THE ZERO BOYS (1986) **

Daniel Hirsch and his friends play weekend warrior survivalist games in a ghost town.  The leader of the rival team puts his girlfriend (Kelli Maroney) up as the prize and Hirsch wins her hand.  After the game, Hirsch and his team stumbles upon an abandoned house and begin to party it up.  There just so happens to be a knife-wielding maniac on the premises who quickly puts the friends’ survivalist skills to the test.

Directed by Nico (Hired to Kill) Mastorakis, The Zero Boys is an unsuccessful blend of action and slasher movie.  It’s surprisingly more fun during the early scenes where the gun-toting heroes try to act macho.  It helps that a lot of their banter is genuinely funny.  Maroney is particularly fun to watch as the Final Girl of the piece.

The horror cliché elements are a long time coming, and when Mastorakis finally gets around to exploiting them, they come off a little weak.  Even though it takes a while before the killer starts doing his thing, the stalking sequences themselves have an appropriate amount of atmosphere (there’s lots of fog in some scenes).  Unfortunately, the horror scenes are frustratingly low on chills.  That’s mostly because a lot of the kills revolve around guns and hunting and not good old hacking and slashing.  I guess it’s novel seeing the heroes fighting back against the killer using machine guns.  That doesn’t mean it works though.

Hirsch gets the best line of the movie when he pins up a picture of Rambo and says, “Eat your heart out, Sly!”