Rating:***
Starring: Jaime King, Thomas Jane and Lukas Haas
Hippies. You can either love them or hate them.
For our resident loonie here, he hates them with a political passion and he's handling the problem with a bloody red axe to boot!
Starting our story in the 80s, young Gus watches his father, a lumberjack, try to fight off a tree-hugger who's trying to stop them from taking down a colossal oak. When his father gets hit by said hippie, Gus reacts the only way he can: picking up a chainsaw and putting it inside the hugger's belleh. The father and son duo then gets separated by the cops and Gus is sent to a mental asylum.

With that, Samantha's clique may just find themselves knee deep into the line of fire of this killer, much to the displeasure of one deputy Buzz Hall who starts to wonder if the woods are really safe for parties like this...

But while the gore flows like waterfalls in a rainy season, there's also the "horror-comedy" take on the movie which, sadly, fell flat for me: it does have cheesy one-liners, mostly from our killer, but they weren't funny enough to tickle my funny bones. Probably because there were some political slurs into them and, sadly, I never involve myself with politics. (Politics bore me to death) Thankfully, if the lines doesn't chuckle, the weird scenes sometimes do the trick as being a hippie-based massacre, our victims are usually "far-out" in their little drug-infused world, uttering lines like " What the fuck's your problem, man?" after getting a body part or two off their places. Its funny, and a little bit of a guilty pleasure, seeing totally defenseless hippies being hacked up with an axe and reacting to it so differently.

Now, while David Arquette, our Wes Craven's Scream star-turned-director mentioned his real intention was to make a fun movie with The Tripper, I can't help but see a small satire here; while the killer's identity was rather obvious given to the kind of opening murder we were treated with, the movie's other mystery was how on Earth did he got out, which later can be pointed out to something Ronald did in the 80s. (I dunno what, but something about releasing maniacs in the street to cut budgets? Dunno, "politics bore me...") Not a single political character and slur is left untouched here, making this a little suspicious.
Even so, the film's not bad. The Tripper (2006) could have gone a little smoother, but it went a tad -no, scratch that- too hard to be "fun". It's silly seeing a presidential figures as killers, with the likes of "Richard Nixon" (Horror House on Highway Five), "George Washington" (Masters of Horror's "The Washingtonians") and "Abraham Lincoln" (President's Day (2010)) being portrayed as human monsters, but some of them wasn't anywhere as satirical and terrifying as an axe-weilding, knife gutting, rabid dog breeding backwoods psycho. Horror junkies who are into politics, republicans or just want to see something outrageous, you have it here.
Bodycount:
1 male killed with chainsaw
1 female had her face skinned off
1 male snared, later found disemboweled
1 male beheaded with axe
1 male had his neck broken
2 males axed to death
1 male snared with bear-trap, gutted alive
1 female stabbed to death with knife
1 male dragged out of a window, later mauled by dogs
1 male and 1 female found murdered
1 male axed on the gut
1 male axed on the chest
1 elderly male falls into a spiked pit, impaled
9+ hippies gets chopped with axe (perhaps more offscreen)
1 male mauled by dogs
1 male mauled by dogs
1 female mauled by dogs
1 male mutilated with a chainsaw
Total: 28 +
I'm still waiting for a spin-off about Margaret Thatcher murdering coal miners.
ReplyDeleteI dunno. Was there already a film called The Digger?
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