L.A. SLASHER

HEY GUYS! SPOILERS!

The whole point about slasher movies is that there really isn't any depth to them. Homicidal maniac kills a bunch of people, someone fights back, homicidal maniac gets killed, Oh No He Doesn't, roll credits, same time next year. There's really not a huge amount of depth in even the most famous or most successful of them: Halloween and Friday The 13th, Rosemary's Killer and Happy Birthday To Me. (Even the Saw movies' occasional stabs at real Issues, such as heartless health insurance companies, are only there to provide unsympathetic mutilation fodder.) They're very simple variations on very simple tunes that don't require complex and dissonant orchestration.

L.A. Slasher thinks it has a Significant Social Message to which we should pay attention, but it's actually a very simple one: reality show stars are a blight upon society, right?  We wouldn't care - indeed, we'd be delighted - if a serial killer took out the likes of the Kardashians and Paris Hiltons, the vapid and vacuous nothings who permeate so much of modern life. Our masked, white-suited cultural vigilante duly picks off an assortment of heiresses, reality stars, sleazy Hollywood pervs, useless politicians and airhead bimboes, streaming their deaths online backed by a wave of public support from people who regard the victims as easy hate figures and are glad to see the back of them.

There's some blood, but nowhere near enough, Eric Roberts is prominently billed but isn't in it very much (you know something's gone wrong when "not enough Eric Roberts" is a valid complaint), the police are barely visible, the characters are never named and are only referred to by their occupations (which are flashed up in huge neon letters in the way they think Tarantino might), and the only real traces of fun come from the drug dealer double-act of Danny Trejo and Dave Bautista. Weirdly, but appropriately, the ranting maniac himself is never identified; like the semi-finalist of some talent show series three years ago, we neither know nor care who it is and it doesn't matter anyway. Similar to the value-free nonentities at its centre, it's a film that's not despicable enough to get angry about but barely interesting enough to sit and watch as it goes through its uninteresting paces, and in the end is probably best ignored.

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