And This Little Hippy Went Wee-Wee-Wee, All The Way Home: The Tripper (2006)

The Tripper (AKA "President Evil") (2006)
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 neck. The father and son duo then gets separated by the cops and Gus is sent to a mental asylum.

Cut forward to the present. Samantha and her pot-riding friends are on their way to an "American Free Love" festival located in the middle of the woods. While on their way, they somehow angered a trio of hillbillies who later continues to harass them whenever they get the chance, but the real problem isn't these hicks. Rather, it's the maniac hiding deeper in the woods, wearing a life-like Ronald Reagan mask (yes, you heard that right) and have made a habit on killing people who goes to this festival every year.

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...

The Tripper (2006) has its ups and downs but overall a good flick. Its gory enough for gore hounds, a real bloody treat from beginning to end as we get nudists getting disemboweled, hillbillies getting their guts torn off, a couple of nicely done beheadings, and one of the trippiest massacre scenes where Reagan breaks into a pot session of at least twenty hippies and going axe-happy ape on them. 

But while the gore flows like waterfalls in a rainy season, there's also the "horror-comedy" take on the movie which, sadly, fell a tad 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 leave me in chuckles, 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.

The artsy editing may be another drawback; on one end, the trippy cinematography have us experiencing a weirdly unique tone, with the abundance of camera and visual effects done to match a chaotic drugged-up world. It's a nice attempt to bring something entirely different for a slasher, but things like this can make some viewers who aren't used to this visual style very uncomfortable and get more headaches than a blood-splattered good time.

Now, while David Arquette, our Wes Craven's Scream star-turned-director mentioned his intention was to make a fun movie with The Tripper, you can tell a small shred of political satire can still be sensed here; while the killer's identity was rather obvious given the opening murder we were treated with, the movie got creative on tying real life events and twisting them to fit the cheesy splatter and hokeyness of the story, like calling back to Raegan's controversial budget cuts on psychiatric hospitals, forcing many mental patients back unto the streets back in the 80s. Not a single political character and slur is left untouched by criticism, resulting to some good writing within the cheese and horror show. 

All in all, The Tripper (2006) could have been a throwaway gag slasher with little to show for, but it fortunately made the hard effort 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 gets a chainsaw to the neck
1 female seen with her face flayed off
1 male snared, later found disemboweled
1 male beheaded with an 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 and 1 female found murdered
1 male axed to death
1 male hacked with an axe
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
2 males and 1 female seen murdered
1 male mutilated with a chainsaw
Total: 29 +