What do you get when you take an old, cheap 1971 exploitation movie called Honey Britches, edit in ailing (and obviously senile) John Carradine to do some snipped-in cryptic yammering as the "Judge of Hell", and give Troma the distribution rights? Well you get, Demented Death Farm Massacre...The Movie, that's what.

Don't be fooled by noted B-movie hack Fred Olen Ray's co-directing credit as all he did was film the Carradine bits and don't be fooled by the title into thinking this is a horror movie. Apart from a few moments of bloodshed in the last fifteen minutes (like when one person gets a pitchfork in the neck) this is just a low-scale redneck crime thriller.

It all begins innocently enough as we see two local yokels driving their pick-up around delivering moonshine while a jaunty country music tune plays in the background. Well one of the "good 'ole boys" lets his religious side show when upon delivering some shine to a local brothel goes on a long-winded rant about how the customer he's selling it to is a "whore" (good way to ring up business if you ask me...).

We'll get back to our God loving, illegal booze-making hick in a second, but now we have to introduce our villains of this piece (and ineffectual villains they are as they spend most of the movie just yelling at each other). Seems that a big city jewelry store was robbed of a million dollars worth of diamonds and said crooks just so happen to be passing through the area on the run when their stolen Jeep runs out of gas. After covering it up with twigs (that's not suspicious at all!) they take a walk through the woods in search of somebody who might be able to help them and end-up at the cabin of a naïve country girl. Said country girl just so happens to be the newlywed wife of our preaching "businessman" and when he arrives home (with the Jeep in tow, since he "found it" at the side of the road) he has to deal with his new houseguests while they try to keep their identities secret from their hosts and figure out a way they can get back on the run.

This leads up to a pretty unexciting finale, which is actually more exciting than almost the rest of the film if you can believe it, where the husband finds out his wife was taken advantage of, kills off a few of the crooks, and ends-up in a junky car/foot chase to finish it off.

For its pure sleaze factor, Demented Death Farm Massacre is watchable. It's not a great movie, the line readings by the cast sometimes border on horrific, it's a tad dull, and the blood looks exactly like the red paint it is, but it's must viewing for aficionados of weak 70's drive-in fare and at least there's a catfight to briefly keep us amused.

Considering that Ray didn't really alter too much of the original film (though for godsakes, what the Hell was he thinking?!) I can't go after him for attempting to make a poor film better or for re-cutting the movie so it doesn't resemble its original form, but I will take him to task for taking co-director credit when his contributions must have taken less than a day to shoot. (Chris Hartley, 9/5/05)

Directed By: Donn Davison, Fred Olen Ray.
Written By: Barbara Morris Davison.

Starring: John Carradine, George Ellis, Ashley Brookes, Trudy Moore.