Here we go with another October, and another struggle to continue the tradition of Slasher Search in some way. The shadowy corners of the shelves have been excavated, the bottoms of the barrels have been scraped squeaky clean, and I don’t know where else to look for vintage slasher movie gold that’s still obscure. If there’s any of the kind of stuff I was looking for left undiscovered, the boutique blu-ray labels are better at finding it than I am. So I’m not really searching for slashers as much as I’m searching for new approaches to Slasher Search.
This year the answer came in a comment from “Dan the Man” on my FACES OF DEATH (2026) review:
“Very long time reader, first time commenter. I have scoured the site and as far as I can tell you’ve never reviewed the French slasher film Orgoff. Slasher Search must continue!”
I had maybe seen the title before, but didn’t know what it was, so I figured this is what I’ll do this year: all requests. If you suggest a movie that I haven’t heard of or at least seems obscure, and I can find it, I will try to review it. (Please try to make it slasher or slasher adjacent and preferably not well known enough to be released on blu-ray.) CJ Holden has already recommended a few more, and I invite you all to add any others in the comments.
Upon further research I learned that Bleeding Skull Video is about to release the first blu-ray of OGROFF, calling it “the zenith of accidental avant-garde horror.” That’s a label that goes for only the most underground of movies (usually shot on video), and it’s currently only up for pre-order, so I’ll say Dan the Man made it just under the wire for OGROFF to be considered eligible for Slasher Search. Theirs is sourced from “the newly discovered U-matic tape masters,” and I don’t know what that means other than it will look better than the Videonomicon dvd I rented.
OGROFF, a.k.a. THE MAD MUTILATOR, is a 1983 French DIY slasher movie shot on Super 8, and it’s practically a silent film. There’s some rudimentary dialogue, mostly at the beginning and end, but usually nobody says a word, and there aren’t even many sound effects. There’s a pretty good/weird synth soundtrack and occasional screaming. Also the filmmaking is extremely crude and amateurish. You could say it’s poorly edited, but it’s more like they didn’t get the shots they need to connect to each other to clearly communicate things. So forgive me if I misunderstood any of the story. I had to rewatch parts of it and still couldn’t follow some of it.
It opens with a man and his kid stopping on a remote road to piss, not knowing there’s a guy in the area who chops up anybody he sees with an ax. The look of Ogroff is one thing that’s genuinely pretty creepy: he has this weird leather mask that he wears under a beanie. There’s something kind of Zodiac about his look. I assume it’s about fetish, not hiding his identity, since people know who he is and that he lives in those woods. Also he wears it when he’s at home alone.
Without dialogue there’s no attempt to set up any of the characters – people just keep parking around here and getting chased. There’s a woman who runs down the middle of the street hauling ass with no one behind her until they cut to shots of Ogroff. I don’t think it’s intentional but it’s kind of haunting how disorienting it is.
There’s a weird variation on the old “cars won’t stop to help me” trope – a car does stop for her but a guy jumps out, dances around and says “Use your legs silly, it’s good for you!” and then drives off without her. I don’t know what the fuck is going on there, it comes across as either the lowest brow comedy of 1980s France or possibly some sort of ethnic stereotype I wouldn’t recognize.
Ogroff finds some guys playing chess in a small clearing, so he axes the shit out of their board, chops one player in the face, the other in the ankle, lights that guy on fire, then chops up their (seemingly immobile?) VW Bug. Blood pours onto its Donald Duck decal. Check mate.
Usually he likes to just run at somebody and start dismembering right away (there is a very fake looking decapitation with light weight foam head), but this particular lady he first ties to a cross with a skull and two masks (faces?) attached at the top and torments her in broad daylight for a while. There’s also a guy he finds cutting wood with a chain saw, and he has a hand ax vs. chainsaw duel. He ends up getting the chainsaw himself and doing a Leatherface dance with it. In the close ups of the guy screaming in agony it feels more like a real movie than other parts. But then it will cut to his completely motionless dummy legs being sawed, bits of meat coming out.
Ogroff has a little shack with some bones hanging from strings and chains, body parts in the sink, his collection of little axes proudly displayed, also a nudie pin-up. There’s a clock hanging from a chain, which must be inspired by the impaled pocket watch in THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Sometimes he munches on raw human flesh, sometimes drinks blood from a ladle. In on scene he lays on his bed holding his ax between his legs, stroking it obscenely.
