Tag Archives: Euro-horror

Be careful what you fish for

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Vegan Voorhees is going to take a little step outside of the slasher movies only hoop into the dangerous world of… OTHER HORROR MOVIES! Well, killer fish movies – but only for a minute! Promise!!

Being a child fan of Jaws, I’ve always liked me some fish-what-bite-back movies. I don’t really like eating fish but they get a raw deal (‘specially if it’s sushi – ho ho ho) so sometimes it’s nice to see them get their own back on people.

So here’s a quick overview of some of the finny films I love as well as those that I didn’t so much as “love” as “stare open-mouthed at”…

The JAWS films (1975-1987)

The Top Dog of killer fish movies, the original movie has not only never been bettered but it’s rare to find anything that comes within a mile of it. That said, for years I advocated Jaws 2 as my favourite of the bunch – thanks largely in part to A). the water-skiing bit, B). Phantom-of-the-Opera shark and C). the dumb group of teens picked off by the shark. Though not nearly enough of them got chomped.

Jaws III and The Revenge were comparably naff but I still like. I can clearly remember cereal boxes with 3D glasses and little Jaws comic strips on the back; Jaws 2 crisps (pickled onion) and attempting to read and understand the complex plottings of the Jaws: The Revenge novel, aged eight.

But enough about these films – we’ve all seen them, we know they started well and ended up with a fish able to strategize an intricate revenge scheme, but what of the hoards of pretenders?

Tentacles (1977)

A giant octopus eats people at a small Californian beach resort. It sounds awesome and begins fittingly awesomely with the ‘pus snatching a child from a pushchair by the water! Harsh. Some spooky scenes ensue but before long, protracted scenes of scuba diving only serve as a reminder that nothing is more boring than protracted scenes of scuba diving.

The ‘pus eventually attacks a sailing regatta, eats another child and Shelley Winters wears a giant sombrero. At the end, a widowed guy sets two killer whales on the poor creature. Tentacles should’ve been so much more. It should’ve lived up to that AWESOME artwork. Someone remake it.

piranha1978-aPiranha (1978)

Joe Dante directed this playful spoof on Jaws and it swims with ease into second best killer fish film. Despite being a total satire-fest, Piranha is actually quite sad in points: the nice summer camp counsellor (Dante regular Belinda Balaski) falling victim to the ever-trilling fishies is a borderline upsetting moment rare in horror, letalone low-rent killer fish horror.

The film was followed by a bizarre sequel in 1981, directed by James Cameron of all people, in which the fish had developed freakin’ WINGS and could hide out inside corpses long enough to flutter out at close by nurses.

Roger Corman produced a real cheap looking TV remake in 1995, which featured a chick from Baywatch and Soleil Moon Frye and much of the same footage from the original. Fair to say it sucked.

The Last Shark (1980)

Universal successfully sued the producers of The Last Shark (a.k.a. Great White, L’ultimo Squalo) for plagiarism and the film was shut down after only a couple of weeks in theaters in 1980, which is a bit of a shame as, despite its shameless pilfering, it’s not the worst killer shark film around.

A rampaging Great White eats windsurfers, boaters and endless people who try and kill it. Borrowed scenes include midnight skinny dipping, the shark crashing another regatta, eating a helicopter, tearing a jetty away and characters which are virtually third-generation Xeroxes of Quint and Brody. The shark resembles a thirtieth-generation copy of a polystyrene junior school art project that more floats than swims.

The Beast (1995)

Proving he was a versatile writer, Peter Benchley penned the novel in which a giant squid terrorises a small coastal community, which was made into a mini-series a few years later. Sounds like Jaws? It virtually is. Shot in Australia with a load of cast members from Neighbours or Home and Away, I can’t remember much of it now, which is possibly a merciful state of mind to be in.

Cruel Jaws (1995)

Love that tagline: “This time it’s even more personal than the last time.”

I encourage you ALL to find a copy of this hilarious patchwork effort that unapologetically steals footage from the Jaws movies and The Last Shark. Another hungry fish – this time trained (!?) by the navy – comes to town to eat folk, the mafia are involved, the marine biologist tells everyone: “Only one species of shark is capable of this…the TIGER SHARK!”

