Blades – review

Blades

It’s hard to admit but sometimes there are movies that just stump you. You watch them, follow the story the best you can, you stick with the thing but darned if you just can’t get the groove of the thing. Such was the case of Blades, a movie that was so obvious that I even made a joke about what it was before fully appreciating that yes, it is indeed an homage/parody of Jaws in the most ridiculous and loving of ways. And once I figured that out the movie got infinitely better.

Blades is the story of a small golf course on the verge of its signature tournament, but just as everyone is gearing up for that event a string of terrible murders befall the course. With an aloof and ambitious owner, a lecherous owner’s wife, and a daft police force it falls to the new golf pro, a former star who has fallen into the bottle, and his assistant, who was to have had his position before he came to town, to solve these strange and brutal murders. What seems like the work of a madman though becomes even more sinister when they realize that it isn’t a person killng everyone but a mower, a mower out for blood.

This movie is as ridiculous as it sounds and it is brilliant in it’s absurdity. I have seen a lot of movies parody Jaws but none of them dare to stray far away from the original conceit of a movie in the water. This takes the basic idea from Jaws of ‘something’ hunting down humans to ‘eat’ them where they least expect it and pushes it into places no one would ever imagine. Putting it on a golf course is a stroke of genius because in how it is portrayed it is so similar to the chaos of the beach that it sets the perfect stage for the murderous mower. This is a low budget movie and the acting proves this out but I will be darned if the ingenuity and sincerity of the film don’t endear it to you. It takes a while for the movie to really get going and to get into its groove but once it does it is hard not to watch with your mouth hanging open at what you are seeing. And darn it, I will throw this out there – I will take this movie ANY DAY over Jaws 3 and 4. There, I said it.

Funny and wonderfully macabre, this is a great movie to catch late at night. Another movie to watch with friends, this is a lost litle classic from the bottom shelf and needs to be dusted off and appreciated anew.

7 out of 10