Oh boy, oh boy. Wow. What do you get when you cross Jason Voorhees with Fred Krueger and Leatherface (whose name is like Bubba or something, I forget)? You get this awful film which wants so terribly to be cool that it starts aping The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the worst of ways. What do you get when you mix amateur film-making with a distribution deal? Well friends, you get Slasher.
Six friends head off to the country for some camping and fun but little do they know that they have entered the woods of a blood-thirsty killer. One by one the friends become the unwitting victim of this madman’s sadistic cruelty and by their wits alone will they stand a chance against his villainy.
Ok, I am sorry, but there’s not enough plot here to push together into anything reasonable. The film has six sort of attractive people who are fun-loving party people looking for a good time but unfortunately for them there’s a killer stalking the woods. A killer that needed a mask to hide his face SO badly that he stole one from the campers (ahem, Jason wants his shtick back). The characters are pretty shallow, none of them showing but the merest glimmer of any signs of life, so watching them die never really causes you much distress. There are twists thrown in but they are so arbitrary, so silly, that it’s hard to take them seriously. Heck, the movie starts out with a comic tone, setting you up for something light and silly with soft core sex thrown in but with the first murder of one of the main ‘characters’ the tone changes abruptly. Suddenly the film dips deeply into dark waters as we see a drawn out torture and murder of a young woman that serves only to show how ‘crazy’ this killer is. The movie quickly dispatches the rest of the cast save two, who must try to survive the killer who, it turns out, may have an assistant. Confusing everything is a neighboring family that is posed to serve as a Red Herring to get you to believe they are the killers but, alas, are just trashy. The family is given too much time for how little they mean to the plot and in the end are only a distraction from a terrible film.
At eighty minutes this is not a long film at all but you feel every last minute of it, I assure you. As I said, there is no real plot, there is no hope that the characters will escape and return to their lives because they are never more than cardboard cut-out characters. The killer is never menacing because he’s a parody of other film killers and, with a ridiculous mask, becomes a joke that can only ape the actions of other movie monsters. The twists have no meaning because there is nothing to set them up. Here’s a tip – if you have to explain why there’s a twist DURING the twist, well, you made some storytelling mistakes. The filming is not terribly, just amateurish, and more-so with awful lighting.
Unless you want sloppy, and silly gore then this isn’t a movie I can recommend in any way. It’s a bad movie, all the way around. Want an example? Ok.
Character and guy are in a car and are trying to escape, only to stop when the killer steps into the road. When she tries to get the car going it’s suddenly out of gas and so, with the killer only feet away, she gets out to see if there’s a gas can in the trunk. Nope, the killer has the gas can, which he sets down, as the victims watch, so he can refill his chainsaw. So the girl runs off to escape the killer (abandoning the guy she was with) and thus eludes him for the night. She passes out and wakes up in the morning to run away again. Naturally his chainsaw, which was on all night, is still running. She manages to run around the woods all night and the next day and into the next night and never gets anywhere, only finding the weird neighbor after enough time has been burned on the running time.
Ridiculous.
An utter waste of film and a shame to get released because someone out there will rent it. No fun. No scares. No freak outs. No use.
2 out of 10
A breaking glass pictures release.
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 