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Blood Tracks (1985)
Genre : Slasher
Stars : Jeff Harding, Naomi Kaneda, Michael Fitzpatrick, Brad Powell, Peter Merill, Harriet Robinson
The "Plot"
A cast and crew assemble at a remote cabin in the mountains to shoot a music video for a rock group. Unfortunately they are trapped in by repeated avanlanches and fall foul of a hermit group living in a nearby disused factory, which resents the intrusion of humanity into their own little world and begins to kill them off one by one.
The Real Story
Well, here's a slasher film that comes from Sweden for a change - but don't expect it to be less dumb than any of its American counterparts. Blood Tracks is a pretty lively film, with a huge death count, and lots of sex and cheap gore effects to appeal to the exploitation crowd. It has its failings - much of the climax takes place in the dark, stupidly, so that you can't see a damn thing, although this may be a fault of the print (along with the awful pan and scan job here in the UK) - but no more so than any other low budget horror yarn from the period. As well as this it's short, has a fast pacing and an interesting isolated setting in the form of the spooky mountains, which I always like the use of in a horror film (whether it be The Abominable Snowman or The Werewolf and the Yeti!).
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The cast members are even more dumb than usual, with a group of people wandering around an old building at night and deciding to split up to search for a missing companion - yeah, that's clever. The female cast members are all vain and unlikable, and so are most of the men for that matter. It doesn't help that the truly hideous fashions and hairstyles have also dated badly since the time in which this was made. The dialogue sounds cheesy and overdubbed, although I do commend the film-makers for getting maximum use out of a piece of stock footage of an avalanche.
The murders - despite being noticably cut here in the UK - are all varied and kept interesting, as well as being short and to the point - there's little of that stalk-and-slash nonsense here. Characters are impaled, get axes through their skulls, are burnt alive, have their necks snapped, get decapitated (cue a cheesy severed bouncing head effect), shot repeatedly, lose arms and fall foul of deadly traps designed to slice them with ropes or drive huge stakes through their chest. Of course, it's all done in the nastiest way possible.
You can't feel too sorry for the truly stupid cast members, though, who decide to have sex in their log cabin while a family of murderers lurk around outside and occasionally peek through windows. Speaking of the bad guys, you almost feel sorry for them towards the end of the film, when the "good guys" fight back and butcher most of their number! For some reason they have reverated to animal behaviour and their faces have been dipped in oatmeal by the look of it. Although cheap and cheesy, I did get a kick out of Blood Tracks, due to it being a straightforward celebration of death with minimal dialogue and lots of violent action. |