BUTCHERS: BOOK TWO – RAGHORN (2024)

Available streaming on Freevie and Amazon Prime from Red Hound Entertainment!
Directed by Adrian Langley.
Written by Kolin Casagrande, Adrian Langley.
Starring Corgand Svendsen, Sam Huntsman, Hollie Kennedy, Nick Biskupek, Michael Swatton, Mark Templin, Miguel Cortez, Dave Coleman, Nathan Bailey, Dan Molson, Alyssa Ingram, Jack Dillabough
Check out the trailer here!!

A suspicious quartet of city youths hit a deer in the woods and seek help, putting them on the doorstep of a pair of hillbillies who like their folk music and racism as much as they like their cannibalism and torture. The quartet of not so innocents find themselves fighting for their lives in the thick forests of rural America.

I really liked BUTCHERS BOOK ONE. It was a no frills, hillbilly, cannibal, killer family flick that delivered high doses of grisly kills, constant action, and all sorts of twists and turns. When I heard there would be a sequel, and maybe more BUTCHERS movies, I was thrilled as I feel writer/director Adrian Langley was able to convey what made the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and WRONG TURN series so much fun with BOOK ONE. BUTCHERS: BOOK TWO – RAGHORN delivers a lot of the same, and while the group of kids in peril are criminals and not just kids who are cheating on one another with one another, they pretty much run the same kind of gauntlet the first group of kids do.

More of the same is good—especially if the original was good, but, and here’s the big but…the main problem with BUTCHERS: BOOK TWO – RAGHORN is that there really isn’t much more done with the concept. For a sequel to be successful, it doesn’t necessarily always have to go bigger than the first as many believe. I think continuing the story and upping the stakes a skosh works. Now, it seems there really isn’t a lot of budget here, the bulk of the movie relies on story, acting, and script—with a sizable portion of the money going towards blood and gore effects. But what BUTCHERS BOOK TWO RAGHORN fails to do is come up with a different story or even evolve the story a bit to keep things interesting.

From what I can glean between these two films is that the first one takes place in 1998 and BOOK TWO is set in the modern day…maybe, though there is no real indication of what era this one is from. Other than that, it just seems like this is another story about another pair of evil, hillbilly, cannibal, killer brothers hunting down, killing, and eating a group of kids in the backwoods. Both films rely on action, suspense, and some out of the box twists, but aside from Michael Swatton playing a hillbilly killer cannibal in the first movie and then playing a completely different hillbilly killer cannibal in BOOK TWO, this might as well be called anything but a sequel. Yes, the trip the story takes is a bit different, but all of the details are almost exactly the same.

There’s some solid gore and a specific torture scene that’s going to make the guys in the audience cross their legs tightly in BUTCHERS BOOK TWO. The RAGHORN in the title refers to the deer that the group hits at the beginning which sets this horror show into motion. Swatton who delivered the amazing “Get ‘er!” line in the first one, devolves into a bald, hulking monster in this one and because so, his performance is much less of a standout. The other brother, Nick Biskupek, who plays Clyde delivers a much less dynamic performance as Simon Phillips expertly and eloquently did in the first one as the smarter of the two brothers. Niskupek isn’t bad, he just reminds me of W.E., the annoying literature quoting Sawyer brother from TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE THE NEXT GENERATION, and I hate that character with such—such a…such a goddamn passion. The kids are decent as fodder for these monsters to plow through with the red curly mopped cutie Hollie Kennedy being a true standout of the group. She’s a spunky little actress who I’d love to see more of. And yes there is a modern twist that makes BUTCHERS BOOK TWO – RAGHORN very, very…modern, but I don’t want to reveal one of the movies bigger twists.

BUTCHERS BOOK TWO – RAGHORN left me wondering why the filmmakers chose to make this movie—a sequel, that by the way that title reads, should continue the story from BOOK ONE, but ends up failing to deliver on that promise. It confuses me why the director/writer Langley along with his co-writer Kolin Casagrande would go this route and really not edge the storyline forward a bit. Am I to understand that these BUTCHERS BOOKS are all going to be the same, with a group of hillbilly killers hunting down kids in every installment? Even the most repetitious of horror franchises try to at least give the illusion of change, but if these two films are any indications, the BUTCHERS series really gives no shits about all of that. If all you want is more hillbillies, gore, carnage, and chases through the woods, BUTCHERS BOOK TWO: RAGHORN delivers that. Personally, I hope in BOOK THREE, if there is one, some kind of point to all of this madness is to come because I don’t know if I can sit through another one that simple washes, rinses, and repeats the same concept again.