Rating: B-
Dir: Eric Huskisson and P.J. Starks.
Star: Lily-Claire Harvey, Matthew Tichenor, Turner Vaughn, Jesse McDonald.
This unfolds, as the title suggests, over the last few days of the year. These lead up to the New Year’s Eve party being thrown in their office building by Hooper Industries. It’s a company of uncertain activity, run by utter dickhead Mr. Dugan and his almost as obnoxious secretary Stephanie (played to the hilt by genre veterans Dave Sheridan and Felissa Rose). The company is in trouble, and firings are imminent. But why let that get in the way of a great good mediocre time? Bonus excitement will be provided by a serial killer called The Doctor (McDonald). He is leaving behind a trail of corpses, killed in imaginative ways, and has decided to gate-crash the party.
I guess the lead characters are Leslie (Harvey), Brian (Vaughn), and Moses (Tichenor), a trio of Hooper employees. I say that, because they’re never much more than tropes: respectively, the Final Girl, the Square, and the Sex Pest. However, over the course of the movie, I will admit they grew on me somewhat. In a way requiring a fungicidal cream, perhaps. Still, it was unexpected. To be clear though, this is not a film dependent on its characters, or the dialogue, which is occasionally witty, frequently crude, and sometimes grating. The jury is out on the extent to which the last is deliberate. On the whole, I’ll give it the benefit, since the overall tone here is clearly not particularly serious.
The point here is obvious. It’s the kills, inflicted by The Doctor in a broad range of ways. They are all laudably practical in nature, executed with somewhat variable skill, but no shortage of enthusiasm. You will likely see things here you have not witnessed before. I know I did, whether it was one victim having their intestines flushed out of their abdomen and down a toilet (I’m not certain that’s how digestive tracts work), or the one impaled in the eye socket with… Oh, let’s not spoil all the surprises. The Doctor is also a cool creation. He’s clad in a plague mask and top hat, with glowing eyes. We never learn much about him, other than his surgical training.
It doesn’t matter. For this is definitely an unrepentant throwback to the era of straightforward slasher movies. Well, in most ways. The complete lack of gratuitous nudity is odd, especially given how obsessed some characters are with sex, e.g. Moses. Otherwise, though, there are few pretensions here. No social commentary. No ambitions to be the dreaded metaphor horror, and no apparent interest in being “clever” or “elevated” either. Instead, this is almost refreshingly pure in its pared back approach, and a single-minded devotion to triggering the old “Fuck Me! Rewind That!” reflex in the discerning horror fan. It certainly succeeded there, on a couple of occasions. This ends with the door open to a sequel, and I would certainly not mind seeing it.