Dead in 3 Days (2007)
Dread Central Staff
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Starring Sabrina Reiter, Julia Rosa Stocki, Michael Steinocher
Directed by Andreas Prochaska
The hills are alive with the sound … OF MURDER! That’s right, the land of the Van Trapps has landed its first slasher film. While Di3D brings a few new things to the table set by the likes of Jason and Myers, for the most part it’s a horrendously boring, embarrassingly predictable mess. Given the choice to listen to The Sound of Music soundtrack for a week straight, or watch this movie again, I’d say, bring it on Poppins!
Let me temper my tantrum by starting off with the positives. The lakeside locale in Austria puts Camp Crystal Lake, or any other slasher setting, to shame. Then again, since this is a horror film, the soothing beauty of the natural surroundings probably shouldn’t count as a plus. Either way, it makes me want to visit The Alps. The other interesting thing about the film is that for the first twenty minutes or so, you actually think you might be watching something original. The genuinely mournful response of the characters, to the death of the first teen victim had me thinking that the film was using the slasher genre as a teen suicide parable. Wishful thinking! That said, the teenagers are less despicable than they usually are. While not fully fleshed out, the characters do come across as more than raging sacks of dope smoking hormones. For the most part I still wanted to see them dead though.
If you know what’s good for you, you’ll read the following spoilers and skip the movie completely. Trust me, you won’t believe how derivative this flick is unless you read on…
After survival girl’s boyfriend gets killed first (drowned at the bottom of a lake), the friends band together in mourning, and their shared belief that the school outcast is the murderer. After a couple more teens get offed in boring, predictable ways by a lame looking killer in a parka, the red herring is revealed, the outcast murdered, and a new red herring introduced. A couple more victims bite the cobblestone, and in the end – DUM, DUM, DUM – The killer turns out to be the vengeful mother of a young boy who drowned in a lake. The teen victims didn’t help her son, so she’s taken to drowning the clique she holds responsible for her son’s death. Since when is drowning a legitimate slasher technique? Slasher? More like Washer. You may think I just ruined the movie, but trust me, I didn’t. This stuff is all so telegraphed that you know it seemingly before the filmmakers even do.
For those of you that think a movie that starts out as One Missed Call, spends most of its time trying to be I Know What You Did Last Summer, and ends with a Mrs Voorhees “twist” ending, sounds okay, then it’s worth mentioning that there is at least one good death by fishtank and a nipple slip or two. The rest of us will wonder how an Austrian slasher flick managed to miss out on the opportunity for a yodeling, lederhosen-clad serial killer that impales his victim on his blood encrusted alpenhorn!
1 out of 5
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