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Posts Tagged ‘regional horror’

Blood Beat

Tuesday, December 15th, 2020

BLOOD BEAT (1983) is another Christmas-set (as opposed to Christmas-themed) horror movie that I watched on Shudder. This one I had heard of as a notably crazy movie, and I knew it had been released on blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome. It’s about a family being stalked by the spirit of a samurai. I believe.

It’s a low budget movie shot in Wisconsin – on film, though. Don’t worry. It has a little bit of the awkwardness and amateurishness that can make regional horror charming, which serves to make it more impressive when some of it seems pretty legit. The lead couple give fairly natural performances, the most inconsistent actor turns out to be an endearing character anyway, things that wouldn’t be impressive in a bigger production – like a guy jumping through a window and hitting the ground, or getting a nice shot of the fog or a frozen lake – seem triumphant. And it’s very weird. Sometimes in a goofy way, usually in a pretty cool way. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »

Backwoods

Thursday, October 8th, 2015

slashersearch15 tn_backwoodsa.k.a. GEEK

This year during Slasher Search I’m hoping to find a few more woods/camping/cabin based slashers, because I’m working on a novel that relates to this subgenre. So I started with one that actually had the word “woods” as part of the title.

BACKWOODS is a very routine low budget movie about a young couple who go on a camping trip and get into trouble with a feral mountain man type dude. Things do not look promising when the movie goes from the opening credits – with a hillbilly folk tune about racoon hunting creepily whisper-sung over black (you’ll be hearing this song alot) – to a shot of the protagonists riding bikes with cheesy drum machines and music so inappropriately upbeat it sounds like it comes from an old educational film strip. This is a pretty bad movie, but at least it’s not as bad as this music cue had me convinced it would be.

Karen (Christina Noonan, no other credits) and Jamie (Brad Armacost – holy shit, he was on an episode of Empire! I love that show!) are visiting Kentucky. Karen insists on riding their bikes through a mountain trail, then chaining them to a tree and hiking further until they set up a tent and have some sex and what not. Of course this is after a friendly local tells them definitely not to go up in that direction. No specific reason I want to mention but, you know, trust me on this.

The first sign of trouble: they keep finding chicken heads everywhere. Kinda weird. Then it seems like somebody’s watching them have sex. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Horror, Reviews | 19 Comments »

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