LASSO Review: Not Enough Old People Kills

First off, I hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving. Second off, sorry about all this. We are just horrible assholes here at BMD.

Lasso was brought to our attention with the promise of a near-perfect premise: a slasher film in which cowboys murder a group of stranded elderly people. On top of that, we heard Sean Patrick Flanery plays a one-armed rodeo guy in the film and suffers a scene where not only loses his OTHER arm, but also pops around doing heroic deeds with just two legs and a face.

These things do happen in Lasso. A group of old folks enjoying a rodeo get stranded and murdered. It seems like the whole rodeo gets murdered for that matter. And the Sean Patrick Flanery scene is something you must see to believe. The film is gory, quick and bizarre.

But it’s also surprisingly competent, which robs it of the lunacy to make this a true weird gem. There are too many strange choices for the film to be legitimately good, but it’s far from bad enough to recommend as a fun disaster either. While certainly unique, Lasso occupies an interesting place right down the middle quality-wise.

It’s definitely a busy slasher film. The cast is much bigger than expected, which is appreciated purely from a body count perspective. You have the pleasure of seeing a lot of people get killed by cowboys. Not only that, but there are tons of these cowboys, and the film’s gleeful violence goes both ways. If your standards for a decent slasher don’t rise far above gore and kills, Lasso has a lot to recommend.

You may be distracted by all the atypical choices, however. Our heroes are a weird incel-type (Andrew Jacobs), a remarkably unkind Lindsey Morgan, and a pretty annoying old lady (Karen Grassle). The cowboys themselves are not really explained, but there seems to be an older leader among them, as well as an iconic one who just pops up every once in a while to whip people to death. His whip weapon doesn’t quite make sense, but he gets some pretty good kills out of it nevertheless.

So no, this isn’t the latest must-see entry of outsider cinema we were all hoping for, but there is still a lot to like about Lasso. I was never bored, even with a third act that feels somewhat padded. Director Evan Cecil and writer Roberto Marinas color outside the lines here, but not by much.