My latest trio of slasher selections didn’t quite work out for me, and here’s why.
BLOODLINE KILLER (2024)
This one is going on the holiday horror page because it has some good Halloween scenes, great autumn atmosphere, and the killer always comes back on Halloween—diehard.
Fans of Carpenter’s Halloween will notice numerous nods to the film that border on total plagiarism. I’m actually surprised the film doesn’t hype itself as being a Halloween-themed horror flick, because it definitely captures the spirit of the season.
Halloween vibe aside, this is more a slasher thriller with a lot of family drama thrown in for good measure, causing the pacing to drag. Even worse, the plot is permeated with holes, and just when you think maybe everything will be explained with a final scene, the credits start to roll. Believe me, it’s not just me. I watched it with four other people, and we were all left dumbfounded.
The opener is awesome, with a masked killer called The Skulleton doing a little hacking and slashing on Halloween night.
A year later, the family that was the target of the killer is still trying to cope with the attack. Shawnee Smith is the mom, and she’s in therapy. Don’t expect to ever make any sense of the hypnotism memories she experiences during these sessions. They muddy the waters even more.
We learn that a horror movie franchise has been made about Skulleton, which is further traumatizing the family, but that familiar plot line doesn’t get the weight it does in the Scream franchise, so it seems pretty pointless to even include it. And good luck trying to figure out the family tree. The killer appears to be related to the family, the killer appears to be coming for the family, and yet the killer also appears to avoid killing anyone in his bloodline. Huh?
There are a few suspenseful scenes and satisfying kills, but it all leads up to what turns out to be a hilarious final battle between the killer and the entire family all at once. All I’m going to say is you have to see the window scene to believe it.
With so many plot holes, I can only assume the filmmakers were intending to make a sequel that clarifies the deeply lacking story here.
BLACK SLASHER (2023)
90 minutes was too many for me to waste on this incompetent, uneven flick. I’m not going to spend much time on it.
First thing I’ll say is about the only positive. The killer, whose shiny silver skull mask helmet is reminiscent of the Laid to Rest killer, gets plenty of screen time, death scenes, and chase scenes.
Everything else is the problem, starting with the audio, which is terrible. It’s either dialogue that’s too low to hear or screaming and yelling that’s loud and shrill.
Anyway, a group of criminals kill an FBI agent and then go hide out in a ramshackle house in a redneck Black community. Huh?
Couldn’t follow the story or the characters, so I just watched for the CGI death scenes. There is some crass sex and shit humor that is completely tone deaf to the rest of the film, there’s a dance montage scene, there’s a shit-eating scene, there’s some casual anti-gay language, and the killer eventually confronts all the survivors at the same time.
Just save yourself the precious movie watching time.
CRAZY WABBIT (2022)
This is described as a miniseries on IMDb, so perhaps it was an online or streaming release. It runs only 52 minutes long, but that can’t save it.
I’m not sure if the film plays out better in installments, but the problem here is that the plot, as clever as it may be, is so blatantly obvious from the start that you’re left knowing exactly where this is going.
I will say the filmmaker perfectly exploits the creepiness of the bunny lady lurking in the background, however there are really no surprises here at all.
This woman keeps having nightmares of an escaped mental patient in a bunny costume and wakes up just as someone is being killed. And right from the first scene when she enters her home, there are flies buzzing all around her house. Um…I can’t imagine would it could all mean….
