Review by Ben Bussey
Oh, the temptation to write a spiteful one sentence review. It would be so easy to do with a little perfunctory wordplay on the title. Bloody Hell. Bloody Waste of Time. What Was The Bloody Point of That, Then?
When a film is promoted to you as “an unusually effective homage to the golden age of American slasher movies” (a quote attributed to FrightFest, no less), I’m sure I can be excused for going in with relatively high expectations. If there’s one kind of film I always have time for, it’s an old school slasher. When done right, they’re just a joy, in all their crude, formulaic, two-dimensional splendour, and even when (more often than not) they fall short on a creative or aesthetic level, they at least have the basic exploitation elements to fall back on, with ample gore and titilation to distract from the absence of decent acting, storytelling or filmmaking technique.
So when a slasher movie comes along that not only fails to deliver something well-structured and well-executed, but which doesn’t even provide the requisite boobs and blood – once again, it’s a case of Bloody Hell, Bloody Waste of Time, What Was The Bloody Point of That Then?
The plot, for all that’s worth, is fairly standard slasher stuff: a bunch of high school kids, failing to get into their homecoming dance, sneak into a school drama building to start a little party of their own – but when a young Prince Charming type reveals himself to be not such a nice guy after all, shit goes south, resulting in his accidental death in a fire. Fast forward three years, and the survivors of that night are in their senior year preparing for Homecoming once again – but someone clad in a firefighter suit is out to ensure they don’t all get to go to the dance. I know, I didn’t see that coming either.
Of course, the premise isn’t the problem; ingenuity has never been essential to the success of a slasher. The real problem is that Bloody Homecoming seems so utterly at odds with itself, so in denial about the sort of film it really is. It’s a microbudget movie hoping to pass itself off as a mainstream production, trying to convey size while clearly not having the means to do so: hence we have high school dance scenes in which there are clearly about 20 kids there at most, and football games shot from a distance with a ton of overdubbed sound effects trying to fool us that something big and loud is occurring. There’s a reason horror filmmakers with no money tend to avoid scenes like this: if you can’t get the number of people you need, it’s just not going to work.
Also – if you’re making a slasher movie, it’s pretty helpful if you can get some decent special make up effects. Cutting away a second before the blade goes in, then cutting back to show it sticking out of the victim’s mouth, or a few trickles of blood running down the chair/through whatever they were leaning against – once or twice might be acceptable, but when you pull that same trick on every single kill, the audience can only feel cheated. Likewise, when the gym teacher utters the obligatory (and much anticipated) “hit the showers!” only for us to cut to one naked girl who we’ve never seen before and will never see again; again, there’s that cheated feeling. Let’s not play coy about what these films are like. Fair enough, not all actors and actresses want to do scenes of this nature, and who can blame them; I doubt any of them were making much money, if they were getting paid at all. But much as how you probably shouldn’t attempt to shoot football games and high school dances if you don’t have the means to do so, maybe you shouldn’t bother writing nude scenes into your film if you can’t find actors willing to do them. Maybe you shouldn’t put kills in your film if you can’t get decent gore FX. Maybe you just shouldn’t, full stop.
Believe it or not, I’m trying not to be too mean here… but what can I say, Bloody Homecoming is the sort of the microbudget horror movie that just makes you feel bad for everyone involved. They’re so clearly trying to make something that transcends its clearly humble circumstances. The cast are all doing their utmost with a script which is anxious to give everyone plenty to do, but it’s almost as if the harder they try the more amateurish it all seems. It’s by no means the most incompetent film of its kind you’ll ever see, but there’s absolutely nothing to recommend it either.
Oh, and this kind of goes without saying these days, but what a horrendous Photoshop job on that cover art…
Bloody Homecoming comes to Region 2 DVD on 10th March 2014, from Image Entertainment.