But all the footage is of Great Whites.

There’s a sensational scene when a girl confined to a wheelchair begins rolling down a pier and plunges into the water and we clearly see her legs begin to kick. A girl squeals “I wanna dance!” when she’s already dancing. The main guy looks like Hulk Hogan and the shark is somehow destroyed three times at the end. It’s amazing.

Literally ALL scenes with the shark are lifted from other movies and it had the nerve to try and pass itself off as Jaws 5!!! It’s at least more fun to watch than Jaws: The Revenge though.

Deep Blue Sea (1999)deepbluesea2

Saffron Burrows is a scientist. Ha ha ha! She and Stellan Skarsgaard have been experimenting on Mako sharks to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s. Ha ha ha! The side effect is that the sharks’ brains swell and they get smarter. Ha h- what?

Said clever fishies rebel against the scientists, crash a rescue helicopter and start to sink the out-at-sea platform, pitting the group of survivors against them as they try to reach the surface.

LL Cool J is a religious chef. Thomas Jane swaggers around, throwing himself all over the show as the macho hero and Burrows plays it all low-rent Ripley, her character so detested by focus groups that they re-shot the end to have her chomped by one of the sharks.

Shark Attack 3: Megaladon (2002)

The first Shark Attack movie in ’99 could send a can of Red Bull to sleep. The second one had roaring Great Whites and a couple of decent laughs but Shark Attack 3 is where it’s at: a giant million-foot prehistoric Megaladon shark comes out of a deep sea trench and eats things. There’s a school of regular GW’s around too, ready and waiting at the bottom of waterslides, eating parasailers and stuff…

As if this were not wacky enough, John Barrowman camps it up as a scientist who turns to his female companion (who played a different role in the first film, evidently hoping nobody saw it or fell asleep and didn’t notice) seconds after she mourns the loss of a friend and says; “What do you say I take you home and you let me eat your pussy?”

Allegedly he was trying to make the actress laugh but it got cut into the film anyhow. See it!

Behold the convincing effects of Shark Attack 3

The Reef (2010)

A subtle Australian export reportedly based on true events. Five people head out on a yacht. The yacht capsizes. Four of them opt to try and swim to land. A shark eventually catches up and begins attacking them.

Open Water has a lot to answer for (not least of all its horrible sequel, Adrift), but The Reef is actually pretty good. Though you could only watch it the once really. Some decent tension mounts in one of those what-would-you-do situation horrors Australia is good at.

Piranha 3D (2010)

Alexandre Aja helmed this in-name-only remake (which would’ve been better off as a sequel), which trades story and character for gore and tits. Lots of tits. So many in fact that I wondered if the film had been part-funded by a Naturist Society.

Dame Elisabeth of Shue tries her hardest to fit things together as the local sheriff who sees Spring Break literally savaged by a massive school of prehistoric piranha freed by an underwater earthquake.

It’s a disappointingly shallow affair but good for squishy demises and 13-year-old boys who want to ogle silicone boobs but the whole thing carries a disturbing undercurrent of misogyny in places, which sees countless pretty girls chewed into chunks only after they’ve ripped their tops off.

Shark Night 3D (2011)

The more family friendly alternative to Piranha, college kids take a vacation at their rich friend’s lakehouse and soon discover it’s teeming with various species of dangerous sharks put there by a group of money-hungry rednecks who want to sell footage of real life shark attacks to the Discovery Channel. Seriously.

No reason is given for the fishes aggression and I was more sad that the teens captured and killed a cute Hammerhead than when any of them died. It’s funny how the lead guy is supposed to be the ultimate nerd but is seen comfortably shirtless with the body of a Jersey Shore extra. The dog is the only character who matters and is the one to save the day when it counts.

