MY CALL: This is advertised as featuring a hideous demonic monster. It doesn’t—not really. This is a slow-paced mystery slasher with a few pretty nice visuals that might not make up for the lack of action and low number of kills. MORE MOVIES LIKE The Slayer: The Mutilator (1984) was similar, and maybe better.
On a vacation getaway to a remote island, two married couples book a luxury beach house for the weekend. Everyone seems happy with the place except for Kay (Sarah Kendall), who realizes she has dreamed of this place, and it frightens her.
I was somewhat skeptical until the first death scene, a great gag in which a man’s gashed and bloody neck is caught between a pair of cellar storm doors and they are held shut by the weight of his hanging body as his legs twitch about. Oh, and then his severed head was in bed next to his wife in bed. Precious. Unfortunately, after this nothing provocative happens for a very long time.
The pacing finds long lulls of couples chatting about their issues and exhaustively searching the island for a missing victim. These scenes are long, boring, and insubstantial. Not that this is so unusual for the genre. I was just amped up for more after that great death scene… and then less amped… and then less amped… and then just bored.
Eventually, and far too long after the aforementioned death scene, we have the fishing death scene. Creative use of lures and some wincing hooks to the face brought a grin to face again. But it doesn’t really make up for all the downtime between the action. There just aren’t many kills or effects scenes in this movie.
All the while we have no idea who the killer is. There was the weird groundskeeper from the beginning of the movie. But how does that explain the cold open of the movie when some laughably mangy rubber claws attacked someone?
Director J. S. Cardone (Wicked Little Things, Shadowzone) is a capable filmmaker and it shows here. Perhaps the greatest flaw of this movie was the budget. And rather than cheapen five or six death scenes with uniformly weak effects, we have three scenes with decent effects instead. Probably the right call, actually. All in all, this movie had a few pretty good gore gags. But was it worth all the slow pacing in between? That’ll depend on the viewer. With this said, the finale visual is gruesome, gory and goopy. This would be the monstrous screen grab shared online that would lure you into watching this movie, as it did for me. I’ll say this was not very worth it for me, but it also was by no means regrettable.
