Hellbilly is the latest offering from Max Cerchi’s Rounds Studios. The plot centers around the title character, HELLBILLY, roaming around the desert capturing, torturing, and killing innocent and not so innocent people. He is very disturbed and played perfectly by Clayton Bigsby, who does what we expect from a disturbed person. He grunts and kills people in violent fits. I will be the first to admit, I was thinking Hellbilly sounded pretty similar to Max’s other skin-mask wearing movie madman, Quiltface from Carnage Road. And they are. I mean both kill people with a machete and other forms of weapons, both have mask, and both roam the desert. But while watching it, and if you have seen Carnage Road(go see it), then you will notice one key thing…Hellbilly is one mean bad mother fucker. I thought he was bigger, meaner, more imposing, and I thought the skin mask was awesome. Hellbilly comes across better to me. For instance, instead of just hitting people once with the machete, he keeps whacking. He cuts on tongues, stabs a certain ‘church member’ after making her eat pages from the bible, chainsaws a guy, and even messes with a blind girl. The blind girl scene and a few other scenes had me chuckling, because there is a black comedic overtone to the film, which I hope gets through to the audience. It defiantly helps lighten the brutal, dark tone of the movie, but not too much. Another key factor was the area in which Hellbilly lived in. One of the things I like about Max Cerchi is that he knows how to use his locations. In Carnage, the backdrop was a vast desert. There was nowhere to run, and it made the film feel a little more helpless. How can you escape when there is nowhere to escape to? Hellbilly holds much of the same helplessness, but not so much desert.

Hellbilly packs plenty of what a good horror film need: lots of blood, good looking women, and of course, an AWESOME MANIAC.