The Snowy Swedish Hills Have Eyes: Blood Tracks (1985)

Blood Tracks (Sweden, 1985)

Rating: **

Starring: Jeff Harding, Michael Fitzpatrick and Naomi Kaneda

Big hair. Bad lines. Bloody bodycount. Yep, it's another 80s slasher of the cheesiest kind! Ripping off Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and chucking the story up to the snowy mountains of Sweden.

In this Swedish production pretending to be American, we open with a drunk fella bumbling his way back home to beat his wife and rob his own family of their last earnings. Having enough of this domestic abuse, the matriarch decided to fight back and earns herself a cut in her neck before burying a knife into hubby's back, all the while their five young sons watch in horror. As a random fat bearded guy walks in to shout "MURDERER!" at the surviving spouse, she and her boys flee into the night and for the next forty years, the family hit out in the middle of nowhere.

We now jump ahead to 1985 and members of a rock band Solid Gold (altogether a real life band called Easy Action!), their entourage of big-haired dancers and dates, and a small filming crew set to the mountains to shoot a scene for their upcoming music video. Soon comes the babes in their skimpy leotards and bikinis gyrating around despite the shivering cold temperature and Solid Gold hamming it up in camera as they rock this film's theme song and make googoo lips during close-ups, it's a whole lot of noise and tomfoolery that catches the attention of a certain runaway mother and her now adult sons, surviving over the years as a group of devolved, homicidal savages.

Not too happy with these rock stars and their almost naked women bringing their bad music to the mountains and, too, trespassing into their abandoned factory hideout way too many times for their liking, the clan decided to hunt down the glam rockers and company after an avalanche stranded them in a cabin. A fact that, mind you, failed to stop Solid Gold and the hairsprayed gal gang from partying and having sex. I guess being cut off from the rest of the world by thick layers of snow is a turn on for some people?

From here on, it's one murder to the next as people either walks into the abandoned factory to get killed off by the mutant family and their set of booby traps, or meet their demise back at the cabin as some of the clan members opted to stalk the place and maybe find an eyeball to munch on. It should have been a cheesy great time with Blood Track's horrendous lines, bad acting and overly insane-looking villains and, to be fair, it does bring in the hammy goods most bad slashers have, with a side of good grue from some of its bloodier kills for that extra kick, but the fact that the movie's been developed with barely visible lighting and too many characters just being there with hardly a plot to work on, it becomes a test of patience for a lot of parts which kinda kills the overall joy of watching a horrendously bad horror flick.

There's really nothing much else going for this movie apart from a snow-set survival gig against maniacs on a killing spree peppered with sleaze and cheese, though, if you see yourself as an aficionado for cinematic fondue and don't mind a bit of one-dimensional horror stories revolving mainly around creeps killing cliques and not a lot more, then Blood Tracks (1985) can be a fair watch for the undemanding and hammy. Yes, you could do better, a hell lot better, but you could also do worse. 

Bodycount:

1 male knifed in the back

1 male mauled to death

1 male had his neck snapped

1 male decapitated

1 male set on fire

1 female torn in half with a booby trap

1 female thrown to a pipe, impaled

1 male had his throat cut

1 female killed, method unknown

1 male had an eye bitten out

1 female murdered, method unknown

1 male knifed in the gut

1 male shot to death with a shotgun

1 male gets a thrown axe to the head

1 female burned to death

1 female impaled on a projected scythe

1 male shot with a shotgun

1 male shot to death with a shotgun

Total: 18