My quick rating – 2.1/10. Fisted! has one of those IMDB summaries that sounds like it was generated by a drunk grindhouse AI at 3 a.m. – and honestly, if the movie had even one-quarter of the energy promised by that paragraph, I might’ve been on board. A camping trip, a deranged slasher called The Jerklin’ Boy, hate and dynamite flowing through his veins, and a “fist of destruction”? Sure. Sign me up. Unfortunately, what I saw is less blood-soaked nightmare and more painfully indulgent home movie that desperately wants to shock you into laughing.
It kicks off with a simulated home-video warning from a guy trying way too hard to be edgy, solemnly informing us how “extreme” this is going to be. At that point, you already know exactly where this train is headed, and it wastes no time getting there. Almost immediately, I was treated to a scene involving a man, a needle, and a comically oversized dildo pulled out of his shorts like it’s a party trick. That’s the joke. That’s the scene. He’s then killed by…something…with some, eh, practical effects that briefly hint at effort before giving up.
Smash cut to obnoxiously loud music for the title card. Then straight into a guy wearing a Creature from the Black Lagoon mask watching Lloyd Kaufman play a news anchor on TV, because that is what he does. Pop up in some of the silliest flix. The campers are all visibly older than their supposed counselor, except for one character who is literally a puppet. Not metaphorically. An actual puppet. At this point, the movie isn’t even pretending to care.
Midway through, the film grinds to a halt so the cast can push their own merch. And that really seals the “friends messing around with a camera” vibe for me. Shortly after, the counselor delivers what may be the most jaw-dropping scene. A rambling speech that essentially outlines which kid is going to get raped, followed by an extended demonstration of giving a blowjob…on a potato. One kid laughs obnoxiously for a solid minute, as if we’re supposed to be laughing with him. Instead, I was wondering why the scene wasn’t mercy-killed in editing.
The technical issues don’t help. The sound is atrocious – any scene shot outdoors might as well be subtitled “WIND.” Instead of reshooting, they just let the microphone get assaulted by the elements. The simulated VHS aesthetic is cranked so hard that fake tracking errors and tape crimps start piling up like visual spam. It’s less retro homage and more editing software gone rogue.
To be fair, there is creativity in some of the cheap gore effects, and you can tell the people involved were having fun. But that’s also the problem. This feels like a private joke stretched to 70 minutes, packed with inside references, dubbed-over names no outsider could possibly understand, and scenes that exist solely because no one said “maybe cut this.”
I’m sure Tom Martino and his buddies think Fisted! is hilarious. And to them, it probably is. But for anyone not sitting inside that circle, this is just a noisy, sloppy, aggressively unfunny mess. Even with the occasional goofy gore gag, I can’t recommend this with a straight face. Sometimes a movie deserves to be fisted…just not in the way it was intended.
