Director/Screenplay/Producer/Photography – Steve Wolsh, Music – Josh Bassett, Special Effects Supervisor – Donald Drew, Makeup Effects – Ben Bornstein, Production Design – Jessica Mahnke. Production Company – WithAnO Productions.
Cast
Arielle Raycene (Audra Bucklebee), Ellie Gonsalves (Missy Becks), Monica Sims (Reese Knox), Dani Mathers (Haley Bucklebee-Saint), Amberleigh West (Autumn Applebaum), Skyler Seymour (Devon Bruce), Eric Littlefield (Conwell Bucklebee), Colleen Hagerty (Tandy Dripp), Donald Drew (Brett Saint), Kane Hodder (Goatface), Matthew R. Staley (Evil Batman)
Plot
Audra Bucklebee buys the old reputedly haunted Tupp House in the town of West Craven on Cape Cod, regarding it as her dream home. As she and her girlfriends Missy and Reese relax on her first night there, sinister goat-masked figures appear around the house to attack them.
Kill Her Goats was the second film for director Steve Wolsh. Wolsh had previously made Muck (2015) where a group of friends are attacked by albinoid creatures. Around the same time as this, he made a further horror film Fog City (2023). All three films take place in the fictional location of West Craven, Cape Cod.
In his films, Steve Wolsh likes to have girls in a state of undress – the end credits here, for instance, proudly announce that three of the girls are Playboy Playmates. There are endless scenes with Arielle Raycene and Ellie Gonsalves showering that go on for minutes at a time. These are interspersed with others where Arielle wanders around in her underwear, including one where she goes through at least a dozen changes of top for no particular reason. The oddity of these scenes is that Wolsh is clearly wanting to show bare breasts but the actresses in question stand in awkward positions as they shower or change with their hands positioned to cover breasts from the camera, as though the film was aiming for a PG-13 rating – although at other times, we get to see plentiful breasts.
Elsewhere Kill Her Goats is filled with scenes of the girls wandering around in briefs, shorts, skimpy tops, bathing suits, or with a topless Amberleigh West modelling on the beach. Even when the horror element starts, there are multiple occasions where the killers manage to grab/attack the girls at the same time as pulling off their tops or pants. The performances of the girls, if that is anything that anybody is actually looking at, are not the best – Arielle Raycene comes across as an airhead.
Arielle Raycene (r) relaxes in her new home on her first night with friend Monica Sims (l)
The scenes with the girls showering, changing, wandering around the house and watching a film take up much of the first half and go on way longer than they need to. The film certainly gets a wake-up out of the at the point when the figure named Goatface (played by horror legend Kane Hodder) bursts in the kitchen door wielding a chainsaw, although the effect is promptly undone with the unintentionally funny image of him pursuing the girls through the house wielding what looks like a double-bladed chainsaw with sparklers wrapped around its blade. The appearances of the goat-headed figures gives the impression that Steve Wolsh is heading for a Folk Horror vibe and has been watching too many recent films in the genre like Sator (2019) and The Long Night (2022). You could maybe coin a label like a Folk Slasher film.
There is minimal plot to Kill Her Goats. The dialogue has the feel of being improvised. This is most evident when it comes to the end of the film where the goat-headed figures are revealed to be those who believed they had a claim to the property trying to drive Arielle out. These are despatched but then Arielle’s sister Dani Mathers turns up and things become incomprehensibly deranged as Arielle snaps and pursues Dani and others through the surrounding area. Quite what is going on, I have no idea. Nor could I work out exactly how the purchase of the supposedly haunted property, the murder of Dani’s husband and something to do with inheritance figured into the plot. It tracks off into the incomprehensible trying to follow explanations.
