Butchers (2020)

Butchers is the kind of lean, mean backwoods slasher that doesn’t waste time pretending it’s anything else: it grabs you by the collar, drags you into the snowbound isolation, and keeps the tension high with brutal, pulpy momentum. Adrian Langley stages familiar “wrong turn” nightmares with a nasty sense of efficiency, and the performances—especially from Simon Phillips and Michael Swatton—give the killers an ugly, grounded menace that makes the danger feel uncomfortably close. The vibe is grimy and relentless, with gore that’s unapologetically graphic and practical enough to satisfy genre diehards who want their horror served raw. It’s not for the squeamish or anyone sensitive to sexual violence implications, but if you’re on the fence and craving a straightforward, watchable cannibal-hillbilly shocker, this one delivers exactly what it promises.

Butchers is clearly aiming for old-school backwoods-slasher nastiness: isolated setting, cruel killers, and a steady drip of blood-soaked misery across the seasons. The problem is it rarely feels like it has its own identity, leaning hard on familiar genre beats and clichés you’ll see coming well before the characters do, with pacing that can make the brutality feel like a slog rather than suspense. If you’re looking for tension, surprises, or a fresh hook, this will likely disappoint, and the severe gore plus implied sexual violence makes it an easy skip for anyone sensitive to that content. On the plus side, if your bar is simply “mean-spirited, graphic, no-frills carnage,” it delivers that reliably enough.