Scream If You Know What I Did At Sneek Two Years Ago: Sneekweek (2016)

Sneekweek (Netherlands, 2016) (AKA "Scream Week")
Rating: ***
Starring: Carolien Spoor, Jelle de Jong, Jord Knotter

Welcome to Sneek. Water sport capital of Friesland. Home of the largest inland water event Sneekweek. And apparently the best city in Netherlands to start killing those responsible for an "I Know What You Did Last Summer"- style accidental murder/cover-up something something years ago!

As a form of initiation for new pledges, two college boys and three gal pals have candidates strip down to their willies and sit in an ice bath while singing nursery rhymes, only for one of the candidate's heart to stop from shock, killing the poor naked lad. Panicking for the consequences that awaits them, dude bros Boris and Thjis, quiet-type new pledge Peter, classic party girl trope Lisa and token black girl Kim agree to a story that the boy fell ill while sitting in the bath without their knowledge. Googie goodie criminal law student and Thjis' girlfriend Merel was adamant at first, but eventually gives in due to peer pressure, much to the price of her now-haunted conscience.

Two years later, the gaggle of six graduate from college and drive off to Sneek for Sneekweek in hopes of closing their last chapters as drunken teens by partying, drinking and fornicating like there's no tomorrow. (Oh, and yacht racing! Let's not forget about yacht racing!) But as we know when it comes to this sub-genre, the good times are bound to end methodically as a masked and hooded figure begins prowling the gang's vacation house and follow them everywhere. Soon, a random date bites it via a nailgun, one of girls gets nearly gutted with a buzzsaw and one of the boys is dead in an apparent suicide.

 All of this and more takes place within the near two hour running time of this Dutch Scream/I Know What You Did Last Summer clone-cum-hybrid as the teens learn that one thing they did that one night that they all gravely regret is coming back to bite them (and everybody else that just happens to be there) in the arse and they're pretty much all alone in this as most of them keep finding reasons to keep quiet about the homicide. (Not altogether good reasons, but reasons nonetheless) The stupidity factor goes up an ante with the fact that some of our characters are willing to ignore the fact that two of them were attacked and one of them is dead by the 50 minute mark, just so they can enjoy more evenings partying, giving us plenty of fillers of teens getting drowned in booze and bumping uglies before a very rushed finale littered with red herrings, convenient twists and one WTF ending that kinda reminds me of that weird last shot from the 80s Spanish slasher Pieces (1981).

Slasher-wise, Sneekweek has the advantage of looking pretty darn good with its polished high-production, fluid pacing and considerably fun stalk-and-chase scenes which are easily the highlights of this movie. The only matter that I'm struggling with is that the murders are mostly done offcamera, which is a bit of a downer seeing half of the characters are inconsiderate, thus worthy of having cold steel or unforgiving blunts going into or through their flesh. But as if the movie is channeling its inner 90s (even giving us a slight nod as one character watches a dubbed version of Scream (1996)), the only onscreen bloody treatment we get involves a garrote, a throat cut and a water bucket drowning. I guess we should be thankful that we at least got bloody aftermath bodies and that one boat propeller kill that's kinda cool if only the body parts used didn't look so rubbery.

Maybe with the magic of editing to cut short a little off the filler scenes and add a bit of skin contact between bodies and murder weapons, Sneekweek could have been more of a treat than what it is right now. It's flawed, right, but is it unwatchable? Hardly. Maybe a tad lengthy, but watchable for a simplistic whodunit slasher.

Bodycount:
1 male dies after his heart stops from sitting in an ice bath
1 male found with wrist slits and hanged on a boat's sail
1 female found wrapped alive in plastic wrapping, suffocates
1 female stabbed in the head with a sabersaw
1 male garroted
1 female found with a powerdrill to her back
1 male had his throat cut with a knife
1 male tied to a boat propeller, pulled into and shredded to pieces
1 male drowned in a bucket of water
1 male and 1 female decimated in a blown house
Total: 11