Rating: B-
Dir: Kyle Hytonen
Star: Eric De Santis, Adam Lemieux, Cassidy Lawson, John Migliore
Given a budget of just ten thousand dollars – and that’s Canadian – this punches above its weight. The most are certainly made of the limited resources, and it has moments where you can easily forget them. It feels a little like The World’s End, if the threat had not been aliens, but a masked serial killer. There’s the same sense of longing for past glories and the tension between hedonistic youth and growing the hell up. I definitely got a Simon Pegg + Nick Frost vibe off the two leads, and you could find worse to copy.
Teddy (De Santis) is on the verge of marriage, and long-time best mate Patrick (Lemieux) decides to throw him a bachelor party he’ll never forget. The good news: there will be beer, friends and a stripper. The bad news? Well, there’s actually a lot of that, beginning with it being in the middle of the woods. I get this is Canada and all, but do all the entertainment options there involve trees? The stripper, Trinity (Lawson), is also a bit crap, not least because she’s depressed, pregnant, and prone to regurgitation. I do have to award a demerit to the makers, for breaking a cardinal role of exploitation cinema: if you’re going to have scenes in a strip-club, there must be nudity in them. [The opening sequence may have set unrealistic expectations in this area, courtesy of August Kyss, top]
The main problem, naturally, is the presence of The Shape (Migliore), who is running around the same forest, offing anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. The effects are refreshingly practical, and range from the good (a particularly nice slit throat near the end) to the deliberately cheesy (a severed head floating downstream, is clearly a mannequin). It does feel like it takes a while to reach the “massacre” part of proceedings – probably almost an hour. Oh, there are deaths to that point, most amusingly that of a movie crew, making low-budget horror nearby. It’s a meta-sequence similar to that in Cocaine Werewolf. However, there’s probably more time spent with the party sitting around, mourning their lost youth and the opportunities that went with it.
Yet I was surprised how much of this worked as drama, to a degree not seen in far larger slasher movies. Teddy and Patrick feel like best friends, and there’s one scene, the camera circling incessantly as they bicker, which is genuinely impressive. The slasher field is not one exactly known for meaningful characterization – people are there to die, after all. However, this pair are among the most three-dimensional I’ve seen in the genre for a while, and provide a definite, positive and unexpected plus point. On the other hand, the film does contain the most repellent act I’ve had to witness in a movie for even longer, when the director of the film within the film dips a Twinkie in mustard and eats it. Even Divine didn’t sink that low.