User reviews

But then, anybody who decides to go ahead and watch this will find that out. As a devoted watcher of horror movies of all budgets, I would have liked to have enjoyed this one a little more. Overall, it's just way too routine to really work, and any moments that could conceivably be pinpointed as the highlights are few and far between. A pity, because this is the first genre film that I've seen since 1990's "Def by Temptation" that had a predominantly black cast (with a few token white guys on hand here). Written by Gordon Greene, one of its actors, it tells the story of a deformed murderer who as a child had seen his mother, a prostitute, slaughtered by a john. This same individual then makes life miserable for a film crew attempting to tell his story. Unfortunately, it's too hard to really care for many of these characters; by the end, one can start liking them a bit more, but by then it's too little, too late. The makeup effects and gore are decent enough, so if the prospective viewer is a gore junkie, they at least can get some entertainment out of this. The cast does feature some familiar faces, but they're basically just picking up a pay cheque: the great Ernie Hudson is reduced to a thankless cameo role as the local lawman, who flirts with his sexy young deputy but who doesn't do much else. One will also recognize character actor Art Evans, as the aged driver Sammy; he's been in such things as "Fright Night" and "Die Hard 2". As for the other actors, they're tolerable at best, but one good thing is that some of the ladies are quite attractive; too bad there's no sex or nudity in this thing. This is particularly tough going in its first half, which mostly consists of the characters arguing and fighting with each other. The horror quotient finally picks up in the second half, but the final body count may be too small for some tastes. The killer, played by Paul Campbell, just isn't that interesting overall. This is the kind of thing I couldn't really recommend to anybody, unless they're die hard horror fanatics willing to try out anything they see in a store, and even they might come away disappointed. Proceed at your own risk. Four out of 10.

Summary is that this movie isn't worth watching. But the really bad thing is that it could have been good if they taken the same care throughout the whole movie. The camera-work was decent and showed that they cared enough to try. Others have said the acting was terrible, but there I disagree. I found the actors believable, it's just that their dialogue (1) didn't tell me anything to get interested in them so that they were all generic characters and (2) the script had the characters doing unbelievable things and didn't flesh out the story of Machete Joe at all. He's just sort of . . . there.

If the script had been written so that the characters had something to say and were doing things that were believable it would've been interesting. As it is, it's not worth a rental.

I haven't written a review for a film in quite a while but after watching this movie I feel compelled to do so!! I have NOTHING good to say about this movie at all!! The big stars of this film are Art Evans and Ernie Hudson but they only appear in this film a TOTAL of about 5 minutes COMBINED. The acting is horrendous, some of the worst I've EVER seen and I've seen MANY bad-acted movies. I would even put the movie "The Room" above this one in terms of better acted bad movies. There are NO redeeming qualities about this movie so I'm going to stop now because I just realized that I'm wasting my time reviewing a film that ALREADY wasted my time!!! Just stay away from Machete Joe!!!!

this movie is the worst movie you can ever watch the only reason i'm sure some reviews give 10 as a rating it's because it's an almost all black casting and let me tell you they took the worst of all the black actors that are out there they act worse than samuel L. jackson in "snakes on a plane" and that's pretty hard to beat and the movie is even worse than "snakes on a plane" and the 3.1 rating is completely false no one can watch this movie and think it's good the story is bad the actors are bad the SFX are bad the camera work is bad damn they most of meant -3.1 stars that would make more sense if that's the best movie an almost all black casting and probably crew can make please don't do it again you make the wayans bros look bad

if you want to lose an hour and a half of your life go buy a bottle of prune juice you'll have a better time with that than watching this shflickt

I've seen several films in this genre. Most of them, with the exception of this well done work, are badly lighted. In effect, in other horror films, a viewer often gets bombarded with flashing lights and dark scenes where most of the actors cannot be seen well. This film, in my opinion, is well written, the actors are fine, and the thrills are well paced, and the lighting is excellent, sometimes, even beautiful. In closing, I comment on a previous review by someone called, 'TheBeardedWonder': This person indicated "... I don't want to spend more time than I have to here..." yet their piece was relatively lengthy, and "...nothing is good about it..." using universal quantifiers, like, "nothing is good". All this seems to me to be a bit disingenuous.