VIOLENT SHIT And The Saga Of K The Butcher Shitter

There are many horror icons out there who got unfairly overshadowed by the big guys. These murderers had the right look, the right weapons, and the sort of modus operandi required to worm their way into people’s hearts yet never did. Maybe it’s just that people’s hearts were already too full of other horror icons to allow another. Or maybe the films in question failed to get the exposure they needed. Either way, these horror characters never received the attention they deserved.

K the Butcher Shitter is not one of these characters. He’s one of the guys who got exactly what was coming to him. There’s no deep think piece out there waiting to be written about this fallen star of the horror canon. He is total bullshit.

But he’s also very special. If you took every bad horror impulse we have as film watchers and (some of you, I assume) filmmakers and decided to just lay into them as hard as humanely possible while forgoing all sense of narrative, technique, or style, you might end up creating a character like K the Butcher Shitter.

I met K the Butcher Shitter as the exact right moment of my life to meet someone like K the Butcher Shitter. Simply put, I was a teenager looking for the most extreme gore I could find. I’d been through the Faces of Death stuff, countless slashers, and even managed to discover Peter Jackson (that may sound ridiculous, but with my location and 1997 lack of Internet, learning about something like Bad Taste was no easy task).

These were still VHS days. And one town over, in the booming metropolis that is Pittsburg, KS (pop. 20,000), there was a magnificent place called Video Warehouse. It was huge, and its horror shelves housed all kinds of crazy filler movies from around the world, many of which were shot on VHS and focused on gore. There, I found something called Violent Shit. Right next to it was Violent Shit II: Mother Hold My Hand. I was smitten.

If you read the plot rundowns on Violent Shit I & 2’s Wikipedia pages, they almost sound sensical. Having not seen the films in over a decade, I was shocked how little I remembered. Looking at them again, I see that my lack of memory has more to do with the films’ narrative executions. The first begins with a small child gleefully hopping home from somewhere. His angry mom lets him into their apartment. Then we see a meat cleaver and some blood. After this we cut to a van driving through the forest. It carries some orderlies and a “retarded” person. He breaks free and kills them. You watch it and have no fucking idea what is going on.

After this, it’s pretty much just a bunch of killing with a flashback digression and then a shitload of blasphemy stuff at the end (K the Butcher Shitter just happens to find Christ on the cross, just happens to crawl inside his tummy, and then just happens to get reborn as a baby a few scenes later). It never really makes much sense, but we’re just here for the killing anyway, so who cares.

And what a killer! K the Butcher Shitter’s defining trait is that he has real issues with genitalia. In both Violent Shit films, we’re treated to extra long kill scenes which focus of destroying nether regions. If it’s a dude, he cuts open the scrotum and either hooks or squeezes the testicles to death. If it’s a lady, he first yanks out a tampon (of course), then starts cutting from bottom to top. Stuff like that. He’s a real charmer.

These death scenes play sort of like pornography. I don’t mean in terms of explicitness, though that certainly applies. Instead I mean that when we get to the killings, Violent Shit’s narrative just stops for long periods of time while K the Butcher Shitter does his thing. It lasts forever. You get bored. But he just keeps going, cutting, and hacking, and playing with people’s body parts like a child. This is actually true of the film’s ACTUAL pornography as well. At one point in Violent Shit II, K the Butcher Shitter snoops a naked lady in a tanning bed. The camera stays right on her vagina for so long that it starts to seem like a nature documentary.

The Violent Shit canon is kind of hard to understand. There are three main films, the third also going by the name Zombie Doom, and then a bunch of weird non-movies and unofficial sequels. I haven’t seen any of them. By the time they came out I was all done with the K the Butcher Shitter game. If you can find Violent Shit III, however, I do kind of recommend it. The film is filled with the same old nonsense, but there are tons of K the Butcher Shitters this time and all kinds of crazy plot elements at play. If memory serves, there are still very long genital mutilation scenes as well.

So this Halloween I make a toast to K the Butcher Shitter and his truly awful Violent Shit movies. You were a very special addition to my teenage years. I may have left you behind, but the memories remain. Most of them. Well, actually the memories are all pretty hazy.