Friday 4 September 2020

AQUASLASH

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND DESPAIR

After the straight slasher movie (Halloween), the sequel slasher movie (Halloween II), the ripoff slasher movie (Prom Night), the ripoff sequel slasher movie (Sorority House Massacre II), the spoof slasher movie (Wacko), the ironic slasher movie (Scream), the remake slasher movie (Rob Zombie's Halloween) and the reboot slasher movie (David Gordon Green's Halloween), the next step, sadly, appears to be the retro slasher movie. Specifically, a movie that's not harking back to Halloween or Friday The 13th but The Mutilator or Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare Beach, deliberately recalling all those useless knockoffs and near-forgotten cheapies we unaccountably used to love twenty years ago rather than the genre's high points (possibly because they're too familiar and many of them have gone down the remake route already).

Aquaslash is an astonishingly hateful concoction: by turns boring, annoying and incredibly stupid. It is a film in which every single character is utterly despicable and without one single redeeming feature and you can't wait to see them get bloodily hacked to pieces. It is a film that spends what feels like hours plodding through the sexual and emotional turmoils of its tiresome teenage simpletons, oblivious to the fact that no-one on Earth cares one hoot whether she goes with him or he cops off with her. Because it's a longstanding tradition, the high school graduation party is held at the local water park (despite the occasional fatalities): amidst the love triangles, the infantile bullying, the drinking and snorting and shagging and fighting and cavorting about in bikinis, someone is planning to sabotage the water slides with sharpened saw blades....

Sure, the first hour or more of imbecile soap opera pays off with a final act of bloody carnage that's certainly spectacular, but there's nothing to enjoy except the spectacle because you absolutely don't care, don't care, don't care. Aquaslash makes Porky's look like The Seventh Seal and I may have lost forty IQ points just being in the same room; even the worst and lamest offerings from the arse end of the original slasher cycle weren't this gruelling.

But more than just being bored, I was actually feeling insulted, seeing the admittedly variable standards of my beloved horror genre being so comprehensively trashed. Lord knows there have been terrible horror movies pretty much since the invention of the horror movie and even the warmest waves of nostalgia can't cover up the inadequacies and idiocies of Final Exam, Blood Song or Graduation Day. (I always had an irrational fondness for Friday The 13th Part V but I can't even defend that one any longer.) But even by those standards Aquaslash is substandard, and whether it's a deliberate or accidental - either a knowing, painstaking homage to bad film or just the inability to do any better - scarcely matters.

There's a moment when it looks like it might be actively referencing the original Friday The 13th, with its inattentive lifeguards too busy groping each other to realise someone's been killed; but it doesn't ultimately mean anything because nothing does; there are other moments when the film's principal reference point is clearly The Bikini Carwash Company. The comedy doesn't work because there's no empathy with anyone, the suspense doesn't work because you actually want to see them die. The sole point of interest is an early reversal where the main black guy doesn't get racially abused because he's actually the principal troublemaker and chief alpha-dickhead bully. Other than that, it's rubbish and you might as well watch genuine 80s slasher rubbish like Mountaintop Motel Massacre or Satan's Blade instead of 80s-infused slasher rubbish like this.

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