Bloody Murder USA, R, 88 m, 2000
If you took any one of the Friday the 13th movies and purged it of all gore, nudity and coarse language, you’d be left with Bloody Murder. I don’t know for whom this straight-to-video quickie is intended; gorehounds won’t abide their genre of choice being taken over by a bunch of prigs, and those with an aversion to sex and violence won’t consider looking at a film entitled Bloody Murder anyway. (The squeamish needn’t worry; there’s more blood in an episode of “The Addams Family.”) The borrowings are shameless—shockingly so: a chainsaw-brandishing, hockey mask-wearing sickie spends his summer picking off the teenaged counselors at a lakeside camp. There is one attempt to set the material apart from the Friday fluff: the supposed killer is named Trevor instead of Jason. (There’s a victim named Jason, though.) I can see lifting from one of the shoddiest and most disreputable franchises in the history of the movies to turn a quick buck (we all have bills to pay), but denying the target audience the very elements that attract them to this sort of crap in the first place makes little sense. (It would be like redoing Babes in Arms or Strike Up the Band and not letting Andy Hardy put on a show.) Bloody Murder is too straightforward to ever be mistaken as parody—it’s a calculated attempt to make money and nothing more. (Incredibly, the filmmakers reached their goal: Bloody Murder was profitable enough to spawn a sequel.) Following an extraneous prologue, the cliché festival joins our company of doomed teens (stock characters all: a brain, a beauty, a jock, etc.) as they report to Camp Placid Pines a week early so they can get things set up for the summer. It’s de rigueur in these cockamamie things for the kids to get high and then get busy (after all, that’s what rouses the killer’s ire), but a game of “Bloody Murder” (don’t let the name throw you; it’s just a variation on hide-and-go-seek) is what leads to the younguns disappearing one by one. Legend has it that the aforementioned Trevor is lurking in the woods and seeking retribution for… Ah, hell, I don’t remember. The madman’s back-story is so sketchy and uninteresting that you’ll probably tune it out, too. But Trevor may be a red herring; more and more clues start pointing to one of the counselors as being responsible for doing everyone in. Still, just when you think you’re clear on the identity of the bloody murderer, the filmmakers pull a fast one. God knows I’ve sat through much worse than Bloody Murder, but rarely anything so flaccid. (And while we’re on the subject, male viewers will almost certainly miss the T&A these slasher flicks usually serve up, though there is a nice shot of a dark-haired hottie in a blue bikini. Nobody can accuse me of being a glass-half-empty kind of guy.) I must say, I don’t mind going without the unseemly business that generally brings entries into this genre so much disrespect (funny how horror films had no problem drawing audiences during the forty or so years the Hays Code was enforced), but Bloody Murder would’ve benefited from an edge (and some self-deprecating humor). This is Sleepaway Camp as performed by The Mouseketeers. If you must shave off a few IQ points by watching junk like this, go with Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. At least it had the good sense to laugh at itself. September 8, 2009 © Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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