FORMAT: BLU-RAY
A trio of couples go hiking in the woods. Since nearly everyone in the friend group is banging someone else, their respective partner has a motive for murder. Once everybody finally gets into the forest and makes camp, a killer with a bag over his head stalks the group and picks them off one by one.
Dead North is an early W.A.V.E. movie, and it’s obvious that director/star Gary Whitson hadn’t quite stumbled upon the winning formula that makes W.A.V.E. pictures so much fun. For one, it’s close to two hours long. If you’re going to give us a horror flick with an inflated running time, it better be some Terrifier 3/Smile 2 level shit.
This dull shot-on-video flick just takes forever to get going. The early scenes involve the couples making plans to go camping and then making plans to make plans to go camping. (You know, to firm up the plans they just planned out.) Then, before they go camping, there are long scenes of people telling each other how much they can’t wait to go camping. Meanwhile, I’m over here like GO CAMPING ALREADY! I’m not saying Dead North would’ve been a classic had Whitson jettisoned all this unnecessary filler, but it would’ve saved us all forty-five minutes of our lives. Oh, and if you want to see someone put up a tent in real time, this is your movie.
Yes, there are some bondage, electrocution, and murder scenes, and they are OK, I guess. (It’s mostly a variety of stabbing and axing.) It’s just a shame you had to wait eighty minutes to get to them. All this might’ve been bearable if the movie was an hour long. At twice that length, it’s often a chore to sit through. (The gratuitous final scene that overexplains the twist ending is especially grating.)
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