Other ponds to paddle in:

  • Devilfish (a.k.a. Devouring Waves) was another scientists versus their own creation-fest, just really boring
  • Red Water had a Bull shark eating various people – and Coolio – in a river
  • Frankenfish set Bayou-dwellers against a giant leaping mutant thing that eats Muse Watson among others
  • Spring Break Shark Attack was a made-for-cable flick that predated the Piranha remake but was otherwise the same, memorable only by the fact that I watched it in China and some schmuck kite-surfing right into a Tiger shark’s gob.
  • Malibu Shark Attack is just that: lifeguards at the beach are attacked by Goblin sharks that float in on a tsunami.
  • It’s Daryl Hannah versus contaminated and angry fish in Shark Swarm, an epic three-hour affair with a body count to rival Jason’s.
  • Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus and Sharktopus are no-budget Asylum affairs with mucho hype and little thrill, crappy effects work, ridiculous plots and washed-up 80s singers like Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. The first is infamous for a scene in which the giant shark randomly leaps 35,000 feet into the air to eat a Boeing 747 and the second features a shark with tentacles and an attitude.
  • And coming in 2012, this:

Can I burst into tears now or do I have to actually see it first?

Ra-Ra-Rusky Rampage

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TRACKMAN

2 Stars  2007/18/77m

Director: Igor Shavlak / Writers: Viktor Sorokin & Valery Krechetov / Cast: Dmitriy Orlov, Svetlana Metkina, Aleksandr Vysokovskiy, Yuliya Mikhailova, Oleg Kamenshchikov, Tomas Motskus, Aleksey Dmitriev.

Body Count: 8

There was a certain man in Russia (not) long ago, he was big and strong in his arms a massive pick-axe.

I like Euro-horror, it’s normally really engaging and the subtitles make me feel cultured. Something about the 77-minute runtime of Trackman left me in doubt that it’d be worthwhile though.

Turns out I was right. Not that there’s anything definitively wrong with Trackman, it’s just a bit of a chore to sit through, even at that film-lite duration.

A quartet of guys successfully carry out a bank heist, only for some cops to intervene at the last moment, causing them to scarper and take three hostages with them. Into the old subterranean tunnels beneath Moscow (?) they go to meet up with the fifth member of the group and escape.

Unfortunately for them, the legend of a Chernobyl-affected freak prowling around down there turns out to be true and he likes to collect eyeballs in jars.

trackman

So far, so familiar. The underground setting robs the film of any pretty scenery that contemporary Euro-horror likes to boast and the killer has a habit of turning up and then not doing anything. He seems able to teleport from right behind a lost victim to out of sight, only to return later for the kill.

Strangely, the killer spares one female character, giving her back a lost earring. Sucks to be her though as she gets ‘accidentally’ shot later. I don’t like ‘accidental’ deaths in slasher films (unless they’re part of the event that prompts the loon), they get in the way and tend to happen to people we want to see die legitimately at the killer’s hands. Olga, however, was fine. She was painted as the likely heroine until shrieky Katya steps in to take over.

This is one chick who succumbs to Stockholm Syndrome within hours, seemingly falling in love with the last remaining bad guy. Both go back to save the other at various points despite he threatening to shoot her on several occasions previously!

By the end, there’s been too little grue, next to no tension and a ‘revelation’ that isn’t properly explained; a few good visuals fail to elevate this export above Creep, Stag Night, My Bloody Valentine and the numerous other films it heavily borrows from. I say nicht.

Fahrenheit 1988

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COLD PREY III

3.5 Stars  2010/98m

“The legend begins.”

Director: Mikkel Brænne Sandemose / Writers: Lars Gudmestad & Peder Fuglerud / Cast: Ida Marie Bakkerud, Kim S. Falck Jorgensen, Pal Stokka, Julie Rusti, Arthur Berning, Sturla Rui, Endre Hellestveit, Terje Ranes, Nils Johnson.

Body Count: 9

The law of diminishing returns applies quite stoically to the slasher realm. Sequels are more often than not retreads of their predocessors, lacking in imagination and largely barren in the imagination department. They’re cash-ins.

This is the point of view of most.

Me, however, I’ll watch just about any old crap. Although this year I “decided” to give up on camcorder-quality films altogether. There’s never been a good one, so I’m going cold turkey. Oh, how will I cope?

