It’s hard to tell what to think about a DVD set that calls itself The Chainsaw Sally Show Season One…and it’s even harder to tell what to think about a clear horrorshow so devoted to bloodshed that the title character would actually call herself Chainsaw Sally, and yet so devoted to absurdity and laughs that her first target is a library in which she was denied a library card. But that’s why you come here, and that is what I do for you. So when the folks at Troma sent a copy of The Chainsaw Sally Show Season One, I knew I was going to be in for it.

The Chainsaw Sally Show Season One follows the title character, along with her friends and her brother, Ruby, as she goes through the normalcy of her life in the most abnormal of fashions. By day, she’s a quiet, almost mousy, librarian, but by night she bursts into a fury of homicidal horror as she and her chainsaw go forth to do epic quantities of damage.

I’m having a hard time pinning down where this is in the canon, exactly, as there was a movie released earlier by the same name, Chainsaw Sally, in which Sally was a librarian already, while this show shows her getting the job (by, not surprisingly, chopping up the current work force), but talking about events from the previous movie.

I’m having an even harder time pinning down how to feel about this one…while sometimes, The Chainsaw Sally Show is a fun, hilarious romp of absurdity in horror, and other times, The Chainsaw Sally Show has this horrible tendency to lapse into the gratuitous, the unnecessary, the downright pointless display of blood and gore. In fact, in some episodes, it’s hard to tell what exactly the point was. They are building up to something–it’s not an episodic series so much as it is one extremely large serial film broken down into small bites, but if you don’t watch the whole thing, you will be pretty lost, and some will likely question a need to even have invested the necessary four and a half hours required to get all the way through this thing.

It’s a shame, too, because much of The Chainsaw Sally Show has a lot of great absurdist quality to it, almost comical–watching a “girl scout” get murdered because she brought the wrong cookies strains the bounds of credibility so far as to be ludicrous–but sometimes it gets wildly unnecessary. You’ll see a great example of this in the second episode, dubbed Pinata…when you see what Sally and Ruby use for a pinata….

Fun? Sometimes. Gratuitous? Sometimes. It’ll be largely up to you to tell if you can wade through the fake blood to get to the fun parts, or if you even really want to try.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands The Chainsaw Sally Show a five out of ten for rather limited appeal, but appeal nonetheless.