Brute 1986 Trailer Drops — Glam Metal Meets the Birdy Family’s Bloody Encore
Official key art. © Cinephobia Releasing
You booked the desert shoot because the ghost town looked dead. Perfect backdrop for the new video — crumbling saloon, dust-choked streets, all that gorgeous decay. Your band’s hair is teased to the heavens, the amps are humming, the camera is rolling. Then the wind shifts. Something rustles in the abandoned bar across the street — something that’s been waiting for fresh faces since 1976.
Turn the volume UP, horror hounds. The Birdy family is back.
Watch the Trailer
Quick Specs
- Film: Brute 1986 (2026)
- Director: Marcel Walz (Brute 1976)
- Writer: Joe Knetter
- Cast: Bill Kaulitz (Tokio Hotel), Gigi Gustin, Sarah French, Dazelle Yvette, Lew Temple, Pancho Moler, Heather Grace Hancock
- Distributor: Cinephobia Releasing (Neon Noir production)
- World premiere: October 31, 2026 — Tubi FrightFest Halloween
- Limited theatrical: December 23, 2026
Cinephobia Releasing has snatched up the North American and UK rights to Brute 1986, Marcel Walz’s sequel to last summer’s cult slasher hit Brute 1976 — and dropped the blood-soaked trailer ahead of the film’s Halloween-night world premiere at Tubi FrightFest.
Ten years after the first film’s carnage, glam metal band Leather Kobra rolls into an abandoned Western town to shoot a music video. Unfortunately for the band, the ultra-violent Birdy family has taken up residence nearby, and the shoot descends into a night of terror, bloodshed, and full-throttle slasher mayhem.
Where Brute 1976 saluted the gritty ’70s (Texas Chain Saw, The Hills Have Eyes), this one goes full ’80s exploitation — Friday the 13th, Maniac — with practical gore and a hair-metal heart. Original music comes from Swedish sleaze-rockers CRAZY LIXX, with Tokio Hotel’s Bill Kaulitz contributing his own tracks and pulling double duty in front of the camera.
Walz is an ’80s baby himself — literally born in 1986: “I grew up obsessed with ’80s horror classics like Halloween III, Friday the 13th Part VI, Sleepaway Camp II, The Burning, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4.”
Full disclosure, up front: I haven’t seen it — nobody outside the festival circuit has. But everything on screen says “made by people who worship the decade.” Practical gore, a killer family with history, a director raised on The Burning. Sign me up, fiends.
Quick facts: Kaulitz stars and contributes original music. Temple and Pancho Moler are Rob Zombie collaborators. The Birdy family returns as the connective tissue of terror. Premiere: Halloween night at Tubi FrightFest in London. Limited theatrical: December 23, 2026.
Extras if this hooked you: The Hills Have Eyes (1977) — the desert-family blueprint; the site’s Friday the 13th (1980) review (cross-linked below); Maniac and The Burning — the director’s own ’80s altar.
(Trailer and acquisition details via Dread Central and ScreenAnarchy.)
