Ah, Slasher (2007). The name alone tells you everything you need to know: this is a film made by people who couldn’t be bothered to come up with a title that wasn’t just the genre itself. It’s like making a romantic comedy called Kiss or a war movie called Gun. German director Frank W. Montag (whose surname fittingly sounds like a command to go to work on Monday) and co-writer Jörn Döring somehow cobbled together a movie so derivative it makes Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan look like avant-garde cinema.
Let’s dig into this cinematic compost heap with the same enthusiasm Mike Corman has for stabbing random teenagers in the woods.
The Opening: Picnic Ruined by Ugly Guy With a Knife
The film starts with a couple enjoying a picnic. Then along comes a disfigured man with all the subtlety of a blender full of broken glass. He murders them, because of course he does, and we’re supposed to be shocked. Instead, it plays like the director just wanted to get to the blood early in case the audience changed the channel back to SpongeBob.
We then cut to Erin, a psychology student, listening to a lecture about Mike Corman—the local boogeyman, pyromaniac victim, and apparently part-time welder’s mask model. The professor might as well have handed out pamphlets saying: “Here’s the killer. He’ll show up later. Don’t expect nuance.”
Our Heroes (And I Use That Term Loosely)
Erin and her boyfriend Danny, plus their cannon-fodder friends Julie, Chris, Tom, and Maya, decide to go camping. Why? Because horror movie teenagers have the collective survival instinct of a lemming on meth. On the way, they run into a lecherous farmer who is so cartoonishly gross he feels like he stumbled out of a parody. Naturally, this means he’ll be back later to attempt a sexual assault—because Slasher doesn’t just want to fail at horror, it wants to fail at taste, too.
The group sets up camp, and the farmer’s son spies on Tom and Maya having sex in a tent (because no horror film can resist the trope of “horny teens must die”). Instead of just scaring him off, Mike shows up wearing a white mask and kills the peeping Tom—pun fully intended.
The Kill Parade (Now With Added Vice Grip)
From here the movie is a parade of uninspired murders, each somehow less creative than the last:
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The farmer’s daughter gets offed because, well, she exists.
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Tom gets his head crushed in a vise, which is less scary and more “Home Depot instructional video gone wrong.”
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Maya gets tortured, because the writers needed someone to scream loudly into the boom mic.
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Chris gets stabbed while trying to fix a generator—thus proving the lesson: never volunteer for chores.
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Danny gets axed, which at least is quick.
The gore isn’t shocking. It’s not even gross. It’s just… tedious. Watching Mike lumber around in his white mask is like watching your uncle try to cosplay Michael Myers after too much schnitzel.
The Twist That Nobody Asked For
Here’s where things go full telenovela: Julie, one of Erin’s friends, suddenly betrays her, revealing that she’s actually Mike’s older sister and—wait for it—lover. Yes, incest, because apparently the writers thought, “We’ve stolen everything else from American slashers, why not borrow a page from Game of Thrones too?”
Julie gleefully explains Mike’s tragic backstory and taunts Erin, only to be beaten to death with a pipe. Honestly, it’s the only time in the movie the audience might cheer, not because Erin is victorious but because Julie finally shut up.
Chainsaws, Tractors, and Farming Accidents
Eventually, Erin finds herself back at the farmhouse, where the lecherous farmer attempts to rape her (of course). Mike bursts in and kills his own dad with a chainsaw, which promptly runs out of gas—because even murder weapons in this film don’t want to work overtime. He switches to a knife, drags Erin to the barn, and almost strangles her until she gouges out his eye with pruning shears and stabs him like she’s tenderizing beef.
Then comes the pièce de résistance of stupidity: Erin ties Mike’s neck to a tractor and drives forward until it snaps. It’s less horror and more like an OSHA safety video titled Don’t Do This at Work.
But Wait—It Was Erin All Along!
Just when you think it’s over, the movie hits you with its bargain-bin Fight Club twist: Erin has flashbacks that reveal she was actually the one who tortured and killed the four girls Mike was accused of murdering. Surprise! The protagonist is secretly the villain.
Except, instead of a shocking revelation, it feels like the film just shrugged and went, “Eh, why not?” Erin, now fully unhinged, suffocates Danny in the ambulance, smiles like she just won the lottery, and walks away. Roll credits, cue the sound of audiences booing.
Why Slasher Fails So Spectacularly
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Derivative to the Core: It steals every slasher trope but does nothing interesting with them. Camping? Check. Creepy locals? Check. Sex equals death? Double check. Incest subplot? …wait, why?
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Acting That Hurts More Than the Gore: The cast delivers lines like they’re reading IKEA instructions. Christiane Imdahl (Erin) tries her best, but by the end, she’s forced into a “mad grin” that looks more like someone passed gas in the ambulance.
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Kills Without Thrills: Slashers live or die (literally) by their kill scenes. Here, the deaths are uninspired, poorly shot, and edited like someone sneezed on the timeline.
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The Twist Is an Insult: Instead of clever misdirection, the reveal that Erin was the killer all along feels like the writers panicked and stapled a plot twist to the script the night before shooting.
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Tone-Deaf Exploitation: The farmer subplot is so grossly unnecessary it feels designed to punish the audience. You came for a horror flick, not a grim PSA about predatory locals.
Final Thoughts
Slasher wants so badly to be part of the classic horror canon, but it’s more like a bad parody that forgot it was supposed to be funny. It’s not scary, it’s not clever, and it’s definitely not original. Watching it feels like being trapped in the woods with a drunk LARP group that brought real knives by mistake.
The only horror here is the realization that you wasted 90 minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
Final Rating: 🔪🍺 (1 out of 10 beer bottles smashed over your head)
One pity point for the tractor kill, because at least it made me laugh. Otherwise, Slasher should have stayed buried in the German forest it crawled out of.
