Blood Red River Bed (2024) (USA)
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There’s a legend about a murdering ghost who haunts the Illinois River in Oklahoma once the sun goes down. The locals know the score but a group of young adults looking to throw one bitching party on the river after dark don’t cater to folk tales and superstitious old people. So it’s definitely on them when The Red Fern Reaper starts picking them off. One local camps out nearby to mumble to himself about how these stupid kids are gonna die but falls to The Reaper before any of them. The Reaper looks great with the backyard-slasher aura swinging in full force. Long black hair riddled with dead leaves, a questionable skull mask, a blood-covered duster, a big-ass hat, a red bandana around the neck and plenty of sharp instruments… although he is quite fond of his sickle. Darrell and Danny Strickland craft one hell of a solid throwback to those SOV slashers that once stood forgotten but now are greedily gathered up by nostalgic horror lovin’ nerds across the world. And rightfully so, there’s a certain charm about them and luckily for us, this ain’t one of them odes to trash slashers that’s too busy winking and nudging at the audience to deliver the goods. Fake film deterioration is needless because this would have functioned perfectly as an SOV presentation but it’s not too distracting and nowhere near as offensive as some other releases that wanted to be a throwback to exploitation flicks that followed in the wake of Grindhouse. Again, it’s just little things in this bad boy that really tick the boxes for a successful love letter to the era of Polonia, Gallagher and Ritter without forgetting how important the digital-video boom of the 2000s was. I don’t see that a lot and I’m thankful when I do. There’s musical performance by local artists that are presented as dirt-cheap music videos (my head immediately drifted off to Cry Wolf’s extended set in Horror of the Hungry Humongous Hungan and I have no issue with anything making me reminisce about that), folks introduced solely to come to a bloody end, a whole bunch of drinking, death in a toilet stall, conversations between friends that are so damn natural it warms my heart (an amazing talk between two toasted buds about bugs had me flashing back to drunk conversations with Larry and Steve in a basement layered in cigarette smoke and blanketed in the skeletons of empty Miller High Life cans), lo-fi splatter, one or two striking shots, location shooting and the lighting issues that causes, tons of insects hovering around the camera lights and an ambling plot just serves to bring whatever poor soul it lands on into the path of the killer. You can smell the stale beer and the aftertaste of too many smokes and if most of these folks had survived, I can feel the hangover they would have had. Go Fuck Yourself sunglasses adorn the face of a character who can’t be bothered to stop smoking his cigarette while The Reaper attempts to plunge a blade into him and if that sounds like your kind of fun, then you’re in the right spot. The film’s psychotronic brain wanders off more than once to chase the shadow of a story that’s not interesting but it always comes back home to its garbage-slasher aesthetic and it’s bits like this that have it never feeling too sanitized like a lot of the homages to these types of movie. It’s not clean and it shouldn’t be because that’s the only damn way it will feel genuine... and this is genuine.
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