TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: PAINTBALL MASSACRE (2020) **

Paintball Massacre opens at a high school reunion filled with awkward encounters and annoying grown-ups stuck in a state of arrested development acting like doofuses.  The next day, the former classmates work past their collective hangovers for a game of paintball in the woods.  Naturally, it doesn’t take long for a killer to infiltrate the game and begin hacking the competition to pieces. 

Like Nutcracker Massacre, this is one of those low budget British horror movies where everyone speaks with muddy accents that are hard to understand (at least to these American ears).  I think the filmmakers were trying for a horror-comedy feel, but it’s never really successful as the slasher scenes are weak and the dismal attempts at humor fall flat.   The use of faux-Spaghetti Western music when the paintballers enter the playing field is groan-inducing and the scenes where one of the girls keeps trying to equate the group’s situation to a Fast and the Furious movie gets old quick. 

Most of the kills happen offscreen, which is the big problem.  Because of that, we usually just see the aftermath of the carnage.  We do get death by land mine, an impalement with a real estate “For Sale” sign, and a face peeling.  Ultimately, there’s just not enough here to really satisfy horror fans. 

It's a shame too because the set-up is sound enough.  (Well, maybe without all the unnecessary reunion scenes in the beginning, that is.)  I have to wonder if it all might’ve worked better if they just made the killer someone using real bullets rather than having a slasher in a paintball mask picking off the friend group one by one.  This would’ve made it closer to something like Masterblaster than, say, a feature length version of the paintball scene from Friday the 13th Part 6.  Seeing how the horror elements rarely click, the action movie approach might’ve been the way to go.  (All the Fast and the Furious comparisons would’ve made more sense too.)