The Tripper

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

So I'm sensing that there is this new wave of lower budget slasher movies going on (nu-slasher?). Not sure if this is the direction the genre is heading, or if it's just a pit stop, or what, but we're getting a lot of these somewhat silly slasher-comedies that feel like they are made by guys with an affection for bad, ultraviolent 80's slashers. But instead of doing an accurate homage to these films, they've kinda created something new... slasher movies that are funnier in a goofier, intentional way. I didn't much care for Severence or Wrong Turn 2, but I have liked Hatchet and now The Tripper.

I'm curious to see where this genre goes. It strikes me as very much in this post-Scream reactionary phase we have going on. Scream is great, but it's problem is the legion of imitators it spawned... a whole bunch of shitty, tame, slasher/whodunits that had ironic air quotes over them, at first to attract the jaded teen crowd, and later to attract dipshit teenagers who can't handle more intense, violent horror films (this has close ties to the wave of pussified pg-13 horror movies we recently have gone through). For a while, this trend pretty much killed the slasher movie.

So then we had our first wave of reactionairies, with slashers like High Tension and Wolf Creek and The Hills Have Eyes remake, which were dark and violent and tried to remind us that slasher movies were once serious, scary and meant for adults. And now we have the second wave, this "nu-slasher" subgenre which wants to remind us that they can be fun but still violent and meant for adults.

The Tripper was directed by David Arquette, and the best thing about it is the cast he managed to rope in. It's a low budget little flick that would normally star a bunch of nobodies, or at best star a bunch of WB (CW now?) actors. But Arquette must have called in some favors, because we have some genuinely good and interesting actors sprinkled in the cast. Best of all is Thomas Jane, who I assumed would have little more than a cameo but turned out to more or less be the lead role. He is slowly but surely becoming my favorite genre-movie actor, he's like the new Kurt Russell or something.

This isn't a great horror comedy, and I for one could have used more excessive violence, but it's good fun. You got a good cast, lots of drug humor, a killer doing a Ronald Reagan impression, ample nudity (and it plays fair, we get some male full frontal) and Thomas Jane with an awful mustache. If you like this sort of crap, it's a good one.