A Blood-Soaked Postcard from the Backroads
There are prestige horror films that beg for awards, think pieces, and four-part YouTube essays. Hacksaw is not one of those movies—and that’s part of its greasy charm. Anthony Leone’s found-footage slasher is the cinematic equivalent of a gas station restroom with a surprisingly good metal playlist: you’re not here for elegance, you’re here for the experience. Shot on a microscopic budget, stacked with practical effects, and running a lean seventy minutes, Hacksaw is a nasty little roadside detour that knows exactly what kind of sickos it’s catering to.Wikipedia+1
Found Footage with Duct Tape and Daring
As found footage goes, Hacksaw is refreshingly unapologetic. None of this “is it elevated horror?” nonsense—Leone wants you to believe, just for a moment, that some unlucky couple really did bring their camera along on their last, worst road trip. The framing is simple: we’re watching what they shot, with enough rawness and wobble to feel cheap-in-a-good-way rather than “my film school friend got a GoPro for Christmas.” The format fits the story perfectly: urban legend, creepy site, handheld idiocy. If you’ve ever yelled “stop filming and run” at the screen, this movie lovingly tells you, “No. Then you wouldn’t see the good stuff.”
Two Idiots in Love with Danger
Our leads, Ashley (Amy Cay) and Tommy (Brian Patrick Butler), aren’t complicated people, and that’s a blessing. They’re a couple on a road trip who decide to swing by the infamous stomping grounds of Ed “Hacksaw” Crowe, a serial killer turned local boogeyman and urban legend.IMDb+1 Their logic is the kind that only exists in horror movies and TikTok challenges: “A mass murderer died here. Let’s poke around.” Cay and Butler give the sort of performances that feel like two real people killing time in the car—bickering, joking, drifting into that casual curiosity that always ruins lives in horror films. They’re not Final Girl icons, but they’re recognizable in a brutally honest way: these are the friends you absolutely could see making this exact terrible decision.
The Legend of Ed “Hacksaw” Crowe
Leone leans into the urban legend vibe. Ed Crowe is less a fully sketched character and more a campfire story with a chainsaw—an assassin of the old-school splatter variety, whose legend has outlived his body.CinemaClock+1 The script doesn’t waste time with elaborate mythology; we get just enough to know that Crowe was a man who loved murder and hated structural integrity. His “workshop” is the abandoned building where he once tortured victims, and that’s where our couple, of course, decide to go exploring. If you came here for nuance, you’ve taken the wrong exit. If you came for a killer whose name sounds like a hardware-store clearance aisle, you’re home.
An Abandoned Building That Feels Truly Abandoned
A lot of low-budget horror overcompensates with neon gels and fog machines. Hacksaw does something smarter: it uses what it has. Shot in San Diego, often with a three-person crew, Leone turns bare hallways, chipped paint, and dead fluorescent lights into a kind of DIY haunted attraction.Wikipedia+1 The found-footage perspective lets every corner feel dangerous because the camera is doing what your eyes would do—straining to make sense of a dark doorway, whipping around too late. It never quite looks “slick,” but that’s the point. This isn’t a studio backlot; it feels like a place you could actually stumble into if you listened to the wrong podcast.
Practical Effects: Cheap, Cheerful, and Cheerfully Nasty
The real star here isn’t just the killer—it’s the gore. Leone shot the film using only practical effects, and that decision pays off like a winning scratch-off ticket in the gorehound economy.Wikipedia+1 There’s a tactile, sticky quality to the violence that digital blood can’t replicate. Limbs look like they have weight, wounds gape instead of glowing, and the camera lingers just long enough to make you mutter, “Okay, we get it, you’re proud of that effect.” This isn’t torture porn in the clinical, joyless sense; it’s more like a love letter to the gruesome set pieces of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and old-school splatter movies Leone has cited as inspirations.Wikipedia+1
Anthony Leone, One-Man Slaughter Department
As debuts go, this is about as personal as a chainsaw to the face can get. Leone didn’t just write and direct Hacksaw—he also handled cinematography, editing, and producing, which means any complaint you have can be mailed directly to him, but so can every compliment.Wikipedia+1 You can feel the low-budget ingenuity in the way he stages scares: a long, static shot that dares you to blink; a slow push into darkness that you know will end badly but can’t look away from. This is someone squeezing every drop of tension and shock out of a modest setup. It’s not refined, but it has personality, and in a found-footage field clogged with anonymous entries, personality counts for a lot.
A Tight Runtime That Knows When to Leave
At about seventy minutes, Hacksaw doesn’t overstay its welcome.Wikipedia+1 It’s here to do a very specific job—set up a legend, drag some idiots into its orbit, and then turn the whole thing into a gory nightmare—and it clocks out on time. In an era where every horror film thinks it needs to be a two-hour generational trauma thesis, there’s something almost refreshing about a movie that says, “We’re going to scare you, gross you out, and let you get back to your life before your pizza gets cold.” The pacing might feel abrupt to some, but for those of us raised on VHS slashers and 80-minute bloodbaths, it’s practically polite.
Performances That Understand the Assignment
The cast is small but game. Amy Cay plays Ashley with a mix of curiosity and dread that never devolves into eye-rolling hysterics, while Brian Patrick Butler’s Tommy has that endearingly annoying boyfriend energy—the type who thinks he’s making a killer vlog instead of a snuff film.Wikipedia+1 Cortney Palm and Michael C. Burgess help flesh out the world around the couple, while Sadie Katz and others pop in like horror-scene seasoning, giving the film a sense of a larger, pulpy universe. There are no Oscar reels here, but there are plenty of moments where the performances feel just real enough to make the violence hit a little harder than you expected from a “tiny slasher you found on VOD at 1 a.m.”
Riding the Line Between Trashy and Terrific
Let’s be honest: Hacksaw is not going to convert anyone who hates found footage, low budgets, or splatter. Some will call it cheap, derivative, or thinly plotted—and they won’t be entirely wrong. But if you tune into its wavelength, there’s a scrappy sincerity under the grime. This is a filmmaker swinging hard with limited resources, trusting that there’s still an audience for nasty little urban-legend slashers that don’t pretend to be anything more than a fun, filthy time. It’s the kind of movie you watch with friends who laugh at the kills, wince at the effects, and immediately say, “Okay, what’s the next one?”
A Love Letter Written in Blood and Static
In the end, Hacksaw feels like a mixtape for horror fans who still miss the days of unmarked DVDs and late-night discoveries. It’s rough, it’s loud, and it occasionally stumbles, but it’s never boring, and it never betrays its own mission: deliver a grisly, found-footage ride with enough personality to stand out in a crowded genre. If you’re the sort of viewer who measures success in gallons of blood and commitment to the bit rather than Rotten Tomatoes scores, Leone’s debut might just earn a spot on your beloved “trash but we love it” shelf. And if nothing else, it’s a strong reminder of one simple life rule: when the urban legend tells you to stay away from the abandoned torture building, maybe listen—unless you’re really in the mood for a good horror movie.
