Low-budget amateur horror has proved to be a great breeding ground for directorial talent in days gone by, but it has also given the genre more than its fair share of useless hacks. Sledge, from co-directors John B Sovie II and Kristian Hanson gives me very little reason to believe that they will have anything of note to offer horror fans in the future. Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson they are most definitely not (and I suspect they know it).
The only thing that sets this derivative, poorly made, badly acted tongue-in-cheek slasher apart from similarly themed films is its framing device: a young woman alone at home sits down to watch a trashy backwoods horror movie called 'Sledge', the action cutting back and forth from the woman watching TV to the film within the film. Unfortunately, as ideas go, it's an absolute stinker, the constant to-ing and fro-ing between such disparate settings only serving to interrupt the flow of the action.
Not that there's any decent action to interrupt
When the woman is on screen, she spends most of her time talking on the phone to her boyfriend, the conversation being extremely dull, while the bulk of the action that takes place in the woods consists of the obnoxious characters engaging in equally inane chit-chat. Very little of this film's 75 minutes runtime is actually devoted to horror, but when it is, there is little for horror fans to actually get worked up about: the killer is an unmemorable psycho in a mask who spouts droll one-liners, and his kills are remarkably gore-free given the method with which he dispatches his victims.
There's not even any of that other staple ingredient of the genre: gratuitous nudity. The characters speak about and indulge in sex non-stop, but somehow the film manages to be completely devoid of bare flesh, making it an all round disappointment for slasher fans.
The only thing that sets this derivative, poorly made, badly acted tongue-in-cheek slasher apart from similarly themed films is its framing device: a young woman alone at home sits down to watch a trashy backwoods horror movie called 'Sledge', the action cutting back and forth from the woman watching TV to the film within the film. Unfortunately, as ideas go, it's an absolute stinker, the constant to-ing and fro-ing between such disparate settings only serving to interrupt the flow of the action.
Not that there's any decent action to interrupt
When the woman is on screen, she spends most of her time talking on the phone to her boyfriend, the conversation being extremely dull, while the bulk of the action that takes place in the woods consists of the obnoxious characters engaging in equally inane chit-chat. Very little of this film's 75 minutes runtime is actually devoted to horror, but when it is, there is little for horror fans to actually get worked up about: the killer is an unmemorable psycho in a mask who spouts droll one-liners, and his kills are remarkably gore-free given the method with which he dispatches his victims.
There's not even any of that other staple ingredient of the genre: gratuitous nudity. The characters speak about and indulge in sex non-stop, but somehow the film manages to be completely devoid of bare flesh, making it an all round disappointment for slasher fans.