STEVE says:One question, before I get into this: When the hell did Austria start making teen-slasher flicks? I like to think I've got my finger on the pulse of the teen-slasher flick market, but the Austrian contingent has apparently left me alone in the dark.
Makes me wonder what I've been missing all these years 'cos this one rates right up there with the best of the sub-genre.
If I'm being honest, though, it really wasn't all that original - kind of a re-telling of I Know What You Did Last Summer, but with a grisly twist - yet it felt like what that film wanted to be. Like this was the original and Last Summer was the pale American imitation. It was very tense, well-acted and beautifully shot... which already separates it from Last Summer by leaps and bounds. And our teen heroes weren't complete knobs, either, which scores the movie extra points in my book. For once I didn't want to see everyone killed in nasty ways.
The sad bit is, no one is going to rent this one because of the sub-titles. Yet shite the likes of Saw IV and Hostel 2 is leaping off the fucking shelves. Too bad.
Apparently there's a sequel on the way. Normally, that would bother me. But here, Prochaska is returning - not only as director, but also as writer this time around - as well as Sabrina Reiter as Nina, Julia Rosa Stöckl as Mona and Andreas Kiendl as Officer Kogler. I don't know how they're going to make it work - as in I Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel seems as implausible as it is inadvisable - but I, for one, am very interested to see what happens next.
4/5
NIKKI says:
We were supposed to watch a Spanish movie called Rec but the version we had didn't have any subtitles. Man, were we pissed. So, at was nearly midnight, my holidays are over (sigh) and we needed something stat -- somehow a Masters of Horror episode just doesn't feel, to me, like our daily movie quota filled.
I scrabbled through the preview tapes looking for something 80 minutes long that screamed HORROR and came up with Dead in 3 Days. We fretted, but went with it. Lately, the second-thought movies have been some of the best.
This was really good. We enjoyed it right from the start. The scenes with the kids finishing school were genuinely funny, and the classic slasher set-ups were in place -- happy kids who have no idea what's coming to them, a sneaky nerdy kid who seems to dislike them, and a scene involving roadkill that shifts our mood from jovial to wary. Stuff can turn on a dime. Ah, horror movies. How can you not love the art?
And then the kids start getting weird calls, and start disappearing, and it's all so tense and interesting. The film hits every mark. It throws us red herrings then proves they can't be responsible. It reveals possible reasons behind the slaughter at mid-point and by the middle of the movie, everything that needs to be set up is set up and so we're not scratching our heads, but nodding along because it makes perfect (inevitable) sense. And it reveals it's basic truth right at the very end, which is the classic tying of loose moral ends.
This is a smart, stylish horror movie that knows what it's doing. That's all we ask for in horror, right?
4/5
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