Anyway, in the realm of the NORWEGIAN slasher movie, things are a little different. This is aided by the fact that there are only about half a dozen in existence anyway. Manhunt sucked and probably won’t generate a follow up, but Cold Prey surfed in on a freezing wave of freshness, filling the lungs of a haggard genre with life and resetting certain cliches so they weren’t embarrassing in the context of the film and its kick-ass sequel, which is the hands-down best dayum hospital slasher flick going.

cp3-8-copy1The declaration of a third film was better than the announcement that so-and-so is pregnant with your child. Screw that, there’s gonna be another Cold Prey! Light up a cigar for something more fulfilling.

Neatly, Cold Prey III comes full circle on the 80s homage of the first two films by setting itself in the 80s. The Norwegian 80s. Where everyone loved Kim Wilde.

Yes, it’s prequel time. I’m neither for nor against prequels. I rather enjoyed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre one, to which this bears some similarities. ‘Origin tales’ have become a bit popular in horror lately, or ‘reboots’ that permit a re-telling of Jason, Michael or Freddy’s murderous arc.

Cold Prey III provides a minimal sequence that fills us in on the Fjellmannen’s early years as that kid with the eye-birthmark thing living in the eerie ski lodge. He offs his unloving folks and disappears.

Twelve years later, in what I assumed was a warm spell for Norway as there’s no snow in sight, usher in six bouncy teenagers (four boys, two girls) who want to check out the hotel but end up camping by a beautiful lake. They do the usual teenage things of drinking beer round the fire and being giggly n’ such and two of them wander off for midnight nudie time, which is thwarted when they tumble into an animal trap, which unfatally skewers Knut, leaving final girl-candidate Siri to go and get help.

Fjellmanenn: The Wonder Years finally turns up on scene to start killing and I’ll not give away some factors which make the story different to the other films. Suffice to say, this one owes a fair wad of inspiration to Wrong Turn and is notably bloodier than its kin.

The other teens soon find themselves on the run when they go looking for Knut and Siri and instead find the killer. There’s an energetic race through the woods to an abandoned house, which shows that the ‘USP’ of the Cold Prey brand is still creating tension out of tried and tested sequences: here, Walkman-toting Magne finds himself creeping away from the killer around the ground floor of the tiny cottage. Don’t. Even. Breathe.

Interesting, while Siri is being held captive elsewhere, the final girl reigns are passed over to the ever-frowny Hedda, who, being the only one without injury, is forced to try and save herself, her boyfriend Anders and arrow-through-the-foot-victim Magne.

Hedda does a good job, but she’s no Jannicke. In fact, most of Cold Prey III‘s problems lie in the rather lax characters, some of which barely have any lines before they’re dispatched. There’s a friendly ranger-cum-cop trying to find them after he gave them a ride to the forest in the first place, his estranged backwoods brother and a revelation some two thirds of the way through that links back to a throwaway line from Cold Prey II.

If you divorce the other films from the equation, this is a decent, above average forest-centric slasher flick. Its ties to the lore set out previously are strictly superficial and by cutting a few lines and the hotel scene, you might not even make the connection that the film is even related.

cp3-7aCold Prey III is good enough on its own but don’t wade in expecting the same dizzy heights; this is a cash-in, a contrived way of making a third film without having to somehow resurrect the maniac from his (very final) termination at the end of the previous movie. Production attributes are very good, scenery gorgeous and performances adequate. The good scenes outweigh the bad but, as with all prequels, you can see how it’s going to end, although some effort goes in to subverting an entirely predictable fate for the last one standing, which shows some imagination still at work.

Ahem… “Hot Shit”

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COLD PREY

5 Stars  2006/15/94m

“You’ll catch your death.”

Director: Roar Uthaug / Writers: Thomas Moldestad, Martin Sundland, Roar Uthaug, Jan Eirick Langoen & Magne Lyngner / Cast: Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Rolf Kristian Larsen, Tomas Alf Larsen, Endre Martin Midtstigen, Viktoria Winge, Rune Melby.

