There is something wonderfully rebellious about a film that seems to have been assembled from equal parts heavy metal, grindhouse cinema, 1990s music videos and a complete disregard for good taste.

Donnie Hobbie’s Jump Scare is that film.

The feature debut from Hobbie follows the all-female metal band Jump Scare as they retreat to a remote cabin to work on their new album. It’s supposed to be an opportunity to escape the pressures of everyday life and find some creative inspiration.

Unfortunately, their neighbours are cannibals.

It is, admittedly, a familiar horror premise.

But Jump Scare has absolutely no interest in behaving like a familiar horror film.

Instead, Hobbie takes the cabin-in-the-woods template and runs it through a neon-soaked, blood-splattered analogue nightmare. The result is a deliberately scrappy collision of comedy, gore, animation, psychedelia and heavy metal attitude.

It looks like a horror movie that escaped from a late-night music-video block.

And that’s a compliment.

There is a tremendous amount of visual personality here. Grainy imagery, saturated colours, stylised lighting, graphic overlays, practical effects and bursts of animation give Jump Scare the feeling of something excavated from a particularly deranged corner of the VHS era.

The film wears its influences proudly.

There are obvious echoes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, grindhouse cinema and the splatter-comedy tradition, but Hobbie isn’t particularly interested in disguising those influences. Jump Scare is closer to a mixtape than a traditional horror film: take something from here, something from there, turn the volume up and see what happens.

And, for considerable stretches, it is a hell of a lot of fun.

The band themselves are one of the film’s strongest assets. Their camaraderie gives the early sections a loose, lived-in quality, and the chemistry between the performers provides a welcome sense that these characters actually enjoy being around one another.

That matters.

Because once the cannibals arrive, the film could easily have become another disposable exercise in slaughterhouse horror.

Instead, the personalities keep it moving.

Hobbie also demonstrates an obvious affection for practical filmmaking. There is a joyous physicality to the violence, with blood, guts, creatures and assorted bodily misfortune given an appropriately handmade quality. Some of the effects are deliberately rough around the edges, but that imperfection is part of the film’s aesthetic.

Jump Scare isn’t trying to convince us that we’re watching reality.

It wants us to enjoy the artifice.

That gives the film a particularly punk-rock quality. It is less concerned with polish than with energy.

The problem is that energy can only carry a film so far.

At 102 minutes, Jump Scare occasionally feels as though it has run out of ideas before it has run out of runtime. The same jokes, stylistic flourishes and conversations can begin to repeat themselves, while the middle section lacks some of the momentum generated by the film’s opening.

There are moments when you can almost see the more tightly edited version of Jump Scare hiding inside the finished film.

And that’s frustrating because there is so much here to admire.

Hobbie clearly has an eye.

There are sequences that burst with invention, and the film’s visual confidence is remarkable for a feature debut. It understands that horror doesn’t always need to be dark, grim or self-serious. Sometimes it can be loud, colourful, stupid, funny and covered in blood.

In that sense, Jump Scare feels like something of a corrective to the more restrained tendencies of contemporary horror.

It wants to have fun.

Even when that fun becomes excessive.

The film also gets something right about its metal-band protagonists. Their world isn’t simply used as an excuse for a soundtrack. Music is woven into the film’s identity, with the aesthetic of heavy metal becoming part of its visual and comic language.

The result is less Texas Chain Saw filtered through a conventional horror-comedy structure than Texas Chain Saw dropped into a particularly unhinged music video.

And then somebody added puppets.

And animation.

And considerably more blood.

For all its rough edges, there is something admirable about a filmmaker arriving with this much personality. Jump Scare isn’t afraid to be ugly, ridiculous or excessive. It isn’t interested in sanding down its eccentricities in the pursuit of conventional genre polish.

Sometimes that works beautifully.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

But I’d take an occasionally overstuffed film with this much personality over something technically accomplished and completely anonymous.

Jump Scare doesn’t reinvent the cabin-in-the-woods horror movie.

It throws the old model into a blender, adds a metal soundtrack, pours in a bucket of fake blood and hits the switch.

The result is messy.

Loud.

Occasionally exhausting.

But undeniably alive.

SUFF #20

Jump Scare screens at 9:45pm on Friday 11 September in Cinema 2, with a second screening at 8:00pm on Saturday 12 September in Cinema 4, as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20 at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For the full program and ticket information, visit the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

• Saul Muerte