Census Bloodbath: Heads Will (Rock And) Roll

Year:
1985
Director:
Mats Olsson
Cast:
Jeff Harding, Naomi Kaneda, Michael Fitzpatrick
Run Time:
1 hour 29 minutes

Plot: Blood Tracks follows a crew shooting a music video for the hair metal band Solid Gold (played by the members of the real-life Swedish band Easy Action, including future Europe guitarist Kee Marcello) in the Colorado Rockies (played by Funäsdalen, Sweden). It goes horribly wrong when an avalanche traps them in an isolated cabin. It goes horribly wronger when various members of the party - including director Bob (Michael Fitzpatrick of Scream for Help) wander into the nearby abandoned factory, where a mother (Filippa Silverstone) and her brood of children have been hiding for the past 40 years after she murdered her husband in self defense. Somehow this has turned them into Hills Have Eyes-esque mutants.

Meanwhile, star Suzie (Naomi Kaneda) desperately tries to get in contact with their helicopter pilot liaison John (Jeff Harding, also of Scream for Help), who is already suspicious that something has gone terribly wrong.

Analysis: I love the time capsule nature of 1980s slashers, so when they focus on trendy music of the era, they tend to be interesting, even if those installments are rarely very good (see Terror on Tour, New Year's Evil, Rocktober Blood, Trick or Treat, and so on). Unfortunately, that rule of thumb has been severed with a pair of garden shears, because while I was eager to see what Blood Tracks had to offer, it came up empty at every opportunity. 

All it would have taken to win me over was for the filmmakers to simply set the camera down and let the 1980s happen at the lens, and Blood Tracks is too incompetent even for that. I was willing to let the weird ADR dialogue slide, because even though I didn't know it was Swedish when I turned it on, I can sniff out a European slasher at thirty paces. However, the incompetence is so much more deeply entrenched than that. 

The cinematography is incompetent. Everything is muddy and dark and uninteresting.

The screenplay is also incompetent. There are way too many characters in play here, and the movie never settles enough for any of them to come to the fore among the gnashing throng. You'd think that the fact that the movie has two screenwriters (Mats Helge Olsson and Anna Wolf) would allow them the opportunity to look at one another and figure out at least two different potential personality traits the characters might have, but they can't even come up with one, bless their hearts. 

The killers at least look different from one another, so that's nice. But there are also too many of them, only one of them ever gets a name, and I was never quite clear on exactly how many of them were actually kicking around in the first place.

The editing is also incompetent. It works in tandem with the cinematography and the staging (also incompetent) to render most of the kills completely illegible. I have spent years of my life trying to parse incoherent slasher movies, and I flatter myself that I have gotten quite good at it. So please believe me when I tell you that this is the most difficult time I've ever had merely trying to figure out what happens to the characters onscreen, let alone when and why. The kills are presumably the reason that any slasher movie existed in the mid-80s, so the fact that they are so abhorrently constructed is downright criminal. 

Frequently the editing conveniently leaves out the type of weapon that's in use, the exact part of the body to which it is being put to use, and sometimes even the identity of the poor sap who it is being used upon. Two separate murders involve the killer kind of simultaneously pulling on a person's body while crushing it in a process that seems to be effective but in such defiance of the laws of physics and the language that we have to describe such things that I had to invent the term "yanking" just to find some way to mark it in my notes.

You'll see below that I have failed to give Blood Tracks a completely bottom-of-the-barrel score. But trust me, that is not so much because the movie has merits, but because - as I said - I have been doing this for years and know just how much worse things can get. At least getting to look at the snowy Swedish landscape was nice.

Killer: The Family

Final Girl: Suzie (Naomi Kaneda)

Best Kill: It's technically not a kill, but the best gore effect by far is the lead killer's arm being shot right off.

Sign of the Times: Easy Action knew how to do the 1980s right.

Scariest Moment: The end credits open with a list of the actors that doesn't credit their characters, which felt uncanny and sinister in a way I can't quite explain.

Weirdest Moment: One couple is having sex in the car when an avalanche buries said car, and even though the rescue operation takes several minutes, the woman is still buck naked when she is pulled out of the snow.

Champion Dialogue: “We're buried! We're buried, you fool!"

Body Count: 15; not including several characters who are kidnapped by the killers and never heard from again, which means they're probably dead, though I have no proof of it.

1. The Father is stabbed in the back.
2. Frank is pushed off a platform.
3. Dave gets yanked.
4. Kee is decapitated offscreen. 
5. Nick is doused in gas and lit on fire.
6. Linda is killed in some way by a pulley-based trap.
7. Carrie is thrown from a platform and impaled on a spike.
8. Mary (I think) is killed in the face offscreen.
9. Sarah is yanked.
10. Fuck-Ass Bob Killer is shot.
11. Bob has a hatchet thrown through his forehead.
12. Louise is impaled with a blade pendulum thing.
13. Dark-Haired Killer is shot.
14. Leper Killer is stabbed in the neck and shot.
15. The Mother dies of... smoke inhalation? Falling?

TL;DR: Blood Tracks has a solid premise that it wastes with a scattershot, muddy approach.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1024