In a Violent Nature Review

“You guys ever heard of the White Pine slaughter?”

– Generic smartass soon-to-be victim

Oh boy, it had to happen eventually, I guess. I’ve finally stumbled across a really inept slasher movie. I mean one that’s so inept and incompetently made, it’s not even funny. Just annoying.

If you’re new to the site, just take a look over at the Slasher Central section (right over here) and you’ll see that I love slasher movies, and probably have spent far too much time watching them over the years than can possibly be good for my mental health. (Hey, my mental health went in a good cause, right?) I’ve loved the Friday the 13th films since my first encounter with them in the early eighties, and forty plus years later, I’m still a fan. Maybe they’re a guilty pleasure that I’m just too far gone to feel guilty about. (I know they sure ain’t high art). But I know I find a kind of comfortable familiarity with the basic formula. A bunch of teens go into the woods, we kind of get to know them a little bit, then at various points, a masked Jason Voorhees will pop up and kill them, leaving behind one lone female survivor.

It’s a very simple formula. It’s practically impossible to screw it up. It’s a formula that has been imitated, out and out ripped off, expanded upon, parodied – but nobody has ever completely, totally and utterly blown it – until now. And what makes this even more of a shock is that the movie bears the Shudder logo. Yep – Shudder, the horror specialist streaming channel that you can add to your Amazon Prime subscription. The streaming service responsible for Greg Nicotero’s Creepshow series, which is one of, if not THE best horror anthology shows I’ve seen to date. (And that’s a lot of dates.)

The trailer gave me the impression of a traditional “in the woods” Friday the 13th slasher, with even a masked killer on the loose, wearing an old-fashioned smoke protector mask worn by firefighters battling forest fires. It looked like an ideal way to while away a Friday afternoon, especially double billed with Longlegs to follow. (That review will be posted soon.)

All the elements for a good slasher film are present and accounted for. As the film opens, an offscreen crowd of young people discover a locket hanging on the remains of a wrecked old fire tower in a forest, and they take it. (Always a bad, baaaaad mistake in a horror movie. Just leave things alone, kids. Though if it weren’t for the sticky fingered among us, I guess there’d be no horror movie plots. The outraged dead would have to stay where they are.)

The removal of the locket from its rightful place causes the Johnny to rise from his evidently shallow grave and go looking for it, killing anyone he sees in the meantime. And that right there, my friends, is the whole plot.

There IS the origin of Johnny that’s told over a campfire one evening, Johnny was in the parlance of our politically correct times, developmentally delayed. He was lured to climb up to the top of the fire tower having been told there was a bag of toys up there for him, what was there instead was somebody waiting to boo him. Startled, he fell to his death, which was deemed accidental but every so often, someone disturbs the locket and the murders start, hence the White Pine slaughter. Even that narrated backstory is keeping in the F13 tradition, though they at least have the decency to show some flashback scenes as well.

So, with all the elements in place, I should’ve had an awesome time. What could possibly have gone so horribly, terribly wrong? These films aren’t hard to get right.

The blame rests with writer/director Chris Nash, in my view. He took a tried and tested formula and in trying to bring something new to something that has worked for 45 years, twisted and bent it out of shape. For starters, in these days of super wide screen cinemas, is there really a reason for a theatrical release to be shot in the old fashioned 4:3 ratio? Then there are the other stylistic choices.

We normally centre around the unknowing victims; we get to know a little about them. Some, we like and we hope they survive, others annoy us and we hope they go first. The masked killer knocks them off one by one until the final battle with a lone female survivor. Nash decides to spend most of the film following Johnny around. And when Johnny isn’t killing someone, he’s endlessly traipsing around the forest. And that’s exactly what most of the film contains, footage of a large man wandering in the woods.

As we’ve only been told what his story is and he’s just popped up from under some leaves, we don’t really care about him at all, and as we only really see the teenaged victims before they die -we have no sympathy or identification with them. It’s literally a repetition of a stranger killing a bunch of strangers. We as an audience have no buy-in. There isn’t even a shred of tension or horror because as I mentioned, we’re following Johnny around so it’s not as if he pops up unexpectedly.

This is the worst kind of amateur film. Imagine the most ineptly made festival film you can ever hope not to see, written by someone who has no sense of dialogue, directed by someone with no sense of style, pacing, or cinematography. Then imagine that both those people are the same person.

I guess the budget didn’t stretch to a soundtrack score, which might’ve helped, or a halfway decent cast. There are two notable kills in the film, one involving a female victim having her head pulled down past her shoulders by the spine, and another involving a log splitter, but by the time those are on the screen, my interest in the film had faded, other than a morbid curiosity regarding what the hell were Shudder thinking in bankrolling this crap.

But those kills are well realised, if unlikely in the first instance, but kudos for imagination and make up effects, they’re what prevent the film from scoring a zero, and I’m giving them a point each.

Avoid this film, you’ll thank me later.

Rob Rating = 2