Friday, October 11, 2024

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 11 - In a Violent Nature (2024)

  Content warning:  gore

Six twentysomethiings find a gold locket in an abandoned fire tower in the woods and take it, unknowingly waking a revenant.  "Johnny" (Ry Barrett) was murdered 70 years ago but it didn't take and only his mother's amulet keeps him from wandering around, hacking people to bits.  

This movie was made by people who fundamentally misunderstood what a slasher movie is.  Where is the joy?  Where is the creativity?  Where is the madcap manic glee??  Nowhere to be found!  

There was a lot of potential here for a Hatchet or Tucker and Dale style hillbilly slasher.  The camera stays with the killer nearly all of the run-time which would have been really cool if he had been at all interesting.  Same thing for the conversations that don't happen on-screen.  You can't build any sympathy for the victims because you don't see them for much of the film and I personally found it harder to place voices with faces so I didn't even know who was getting murdered half the time.  

The dialogue itself was so stilted and unnatural.  Like somebody browsed Reddit and just wrote down "how young people talk" as a direction.  And the last 15-minutes of the film are taken up by a boring, long-ass story about a bear attack that had nothing to do with anything else.  

It's like a student film trying to use the slasher genre to make a point about human impact on nature that is completely obtuse and again, misses the entire point of slashers in an effort to "elevate" horror.  D-

It's currently streaming on Shudder.

No comments:

Post a Comment