EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest. You can still get a weekend pass for weekend two. Single tickets are also available. Here’s the program of what’s playing. Bury the Bride is also now streaming exclusively on Tubi.

Michael David Cummings is better known as Spider One, the lead singer of Powerman 5000. He’s also expanded into making movies, producing the series Death Valley for MTV and then directing Allegoria — which also had his partner/fiancee actress Kyrsy Fox, Scout Taylor-Compton, Lyndsi LaRose, Rachel Brunner and Adam Marcinowski in the cast — before making this new film. You may know his brother Robert a bit better. You know. Rob Zombie.

June Hamilton (Taylor-Compton) is marrying a man named David (Dylan Roarke), who her friends see as, well, maybe a bit too rural. Redneck may be a better term. Yet they all come together to have a bachelorette party in the woods and even June’s sister Sadie (Fox) comes along, despite her disagreeing with every single thing her sister does.

The moment the girls arrive at the hunting cabin of David’s family, things seem off. Carmen (LaRose), Liz (Brunner) and Bett (Katie Ryan) don’t really enjoy all of the stuffed animal heads everywhere, but they try to have the best time they can, thanks to some expensive wine and the chance to spend time together. And then David and his friends Bobby (Cameron Cowperthwaite), Mike (Marcinowski) and Puppy (Chaz Bono) intrude.

The girls are put off by them even further — I mean, what is June doing with a guy missing teeth? — except for party girl Carmen, who takes off into the woods with four of them to supposedly hunt an animal but she takes as the opportunity to do some exotic dancing for her friend’s fiancee’s friends. Everything after this is a spoiler, pretty much, but it ends up with June and Sadie against David and his feral pack after they drink Carmen like shotgunning a beer.

The whole idea of burying the bride is tied into a bottle of backwoods booze that gets buried in a ritual, but the real deal is that this family of rural bloodsuckers lures women back to their hunting lodge, make them have bachelorette parties and then kill them. They must have a whole room filled with penis gag gifts. Except, you know, these vampires can go out in the sun and are really, really easy to kill and given to pontification.

What emerges is a movie that is uneven. When it’s good — as in the closing few moments — it looks great and has some new ideas for the supernatural white trash in the woods genre. And when it’s bad — such as the first half of the movie where every woman treats one another like they hate each other and look, I don’t hang out with just the girls all that often, but I would hope they were a bit more supportive than this — it’s bad. And literally hard to listen to, as sometimes it’s too quiet and as you strain to hear, it suddenly gets too loud, like the Pixies doing a whole bunch of blow and trying to outspend the $426,934.81 Black Sabbath did on Volume 4 and then realizes they have the same audio issues where everything is too loud, but if it’s too loud you’re too old but hey, we’re talking about a movie here and not great bands that established the loud quiet loud style. This is just hard to hear, a problem with lots of modern films or maybe years of said Black Sabbath riffs have made me deaf.

Can we get back to the supernatural white trash in the woods genre? You know who else makes movies in the very same field? Oh yeah, Spider One’s brother. And he makes movies starring his wife. I’m not saying it’s a coincidence but he also has a band that sounded a lot like White Zombie. And maybe other people aren’t going to call this out, because after all, Spider One also does a podcast for Bloody Disgusting. Who knows, maybe he’s a nice enough guy. But it just feels like maybe he could make a better movie, one that doesn’t have its lead watch everyone she knows die and then just crash out on the couch and actually be able to go to sleep. If I have a deadline, I’m awake all night. If I just watched my entire circle of friends get killed by a bunch of NRA bloodsuckers, I’d be a total lunatic. Actually, I’m jealous she can sleep so well in the face of such supernatural concerns.

In the world of rock star directors, Spider One comes in not as high as his brother or Dee Snider and doesn’t have the lunatic outsider art edge that Glenn Danzig brings to the table. Actually, if you didn’t tell me that Spider One made this, I’d think, “Oh, someone tried to make a Rob Zombie movie with all the swearing and weird sex talk but not as intense or idiosyncratic.” And then I saw Spider One in the credits and knew that my theory was correct.