Body Count: 5

Hands up in da air for a Final Girl Filmclub entry.

Fans of Friday the 13th have long wanted an episode set in the snow. To date, Cold Prey is the closest any of us are going to get. And I say this as a long time Jason advocate… Cold Prey would probably still be better.

Seems as if in the wake of the Scream generation, European slasher films are where it’s at. Them toyed with the concept of uninvited guests long before The Strangers; Haute Tension lived up to its name; and Norwegian export Cold Prey not only packs in more tension than its French counterpart but unfolds as possibly the best slasher film in a long, long time. Combined with its equally well-crafted sequel, this is one franchise to be reckoned with. Although reports of the yet-to-be-released-internationally prequel, Cold Prey III, paint a picture of inability to leave well enough alone. Apparently, it sucks.

EDIT: I’ve since seen it, it doesn’t suck after all.

Never mind, it can’t change the fact that Cold Prey is a sensationally well made film, constructed out of a thousand cliches but using them wisely rather than retreading old ground and falling into a pit of topless babes going off to check on weird noises and dialogue no deeper than “oh my God, Todd looks soooooo hot!” Beautifying its simple story with a good eye for what looks scary and an evident lack of spoon-feeding the audience, it perfectly avoids the kind of executive meddling that has plagued way too many bigger budget American releases of the test-audience era.

Five young friends – horndogs Mikal and Ingunn, cutesy couple Eirik and Jannicke, and singleton Morten Tobias – drive out to a desolate frozen landscape for a day of snowboarding, which is soon cut short when Morten Tobias breaks his leg and they end up seeking shelter in a long-abandoned ski-lodge.

They bed in, stoke up a fire and the generator, get loaded on booze and get wasted by the hulking pick-axe toting psycho who resides there.

Cold Prey adopts the kind of slow burn approach often preferred in European horror. Little horrific happens for the first half, we simply spend time with the group, who have a few unspoken issues between them, most notably, sweet natured dork Morten Tobias’ unrequited love for Jannicke. The debut murder, some 40 minutes in, is set up just like something out of a Jason movie and remains undiscovered until the next morning, after Eirik opts to trek back to the car, leaving the other three alone at Hotel Creepshow.

Meanwhile, Jannicke and Mikal come across a room filled with ‘abandoned’ ski apparel, jewellery and keys, echoing that creepy cabin scene in Wrong Turn. Spooked, they decide to actively look for their friend who hasn’t been seen all morning and when they realise the extent of their dilemma they barricade themselves in a room until Eirik returns. Of course, we already know he’s been incapacitated by the nutter, who looks like he’s just hiked in from Lapland. Maybe he has. Maybe he’s Santa and they’ve all been bad.

The Friday-meets-Shredder outlay is soon cranked into overdrive as attempts to raise help are repeatedly thwarted by the killer until only Jannicke is left to battle him, culminating in a scene reminiscent of something I saw in Hostel of all things, but used to better edge-of-your-seat effect here. Despite the formula, the fact it comes from foreign shores leaves a gap in your expectation – the first time I saw the film I found it positively nerve-shredding.

All in all, while there’s not much to say about clever plotting elements in this otherwise standard slasher flick, Cold Prey undoubtedly benefits from believable and – gasp! – likeable characters, none of whom ‘have it coming to them’, their complicated personal motivations and the unrelenting cloud of bleakness that hangs over proceedings, ever threatening to shower things in sticky blood.

Director Uthaug’s vision was that the true horror was found in the helplessness of the situation and the killer was just a conduit for converting the underlying brood to a more accessible legion of terror. It works.

The byproduct of this is that we don’t really know what drives the killer. It’s hinted at and even shown in brief flashbacks towards the end but it makes little sense. It’s left up to you to decide rather than rammed down your throat.

Low-concept, high-art stalk n’ slash with a fond recollection of what actually made the hey-day films so good. Impressively, all cast members were brought back for roles in the 2008 sequel, which I frankly didn’t have time to fawn over so will follow some time soon.

To see how Cold Prey fared when pitted against similarly-named band Coldplay, go here.

