Shadyside 1994: When Ryan (David W. Thompson), a mild-mannered nobody, massacres a handful of people for no apparent reason and can only be stopped by a bullet in the head, that shocks the whole area - but not enough to have any effect on the long-standing rivalry between Shadyside and neighbouring Sunnyvale high schools, and this time around it's a Sunnyvale car that's totalled in a crash - with driver and passenger getting away with minor injuries though. But after that incident, Shadyside resident Deena (Kiana Madeira) thinks somebody from Sunnyvale is prowling her neighbourhood in a skull mask, just like the one Ryan wore when he killed all those people. Deena thinks her Sunnyvale ex girlfriend Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) is behind this, as she was in the crashed car, so Deena fetches her brother Josh (Benjamin Flores jr) and her best friends Kate (Julia Rehwald) and Simon (Fred Hechinger) to pay a visit to Sam in the hospital and tell her to stop this, but then somebody kills everybody in the hospital - and it actually turns out to be shot dead Ryan himself - and Deena and company fetch Sam and the lot of them go on the run from what they soon find out is more than just one killer. Now Josh is quite a bit of a nerd, and he knows about town history that's pretty much drenched in blood, and a killing spree in pretty much every generation. And he also figures the killers after them are actually the killers of past killing sprees reaching back to the legend of Sarah Fier (Elizabeth Scopel), a burnt which who has sworn revenge on Shadyside. It also turns out that all the past killers are after Sam, who has accidently touched Sarah's bones, which ... I don't know. Anyways, knowing that, our heroes use Sam as bait and lure the killers into a trap to blow them up - but unfortunately, while the trap works just fine, the killers regenerate. So our heroes find out Sam actually has to be actually dead for a time for the curse to end, and if she can be brought back to life then, perfect. So Deena and gang lure the killers to a department store and drug Sam like crazy - while the killers already close in, take out some of the gang, and ultimately it's up to Deena to drown her girlfriend in order to save her ...

Now the concept to spread out a slasher story over three movies in reverse chronological order seems to be a promising one at least on paper, and watching this first movie one can's denie that it does many things right, from telling a self-contained story with only hints to future episodes, to focus on characters rather than losing itself in its mythology, making this one a decent thriller - but one that's by no means perfect, basically it's just a bit too full of high school clichés to stick out, and while it has its fair share of good scenes, much of it seems to be no more than routine. That's not at all saying this one isn't entertaining, it's just not something one will remember for long.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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