Brute 1976 Review: Unhinged Desert Terror

Marcel Walz’s Brute 1976 is a nostalgic throwback to ’70s schlock slasher movies, combining maniacal villains with hapless victims and gruesome gore.

Films like The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre collectively formulated a blueprint for a specific type of horror film, governed by a distinctive aesthetic. They used isolated, dilapidated settings to drive up suspense, off-kilter characters to maintain tension on a knife-edge, and bleak, matter-of-fact violence to shock audiences. Brute 1976, the new film from director Marcel Walz, is just the latest to borrow this aesthetic; it trades in nostalgic homage, crediting Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper for their influence.

Brute 1976 is an old-school slasher that draws inspiration from industry heavies of the past. Set in the summer of the titled year, the film follows a group of young people who head out to the desert for a photoshoot. They come across an abandoned town by the name of Savage, and rather quickly find themselves in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with a cultish family of deranged masked murderers, hell bent on sequentially dispatching each of them in gory fashion.

From the outset, Brute 1976 establishes an expectation for what is to follow; beautiful, wide shots of desert expanses feed into a cold open that prominently features questionable acting performances and blown-out lighting aplenty. Low-budget horror typically walks in lockstep with the former, but the building blocks for a compelling introduction are put in place. Two young women, Raquel (Gigi Gustin) and June (Bianca Jade Montalvo), seek assistance after their car breaks down on the side of the road. They walk until they encounter Savage, and a seemingly abandoned mine, which they haphazardly explore in the conventional horror movie style; blindly, and without nearly enough care for their safety. 

To the surprise of nobody except our characters, they soon come face to face with a dangerous individual who seriously maims one of the women, while the other is caught in a retro scream freeze-frame, while a burly masked fellow named Brutus (Bishop Stevens) gesticulates wildly, brandishing a chainsaw in his hands. If you’re picturing Leatherface, then you’re with the majority. Brute 1976 borrows from its influences but it doesn’t do it subtly, and that quickly becomes frustrating as more shallow characters are introduced as our inevitable lambs to the slaughter.

Despite a fairly boilerplate narrative and characters that fail to make an impression, a more compact version of Brute 1976 lies within the bones of the film, which stretches far beyond the temporal limitations of its storytelling. Walz offers up satisfying enough set pieces but allows many of them to run too long, creating uneven pacing that saps the momentum out of the movie on more than one occasion. Even the final sequence, an ode to dinner scenes and villain monologues performed far better in the past, feels incongruously excessive.

Brute 1976 was crafted with the best of intentions; the inspirations are etched across every frame, and an admirable amount of detail comes across in the production design and the way the characters are brought to life. Beyond that, though, the film falters as a quasi-copycat that doesn’t do enough to stand on its own two feet; it’s too focused on replicating the successes of others to adequately carve its own path forward.

Brute 1976 will have its Premiere on August 26, 2025 at Laemmle Glendale (Los Angeles, CA), where it will be screened again on August 29-30. The film will also be screened at Alamo Drafthouse (Indianapolis, IN) on August 29, with more markets TBA. Brute 1976 will be released on VOD on September 30, 2025.