Blood Cabin   Starring: Allen Andrews and Scott Christian 4 Digital Media RRP: £15.99 MVD2198 Certificate: 18 Available 04 April 2011

Five teenagers travel to a remote woodland cabin to spend a few days relaxing, partying and cavorting (oo-er, missus!). However, events don’t exactly go according to plan, and the promiscuous teens get rather cut-up about the fact (incidentally, that was a pun). They are separately abducted and dispatched, until only Aggie remains (the only friend not paired-up). If she is to prevent herself being paired up with a knife (you see what I did there?), Aggie will need to escape the clutches of the apparent owner of the cabin. Aggie is clever and shrewd, but she doesn’t account for the man Stevie’s real intentions for her...

The film tagline for Blood Cabin is “At Big Stevie’s Party, Everyone Gets Wasted.” Yes, very witty. I was thinking more in the lines of “This Film Is So Awful, You’ll Be Phoning A ‘Bloody Cab In’ Minutes.” This is a writer/director project and, as we’ve seen before, not everyone can be an auteur like John Carpenter.

The story starts with a fixed camera shot, accompanied by a disinterested-sounding narration which informs us that in the past a group of young people had been slaughtered in the same location. To be honest, I was yawning before the car with the teens even came around the bend into shot. From that moment on it appeared to be slash-by-numbers (hang-on, that’s a good title, I might use that!).

The characters, by their own admission have no idea who owns the cabin, and don’t even hesitate to stay, even though they find it in a tidy lived-in state. The dialogue is generally uninteresting, and it makes you almost relieved when they are casually killed in various ways. The running time of only 1 hour and 11 minutes (including the credits) is obvious evidence that there is scant material to work into any sort of feasible plot. Even the incidental music is all over the place. I wondered if the composer had ever seen a horror movie, or indeed knew anything at all about mood. One moment we have a jazzy style reminiscent of a 1970s American detective series, the next a ‘jangly’ piece which to say is inappropriate for what is meant to be a nervy hide and seek in the woods with the killer would be a monumental understatement.

And then something strange happened. Around two-thirds of the way through the movie I re-evaluated my opinion - albeit only a little. Some of the occurrences seem so cliched and silly, they made me smile. I actually laughed out loud when Aggie was using a wire coat hanger under a door to try and retrieve a key, and the killer appears the other side of the door and places the key within reach so that she can run straight into his clutches.

Stevie, the killer, looks relatively normal in appearance; this makes what was happening rather bland, that is until he catches Aggie and breaks his silence to explain his little perversion to her. The scenes back home at the killer’s house display his ultimate lack of power and influence in the real world. I very carefully read the promotional blurb but detected no hint that Blood Cabin might be intentionally comedic in places. I’m going to be very generous here and say that, whether intentional or not, this film should undoubtedly be repackaged and promoted as a dark comedy. It might attract slightly more attention in horror circles. As it is, this is going to sink like lead into the sea of obscurity.

There are supposed to be some extras accompanying this disc, but as I received only a DVD-R copy with a constant on-screen time code, I’m not inclined to tell anyone what they are. Goodness me, Organic Marketing, don’t you think that if I was a villain and inclined to make copies of a retail disc I would choose a film that was actually entertaining?

3

Ty Power