I guess Ogroff is a little vain or sentimental or something, because he saved newspaper articles explaining that he was part of the French resistance and got a medal because he “decimated a German regiment,” but he was disturbed by all the people he had to kill. Maybe he thinks everybody in the woods is a Nazi. I’m not sure.
There’s a big part of this movie that I have trouble deciphering that involves a young woman in striped pants. She’s driving around, and she goes to an army base in town asking them to take her to Ogroff, but she’s told “Ogroff can’t be found. He’s everywhere in the forest.”
Why is she looking for Ogroff? No clue. But before she finds him she finds a corpse hanging from a noose. She cuts him down and starts searching his pockets – I really don’t know if she’s supposed to be looting, or checking for I.D. But he sits up and grabs her, so she runs back to the car, gets a gun out of the glove compartment and shoots him in the belly.
He doesn’t drop. He digs his fingers into his flesh and pulls the bullet out. So she ties his neck again and yanks it with her car and then smashes his head in with a big rock. Later, Ogroff comes across her, hits her on the head and carries her home. He ties her to a chair for dinner but then puts her to bed (or worse, it’s not clear) and when she wakes up topless she just willingly hangs out with him while he does his chores (mostly burying hands). She does stop him from chopping up yet another car that parks on the road for no reason, so she’s a good influence. Maybe she can change him.
But then zombies start crawling out of the trap door in Ogroff’s shack – because his victims came back to life? Because he’s trying to save the world from zombies by storing them down there? I don’t know, but a zombie soldier tears through the wall to grab the woman. It turns into a zombie movie! The actors do a good job of lumbering like Romero zombies, though this means many long shots of lumbering without anything else going on.
A couple cute zombie masks:
Sometimes there are cool-for-DIY shots like a chainsaw point-of-view, lots of running-with-an-ax point-of-view, a scene where he’s riding a motorcycle waving his ax around. Safety advocates will be happy to see that he’s wearing a helmet (I assume with the mask underneath). The helmet doesn’t keep his head intact, though. Spoiler. But then he has a head again later so maybe that was a different guy. Like I said some of this I don’t follow. Anyway he tears a zombie’s guts out with his bare hands and eats them but then gets surrounded by other zombies and instantly dies.
At the end it throws in a whole other subgenre. In classic slasher style, Mrs. Ogroff or whatever we want to call the last survivor waves down a passing motorist (top-billed Howard Vernon, DELICATESSEN), a priest who assures her she’s safe, but then turns out to be a vampire and bites her. Cannibals, zombies, vampires – it’s a damn monster mash!
The title on the opening and closing credits is clearly in camera – I thought at first it was a three-dimensional cutout, but on further analysis I think it’s painted on a cel held up in front of the camera. You don’t see that every day.
So what’s the story behind this home brewed fever dream? Director Norbert Moutier (credited as N.G. Mount) reportedly owned a video store and made this to rent there. He was also a publisher of fanzines, later a comic shop owner, and also an actor, at least in the sense that he played Ogroff! Cult filmmaker Jean Rollin appeared as an actor in Moutier’s later films ALIEN PLATOON (1992), TREPANATOR (1992), and DINOSAUR FROM THE DEEP (1993), and they both appeared in a short called MARQUIS DE SLIME (1997). I think that’s interesting because Rollin was so much artier – he was known for making really beautiful, sensual films. They were both French outsider horror directors, but I wouldn’t have guessed they ran in the same circles.
Moutier’s last film was a 1998 tv movie called BROOKLYN COP, but he lived until 2020.
Do I like OGROFF? The character, yes. He’s got spunk. The crudeness of the storytelling makes it hard to get involved in this movie, but every time it gets boring (which admittedly is often) there’s something weird on the way that will make me perk up. I read about it playing at Alamo Drafthouse or somewhere like that, and I think that might be ideal, seeing it with a punchy crowd as part of a horror marathon. But not having had that opportunity I’m glad I still watched it. It’s distinct – an onslaught of brutality and depravity that manages to come across as cute and naive. There’s a magic to it that you could never do on purpose. But I hope Bleed Skull makes it popular enough that we get a slick studio remake some day.
October 9th, 2026 at 2:07 pm
The new logo certainly lives up to the occasion.
The relatively obscure German slasher ‘Der Fan’ (1982, dir. Eckhart Schmidt) has been made available recently, but I still need to see it myself.