Berserker (1987)

DECEMBER 30, 2019

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I can't remember if it made it into the movie adaptation, but one thing I loved in Sphere (the novel) was that the creatures that sprung from the subconscious of the characters had no insides, because while someone might have a strong mental image of a shark or jellyfish or whatever it was (hey it's been like 20 years, leave me alone) looked like on the outside, their mind wouldn't dream up the interior to go along with it, so it simply wasn't there. In other words, it had the right look, but nothing was actually holding it together - something one could also say about Berserker (aka Berserker: The Nordic Curse), a standard past-its-prime '80s slasher (1987 to be exact) that checks all the boxes but never quite felt alive to me.

And that's a shame, because the killer backstory is borderline insane: a berserker is a viking warrior who will dress in animal skins (and snouts) to hunt its victims, as opposed to your standard masked maniac. For a red herring, the movie employs an actual bear (Bart the bear, in fact - kind of a big star back then! He was also in Great Outdoors and The Bear) that we're led to believe is the actual killer since the death scenes are shot in closeup, so you just see a paw swipe someone or the jaws snarling or whatever. It's actually a cheat - when they finally reveal the killer near the end there isn't a single angle where one could believe it was anything but a guy in some loinclothes, but it's an amusing, ambitious attempt at least.

If only it was serving something more interesting! It's bad enough that our characters are right out of the stock slasher handbook, but they all kind of look alike too - there are three blonde women who could all be named Muffy and two blonde men who could be named Chad (as could the brunette guy, for that matter, but at least he's not blonde). Throw a redhead into the mix, damn you! And the movie commits the cardinal slasher sin of killing two of them off almost back to back after an interminable wait, then lets the others all run around for a while, alert to the danger. I can give it some points for not reducing everything to a Final Girl (in fact the men's survival rate is higher than the women's, also unusual), but there's no one else around except for two old-timers, a cop played by John Goff and a mountain man played by George "Buck" Flower, both of whom presumably went home every day and hoped to see a message from John Carpenter (and perhaps they did, since the Fog vets both ended up in They Live a year later!).

When these guys are on-screen, the movie picks up some; granted their conversations have almost zero bearing on anything (at one point they spend a good minute discussing when Flower's character first beat Goff at chess), but there's something dryly amusing about cutting away from attractive and horny 20somethings to let two veteran character actors shoot the shit. After Goff leaves Flower's place for the night we cut back to him every now and then finding signs of a struggle or something else amiss, hoping to find our protagonists before they're all killed and clearly knowing more about what might be going on than he was willing to admit to them earlier (BOTH men do the "don't go up there" routine, hilariously). As for Flower's character... well he disappears for a while, and if you have a guess why then congrats, you've seen a movie before!

(Spoiler for 30 year old movie: he's the killer.)

To be fair it's not a badly made movie; it actually looks pretty good (lots of fog and backlighting, if that's your bag) and the shots of the bear are mostly well integrated, so they weren't all amateurs stumbling their way to the finish line. In fact one of the actors went on to write and star in Iced the following year, so I'm already used to seeing this guy in badly made slashers and this ain't one of them. But all of the most memorable things have zero to do with the horror element; in five years all I'll remember is the jaw-droppingly awful pop songs on the soundtrack (one has a chorus that is primarily "You're a coooooool dude!"), weird homoerotic notes of the shirtless male heroes pouring beer on each other, and the fact that they're all traveling to a cabin that has one room so they're all sleeping (read: fooling around) a few inches away from each other with no privacy whatsoever.

The only exception is the closing shot, where we learn who our Berserker really is via a few dissolves between the muscle bound actor who played him in the kill scenes (when they weren't just using poor Bart) and Flower, who is decidedly less in shape (so it's kind of like a werewolf movie, but one where the werewolf would be mostly human and seemingly wouldn't require a different actor to play his non-werewolf self). Then it freeze-frames on Flower before the credits roll, and it's just a hilarious image that I hope remains burned into my mind for at least three more days. Berserker 2 could have been amazing if they picked up directly where this one left off (they certainly didn't need to introduce too many new characters for a followup since so many of them survived this one) and discarded the mystery angle to let ol' George really cut loose as the villain.

Vinegar Syndrome's blu-ray has the expected extras - a few interviews with cast members and the director (who also provides an intro), but all shot separately so they can't jog each others' memories when necessary or have fun reminiscing as a group, which is how the best of these things play out (see the one on Creepshow for a terrific example). And the commentary is by the Hysteria Continues guys, who are certainly fans of the slasher genre and have more appreciation for some of these lesser films (including this one) than I do, but they tend to run over the same points a lot to make up for the fact that they didn't make the movie and thus don't know too much about its production. And they've already done a few slashers from this era (Trapped Alive, Cutting Class, etc.) so if you've heard those you might experience deja vu since they discuss a lot of the same things (mainly, how the slasher film's glory days were over by then but these movies were still coming along for direct to video audiences, and that they might not be classics but have their merits). Like the movie itself, it's not that any of these things are badly done, it's just that you're going to spend some time thinking "haven't I already seen/listened to this?"

What say you?

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