Slashed Dreams

NOVEMBER 1, 2007

GENRE: CRAP, HORROR? RAPE-REVENGE (?)
SOURCE: DVD (BUDGET PACK!!!)

At long last, October is over! I can go back to the standard, sane, simple, single movie a day. And I feel even better about that when my daily movie is as bad as Slashed Dreams (aka Sunburst), because I don’t want to run the risk of watching another film that might turn out as boring and pointless as this one for at least another 24 hrs or so.

This may be the most plodding movie I have ever seen in my life (certainly the worst offender for HMAD). LITERALLY nothing happens in the film. Except a rape. Nice, huh? We watch 2 folks sort of shuffle about the woods for nearly an hour (swimming, frolicking, eating...) before a couple of rednecks harass them (very tamely. One of them actually seems borderline nice). Later on, they come back and hit the guy a few times and rape the girl (at least, we are told as much. It’s sort of hard to tell if the guy is raping her or just hugging her. It’s certainly the least graphic rape scene ever committed to film, so it’s got that going for it at least). Then Robert Englund shows up, philosophizes about tea, the boyfriend tries to fight the rednecks, who both run away, and then the good guys go swimming. The end. I’m not exaggerating, that’s the movie. No one dies or gets jailed for their crimes. And the heroes barely seem perturbed afterwards. You could almost remove the scenes with the rednecks entirely and the film would just seem like the filmed version of a Bartledanian novel.

As you can probably tell from that image, the movie was very poorly retitled from Sunburst sometime after Nightmare on Elm St, in order to try to give the film some cash-in value. Usually, this is certainly fine by me, but there are two problems with it this time: 1. It’s the most obvious retitling I’ve ever seen (I wish I could convey how ridiculous the little zooming animation on the green box looks), and 2. Englund’s not even the fucking bad guy! He’s some hippie (heh, OK, so maybe he is). He doesn’t even show up until the final 10 minutes or so. Come on now. This is purely a scam.

His reaction to being told that his friend was raped is pretty astounding. The boyfriend tells him she was raped, and Englund doesn’t ask anything like “Who did it?” or “Where did they go?” He just asks if the girl has had some food yet. At first, I thought he was going to turn out to be an even worse villain, but no, he just makes her some tea and then more or less exits the film again.

This movie is also stuffed with folk music, most by a female singer. Terrifying, perhaps, but not in the intentional way. If not for my little safety that I can qualify (and judge, unfortunately for the filmmakers) a film as horror if it is presented as such (which being on the Chilling Classics set certainly does), I wouldn’t even consider it horror at all. It’s Rape-NonRevenge, a thankfully obscure genre that is hopefully comprised entirely of this one sorry film.

Oh there’s a bear scene too.

What say you?

4 comments:

  1. Rape-Revenge? Ohmigod.
    I experienced the musical version of that at a recent gig I attended. The band in question were called Skat Injector and were so invasive as to label themselves 'noisecore ear rape'.
    By all means check out my review of them here...
    http://www.johnskibeat.blogspot.com

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  2. I have an old VHS of this (still under the Slashed Dreams title) and I was planning on reviewing it for my site. I found it boring, so I kept putting it off, thinking nobody would bother reviewing this one anyway. I figured I'd still get to it before anyone else.

    I swear, those guys behind the DVD budget packs are ganking shit from my VHS boxes...

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  3. Just because somebody had to:

    My Defense of Slashed Dreams.

    I actually thought it was pretty funny. "Animals are clumsy too!"

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  4. Holy fuck this sucked ass. did that girl even get raped? if she did--that guy has a remarkable talent for cumming in five seconds! what a boring movie... ugh

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