The slasher genre started with great movies like Halloween, Friday the thirteenth and Nightmare on Elm Street; now it has degenerated into this amateurish mess of a movie. Most of the slashers, new and old, try to impress with interesting, and a lot of the time, extremely gory, death scenes. But whereas most other slashers offer some new, innovative ways to knock off their characters in no particular order, this just seems to re-use many of the old ideas. The movie is based off some of the same ideas as the Children of the Corn films, and while I haven't seen all of them, I can safely say that they are far better than this. Children of the Corn actually features some interesting and fairly scary/disturbing ideas, whereas this film just exploits the theme to explain why there is a maniac going around killing people. The plot is fairly boring, and seems to mainly be there for these characters to smoke pot, have sex or drink beer in every other scene. This is probably due to the original idea of having the slasher killer kill off teens who don't follow the ethical rules(no drugs, no beer if you're underage, and no pre-marital sex). However, it doesn't work well. It just makes you care less about these characters, maybe even to the point of wanting to have them killed off, and just waiting impatiently for that to happen. At times, I found myself cheering at the killer rather than hoping for this faceless, shallow, one-dimensional character to live. The acting is atrocious. There weren't one single character that was well-acted in the film; this could be attributed to the fact that they're all no-names, but that's no excuse. Robert Rodriguez used ordinary people, with zero acting experience in El Mariachi, and that contains far better acting. The characters are all one-dimensional, if they're not breaking one of the aforementioned ethical rules, they're mocking each other, acting unbelievably stupid or just basically being extremely egotistical. I never cared for any of them, and was actually happy to see them die. I was actually more annoyed at the fact that so many of them lived, rather than the opposite. The ending is so ridiculous and predictable, that no one could actually be surprised by it. The twist was also painfully obvious from the very beginning; I had figured it out not long after the opening scene. Something I also found extremely annoying was the seemingly lazy attitude of the filmmakers; many of the scenes, especially the death scenes contain ridiculous and obvious continuity errors, due to the scene being shot in as few takes as possible. The effects of the movie were also far below average. The scenes involving the killer inspire no fear in the viewer, as we either see him too much or too little; both a lot and a little exposure to the killer in a slasher can work, but both require him to be presented as powerful. Slash fails to do so, the killer seems too human and weak, even though they were obviously going for him to be strong, judging from his impressive figure and his choice of weapons. The film just fails in nearly all aspects, never scaring you, but rather inspiring you to laugh at the pathetic attempt at film-making it is. I don't recommend this movie to anyone, not even slasher flick fans, except maybe people who know the genre and who can laugh at such a weak, boring, amateurish excuse for a slasher/horror film. 1/10
Review of Slash
