A group of drug-loving hippies drive to a music festival taking place in a California redwood forest. They not only run foul of the local rednecks, receive a warning from the local sheriff, but they are soon trailed by the insanely jealous boyfriend of one of the group. When the results of a couple of violent deaths are discovered, the sheriff makes the decision to cancel the festival and close the road in, but the mayor and concert organiser are vehemently against this and recklessly keep it open. The hippy crowds love this turn-around, but it proves to be a mistake when a Ronald Reagan-masked and suited axe maniac goes on a killing spree...

Teen slasher movies have been done to death (pun intended), so what makes this one any different? Well, the fact that it's no good, for one thing. David Arquette obviously utilised his acting experience in Scream and the movie version of Buffy The Vampire Slayer to co-write, co-produce and direct The Tripper. It's almost as if he's looked at some of the classic slasher movies and said, "I can do that!" Unfortunately, it's very plain to see that he can't. When I first saw the premise for this movie it appeared to show promise, at least in the black humour stakes. However, comedy only works in conjunction with horror if the balance is right, and this example is on shaky ground in every respect.

The most fundamental mistake here is the characterisation. Nobody has any depth, existing as ciphers, particularly the central group of hippies. It seems to me that Arquette, who apparently worked on this project for four years, has no inkling of what a hippy is or what he/she might represent, because he is so far off the mark. For a contemporary setting, this is a very dated view of a sub-culture.

That brings me to the film's supposed homage to slasher flicks of the eighties. As a couple of examples, the Jason-Friday movies are fun without being humorous, and the Chucky-Child's Play movies are humorous without losing their edge. Like so many other copycats that these and Halloween inspired, The Tripper doesn't really know what it wants to be, and so simply goes through bland stereotypical motions and consequentially falls between the metaphorical cracks in the pavement into obscurity.

This is an adult version of Scooby-Doo but without the cohesion and sense of fun. So we have a bunch of kids rattling around in an old van, and a ghoul with a mask (is it Old Man Jenkins, caretaker of the abandoned amusement park?).

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Ty Power