When talk, as it so often does, turns to the subject of the worst horror film of all time, Kendal Flanagan and Ollie Martin’s Australian slasher Houseboat Horror is often at the forefront. And for once. you can well believe the hype. It’s a truly horrible film, the worst kind of amateurish garbage elevated in some quarters way beyond its worth by cultists who seek to heap praise on any old rubbish so long as it’s not mainstream. In truth, it’s mostly embarrassing when it’s not being all but unwatchable.

The plot concerns the world’s worst rock band, hard of both drinking and thinking, who retire to the eponymous houseboat on the shores of Lake infinity with a video crew to tape a series of music videos. Unknown to them, a pair of hitchhikers have already been murdered and, ignoring the obligatory frosty welcome at the petrol station by muttering locals, the band press on to their destination. Once at the houseboat their stupidity leads to many of them being similarly slaughtered by a maniac credited as “Acid Head” (though the sound quality is so poor that it’s really not clear if he’s ever referred to in the film by this name – whatever, he’s played by the charisma-free Zlatko Kasumovic) in a series of slayings designed to showcase Nick Dorning’s not-terribly-good gore effects. A last second jump scare (that anyone with half a brain could see coming) threatens a sequel that was never made.

Australia has made some fine horror films over the years, but this is very far from being one of them. Shot on atmosphere-sapping videotape by people with only the vaguest of ideas how to shoot a “film” (the word is used very loosely here), it’s hard to think of a worst viewing experience shot in the country, much to the enduring embarrassment of many of the country’s critics and cinephiles. amazingly, given its amateurish feel, Flanagan actually had some experience, having directed over a hundred episodes of TV soap opera Prisoner (1979-1986), aka Prisoner: Cell Block H, and one of the soap Richmond Hill (1988). Martin had no experience at all and apart from acting in another couple of low budgeters, the short Killer Zombies (1986) and the science fiction comedy Smoke ’em if You Got ’em (1988), was never heard from again. Could it be that the more experienced Flanagan was parachuted in to make something of Martin’s terrible script after the latter proved incapable of translating it to the screen? If so, he failed dismally.

It’s a monstrosity from beginning to end. If you’ve seen The Burning (1981) or Friday the 13th (1980), you’ll probably be able to guess how this is all going to play out and you’ll certainly be well ahead of the typically airheaded characters – no matter what continent it’s shot on, it seems, a slasher film will always be well stocked with the dimmest bulbs in filmdom (or in this case, videodom). And there’s a lot of them (there’s a body count of 13 for those keeping count), not a single one of them likable or even memorable, even those with the most outrageous of 80s fashions and haircuts (lovers of a rock and roll mullet might find something to enjoy here). Most of these insufferable dolts are played by Australian television regulars, many of them drawn from the ranks of those staples of the small screen, The Young Doctors (1976-1983), Neighbours (1985-2023) and Home and Away (1988-) – top billing, for example, goes to Alan Dale, Jim Robinson in Neighbours who overcame the indignity of it all to forge a fairly decent British and American career for himself.

There’s a lot of humour which, let’s be charitable here, doesn’t “travel” well and it certainly hasn’t stood the test of time, though one gag raises a smile to fans of a certain vintage – a shopkeeper is seen constantly clutching a paperback copy of Denis Gifford’s seminal A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. But the rest of the film is certainly no joke. The effects are crude, sometimes being shunted unceremoniously off screen before they’re really finished; there’s the terrible synth score that we’ve come to expect from the lower budgeted 80s slashers and this time we also have to put up with “knockout Brian Mannix song hits,” as feeble a collection of half-arsed ballads and soft rock meanderings as you could never wish to suffer through, all of them scarier than anything else you’ll find in the film; the end credits take a full 6 minutes to scroll, desperately trying to bump up the film’s meagre running time; the dialogue often sounds adlibbed with everything that goes with that (“you have to remember this is a holiday resort, not a jail sentence”); and throughout, there’s a strange and distracting lens defect that mars the top right of the screen.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone involved looks back at Houseboat Horror with anything like affection, though Brian Mannix managed to get a self-titled album out the following year, perhaps in spite of Houseboat Horror rather than because of it (tellingly, none of the awful songs featured here made it to disc) and he made a very belated comeback in 2006 with his new band, the charmingly named Frothy Green Discharge. The film itself became the stuff of legend, piled on by all but a handful of hardy souls determined to persuade us that it’s not as bad as it seems (the every optimistic editors of Bleeding Skull!, who never knowingly met a piece of low budget garbage they didn’t like, seem to have watched an entirely different film, hailing what they saw as “professionally made” – perhaps they were joking?). But it is as bad as it’s made out to be, and then some. A good many slashers from the 1980s were dull, repetitive and derivative but few of them were quite so painfully, irredeemably bad as Houseboat Horror.