More rubbish films that don’t deserve long reviews

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Would you believe that quite a lot of slasher films suck? No, me either. I expect brilliance in everything. But as before, some slasher films have failed me. Failed miserably. And thus, they don’t warrant any more of my ludicrously precious time than they’ve already sucked away with their suckiness. Sucks to them!

BLOOD TRAILS

1.5 Stars  2006/18/87m

“You can’t outride death.”

Director/Writer: Robert Krause / Cast: Rebecca R. Palmer, Ben Price, Tom Frederic, J.J. Straub.

Body Count: 7

A terminally dull German film masquerading as American by casting British actors effecting bad accents.

Moody bicycle courier Anne is approached by her estranged ex, Michael, and agrees to get out of the city for some fresh air after a particularly bizarre sexual encounter with unhinged traffic cop, Chris.

Now, if you were a fisherman by trade, would you go on a fishing holiday? No. Still, Anne being a bit of a simpleton, she and Michael decide to go mountain biking deep in the woods. Guess who shows up and manages to cut Michael’s throat with a bike tyre via a nifty Matrix-style in-air skid?

After this development, about twenty minutes in, the rest of Blood Trails consists of Anne pedalling away; Anne sitting on rocks; Anne crouching behind trees on lookout… Everything takes forever to unfold, supposedly in the name of tension building but, if anything, if there was ever an excuse to fast forward, this was it.

At one point, Anne comes across two forest workers, neither of whom utter a single word despite the obvious fact that the woman is traumatized and that the tree they were sawing down fell on her! It matters not, as Chris soon floats in and kills them.

Minimal interest kicks in as Anne attempts to escape but it all goes out the window with a stupid finale in which the unarmed killer manages to shoot two cops who turn up out of the blue for no reason.

It looks like helmer/scribbler Krause was trying to create a ‘true’ survivalist horror but the film spends too much time with an unsympathetic simpleton of a heroine who makes some of the most ridiculous decisions in slasher movie history, i.e. you have a car at your disposal, which you could run down the killer with but instead get out and cycle away. Says it all.

Blurb-of-shame: Tom Frederic was in Wrong Turn 3.

WHISPERKILL

 1988/15/90m  1 Stars

“Shhh… You’re next.”

A.k.a. A Whisper Kills

Director: Christian I. Nyby II / Writer: John Robert Bensink / Cast: Loni Anderson, Joe Penny, June Lockhart, James Sutorius, Jeremy Slate, Joe Leter.

Body Count: 4

It’s great that this made-for-cable “mystery” doesn’t give away the killer’s identity on the DVD box, isn’t it? Oh look, it’s obviously a female in a film with only two female characters.

Bad-movie-fixture Loni Anderson is the owner-slash-editor of newspaper in the small town where a ski-masked fiend is first making murmured phone calls to the people who later get stabbed.

Like others of its ilk, Whisperkill is laced with stock soft-focus erotic scenes between Anderson and leading man – and suspect – Joe Penny. Meanwhile, the real killer knocks off a few of her male acquaintances and the rest is fattened up by crummy sex-scenes until the identity of the “mystery killer” is revealed for us all to go “oh, for fuck’s sake!” at.

Commits the unforgivable sin of being boring as well as crap.

THE DEADLY INTRUDER

1 Stars  1986/18/84m

“Someone out there is watching you… Don’t unlock your door.”

Director: John McCauley / Writer: Tony Crupi / Cast: Molly Cheek, Chris Holder, Tony Crupi, Danny Bonnaduce, Laura Melton, Styart Whitman, Danny Greene, Marcy Hansen, Santos Morales.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “Cooking without garlic is like making love without foreplay.”

Another escapee from an asylum arrives in another small town (Midvale, pop. 18,000) and begins laying the locals to waste. This truly horrible film has the audacity to declare itself “in the Hitchcock tradition” on the back of the box but could not be further from Hitch’s style if it boarded a rocket to Jupiter. And I wish it had.

