Movie Review: Slasher (2010)

By Heather Henshaw

Director: Frank W. Montag

Writers: Jörn Döring & Frank W. Montag

With a name like Slasher you would think kids running through the woods being killed off by a masked maniac. Well guess what? Ding, ding, ding you would be correct! It is the same tiresome plot that we have seen a million times before from a million different companies. I usually think German cinema is really impressive but, to me, this was just your everyday run of the mill hack and slash.

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 Slasher starts off with a couple that is out and about and they get that certain urge to pull over and have a little self-indulgence.  Someone beats them to the punch as a chainsaw weilding maniac appears and hacks them up piece by piece for the sheer pleasure of it. After that we find ourselves in a college class room being told about an infamous killer who (yes, you guessed it) is the killer of the movie. After this class there is a break so Erin (Christiane Imdahl) and her friends Julie (Pia de Buhr) and Danny (Christian Stock) decide to spend a relaxing weekend in the woods, far from their everyday lives and days filled with BS. Gathering up several more friends, the group heads into the forest for more fun and mindless college crap. They get lost on the way there and stop in at a farm for directions. The family is inbred and crazy, of course. The students get directions and finally make it out to the camp site. Once they make it to the camp site, there is more sex and well you guessed it again, one by one they start to get taken out. As the numbers start to narrow down, the few survivors they do their best to fight back and live. Who will live? Who will die? Does it matter?

There are so many films out there nowa days that just blend in to the same cup of tea. This film is no different. I hate to say that, but it just seemed like a generic take off of a compiled set of films such as Friday the 13, The Hills Run Red and Scream all in one cup with a few lumps of other stuff. They also added a side plot of an inbred family that actually literally went nowhere. The family comes into play a few times but it gets cut down to you’re just sitting there asking yourself what the point was of them in this whole film. There are also a few random kill scenes that don’t appear to have any purpose.

I will say the gore is non-stop and they do get the blood flowing in this film. There are plenty deaths one in particular that made me kind of sit there and say damn. The victim is at first tendered to such as make-up and her hair brushed quickly moving to a very uncomfortable scene with a knife and her legs spread open. Other than that one scene the rest of the deaths are just your generic average kills with chainsaws, axes, and knives. The killer has the same back ground as most killers do in slasher films; he wears a mask and was badly burned in a fire. I will say this movie had heart and was a good attempt at a throwback 80s slasher, but again it is just really played out and cliché. If you can make it past all the bad acting and bad rip offs you will find the ending does have a twist (an actual good twist that comes out of nowhere). It never really gets explained to us and is too late for a recovery in my opinion.  There is no explanation, though and I think it might have saved the movie if they would have attempted it.

All in all I may not have been too impressed with Slasher but it is worth the watch. I always have enjoyed foreign cinema and I continue too, granted it is not the best at times. The plot may be generic but the gore is good and fun so I say if you get bored toss in Slasher. It has its comedic parts but it is not a film I would go rant about for weeks on end. The 80’s were a good time for slashers and this updated film pays fairly good homage to all those films a lot of us grew up with. It just has subtitles to it but still it brings you the blood, guts, gore, and boobs that we all know and love to this genre.