We’ve all seen comedies that parody horror film tropes, and they can be very hit-and-miss. Director Jody Stelzig does his best with Ray Spivey’s strained script and little-to-no-budget, but the result is a patchy, if occasionally amusing, mess.

The Gunter family has run the marijuana trade in Red Eye, Texas, for generations, but a slaughter carried out at the Earth Wind Music Festival in 2014 has decimated their sales as film companies keep making and remaking movies about the massacre. Willie Wonder (David Trevino), a young student with a luxurious (and impenetrable) head of Jheri curl hair, was accused of the murders but in reality, the Gunters had intended the lumbering Pokerface to take the blame. Ten years later, another no-budget group is there to film yet another remake, but Pokerface has kept Willie under his wing throughout the years, and Willie wants the film shut down.

Allen Danziger, Jerry in Tobe Hooper’s original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, makes an appearance as the former sheriff of Red Eye, but that’s not enough to hang a movie on. The problem isn’t that the film looks cheap (we can overlook that, just as fans of Troma and other bargain basement artists do), it’s that many of the jokes don’t land. Had The Weedhacker Massacre been a short, it might have got away with it, but stretched to 90 minutes, things become problematic. There are standouts in the cast, however. Trevino is great as the wannabe film star who inadvertently becomes labelled a mass murderer while most of the other cast members play deliberately badly to match the film’s lo-fi aesthetic.

Perhaps you need to favour the ‘weed’ to get more out of the film, but in this instance, it sadly left us far from high.