Things kick off in a fairly pacey Friday the 13th way with seven murders in the first 35 minutes before the rot begins to set in. The rest of the plotless plot centres around screechy heroine Jessie, who throws a party for some friends (two of whom never make it) where she is introduced to Bob, a magazine writer from Canada working in a local clothes store to “get the working man’s perspective.”

And while nobody but Jessie and friends believe him, there’s a homeless drifter loitering outside the windows, wandering aimlessly with a sickle, looking like a psychotic Paul McCartney. Said hobo abducts Jessie that night and ties her up in a shack about 30 feet away from her house!

A good third of the film is taken up by this senselessness that never goes anywhere as we decide who is now more likely to be the killer: Wino McCartney or Bob? The outcome is anything but a surprise and the obnoxious twist that somehow anticipates the sequel-that-never-was is the only scary thing that happens in The Deadly Intruder.

There is no merit to this film with the possible exception of seeing Danny Bonaduce of The Partridge Family murdered with prejudice. Add this to the ghastly repetitive synth score and it hurts like fingernails down the chalkboard OF MY SOUL!

SNAPPED

2005/15/80m  1.5 Stars

“Picture yourself dead.”

Directors: Jeffrey Prosserman & Julian Van Mil / Writers: Steve Abbott, Michael Bien, Prosserman & Van Mil / Cast: Tiffany Knight, Michael Bien, Joe Costa, Natalie Van Rensburg, Peter Soltesz, Sara-Jean Villa, Brett Rabinowitz, Lindsey Veenendaal.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: “So, you’re solution to my dilemma being ‘all men are dicks so stick yours in me’?”

I like weird things: cold toast with Vegemite, sideburns, Dr Pepper and Eurovision. Snapped is a weird film, really weird. But I didn’t like it. Sorry, Snapped and all ye affiliated with you.

Tiffany Knight is the curiously named Amy Mechanic, a struggling photographer who lands a well-paid new job for a mystery client. Without any credible explanation, Amy begins bludgeoning and hacking up bystanders in her life and taking pictures of the bodies to win the praise of oddball gallery rep Virgo.

Much of the build up to her ‘snapping’ (get it?) concerns the split from her junkie painter boyfriend and moving into the basement of bitchy best friend, Rose, whose own boyfriend is getting visits from an ass-kicking female loan shark. None of these things are of much importance, merely devices to bring more pitiless victims into Amy’s path.

Like so many post-millennial slashers, Snapped suffers from an overabundance of assholey characters we don’t care about, rather than nice folk battling for survival, rendering it the kind of picture you shouldn’t stop to gaze upon, let alone attempt to figure out the ridiculous twist ending, which makes even less sense!

BLOOD REAPER

1 Stars  2004/18/80m

“The legend has just become a bloody reality…”

Director: Lory-Michael Ringuette / Writers: Douglas Hensley, Ringuette & Michael J. Stewart / Cast: Cameron McHarg, Alison Moon, Jerri Badenhop, Mark Siegel, Charlene Amoia, Lory-Michael Ringuette, Brinke Stevens, Bernard Mann.

Body Count: 10

As if the barrel-scraping of Camp Blood and its shoddy sequel was actually a challenge to other filmmakers, here’s another shot-on-video campers-in-peril quickie with equally abysmal results.

More youngsters ignore warnings of a mythical killer living in the woods blah, blah, blah. They go camping anyway, blah, blah, blah. Even Brinke Stevens – who gets top billing for her seven minute cameo – looks glazed with disappointment that it’s come to this.

Long, boring sequences of individuals milling silently amongst trees while the camera bobs behind branches pad out the eighty minutes, while the audience pleads for someone to put us out of our misery. There’s an almost eye-opening innovation of electing the chubby girl as the heroine but, alas, they make it not so and kill her with a sharp log.

The intermittent gory murders are sloppy and unrealistic, reproducing everything we’ve seen elsewhere in better films and they even try to recreate the famous Ki-ki-ki ma-ma-ma sound of Jason and toss in a plinky-plonky Halloween-style theme to lighten proceedings but all it does it remind us that Blood Reaper will never live up to those standards.

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