hartley, 12/5/06)

Directed By: Philip Cruz.
Written By: Philip Cruz, James Hyde.

Starring: April Billingsley, Ron Jeremy, Maury Sterling, Terry Mross.