The MacDonald family live on an island off the Cornish coast, daughter Ronnie (Samantha Perkins) rowing to the mainland to sell their farm produce. When their nanny goat's supply of milk dries up, Mrs. MacDonald (Jackie D. Broad) thinks that a little attention from a billy goat will get the animal's teats a-flowing. To save himself the trouble, Gyles MacDonald (Michael Balfour) sees to the nanny himself, resulting in the birth of a half-human half-goat hybrid. Ronnie saves the helpless creature, which she names Billy, but when it grows to full size, it goes on a bloody rampage.
With its absurdly grotesque characters, low-brow humour (fart and poo jokes galore) and demented plot, Revenge of Billy The Kid feels a lot like the UK's answer to Peter Jackson's Bad Taste; even the style of direction and use of music are reminiscent of Jackson's movie. If only director Jim Groom had piled on the excess like his Antipodean counterpart, we might have had a twisted cult classic to rival the best of them. It's a shame then that, once Groom has established his outlandish characters and set up his bizarre premise, he fails to go all out on the craziness and splatter, which is what the film deserves.
I suspect that the limited budget had a lot to do with the lack of spectacularly gruesome set-pieces: the Billy make-up and animatronics are fairly impressive, and probably didn't leave much in the coffer for other special effects. There are a couple of moments where the film works hard to disgust - Grandpa MacDonald's corpse thrown on a manure heap, Mrs MacDonald popping a pus-filled boil, and a hilarious sex scene that involves lard - but these only serve to highlight how restrained much of the rest of the film is. I don't want to be too harsh on the movie - I enjoyed it for what it is - but I feel that the opportunity was there to make a gore-drenched benchmark bad taste classic, and in that it doesn't quite succeed.
With its absurdly grotesque characters, low-brow humour (fart and poo jokes galore) and demented plot, Revenge of Billy The Kid feels a lot like the UK's answer to Peter Jackson's Bad Taste; even the style of direction and use of music are reminiscent of Jackson's movie. If only director Jim Groom had piled on the excess like his Antipodean counterpart, we might have had a twisted cult classic to rival the best of them. It's a shame then that, once Groom has established his outlandish characters and set up his bizarre premise, he fails to go all out on the craziness and splatter, which is what the film deserves.
I suspect that the limited budget had a lot to do with the lack of spectacularly gruesome set-pieces: the Billy make-up and animatronics are fairly impressive, and probably didn't leave much in the coffer for other special effects. There are a couple of moments where the film works hard to disgust - Grandpa MacDonald's corpse thrown on a manure heap, Mrs MacDonald popping a pus-filled boil, and a hilarious sex scene that involves lard - but these only serve to highlight how restrained much of the rest of the film is. I don't want to be too harsh on the movie - I enjoyed it for what it is - but I feel that the opportunity was there to make a gore-drenched benchmark bad taste classic, and in that it doesn't quite succeed.