Only, Slasher fulfils none of this promise. Instead, it emerges as no more than a copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) that has been made 25 years too late. There has been an upsurge in Backwoods Brutality films ever since the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). This has taken off in a big way in Europe with efforts such as High Tension (2003), The Ordeal (2004), Sheitan (2006), Them (2006), Frontier(s) (2007) and King of the Hill (2007), most of which put tame American counterparts into the grave. Unlike most of these others, Slasher only repeats the basics but does so with no imagination or style and makes no attempt to do anything unexpected or different with the elements. The chainsaw wielding killer with his face hidden behind a mask is a blatant copy of Texas Chain Saw’s Leatherface, for instance. The characters are the same blank cutouts that are found in any slasher movie (bar their speaking in German). There is no irony or genre in-reference – the most the film attempts to subvert the genre is in throwing in an in-bred backwoods family and having them turn out not to be the killers after all.

Slasher feels like an amateur film made by a group of teenage friends with more enthusiasm for the genre than they have film school experience. Frank W. Montag’s handling of actors seems awkward, while the dialogue scenes are lacking in greater nuance. This is particularly the case when it comes to the backwoods family the group encounter who are so caricatured that they verge on parody – the intellectually handicapped son who immediately starts pursuing one of the girls with a pitchfork, the father with a leprous skin condition who is having sex with his daughter. We are introduced to the father in an absurdly contrived scene where he is asleep in a chair and one of the girls puts her head down to his chest to see if he is alive only for him to wake up and grab her butt, which is as silly as it sounds. The gore is plentiful and at least occurs with a great deal of enthusiasm if uneven skill. The nastiest scene is where the killer has Maja Makowski tied up in a chair and then repeatedly stabs her to death with a knife in the vagina.

Where Slasher collapses into the pretentious is when it comes to throwing in an M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist ending that reveals everything to be not a backwoods stalking but an elaborate set-up. [PLOT SPOILERS]. I am not sure I fully follow the end explanation but it appears that rather than being one of the stalked victims, Pia de Buhr is the brother of Mike Corman (Sebastian Badenburg), the masked chainsaw-wielding killer, and that everything was a set-up all along. Several years ago, Mike was a serial killer but Christiane Imdahl was one of his victims. She has (for reasons I don’t understand) forgotten or repressed most of what happened when she was abducted by him. In her escape, she set fire to the house, during which he was burned and facially disfigured. He and his sister then set this elaborate scheme up to get revenge on Christiane. It’s a preposterous set-up, not the least of which it fails to explain why all the other members of the group and several other random victims are also slaughtered.

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