FOX TRAP ** U.K. 2016 Dir: Jamie Weston. 97 mins
This slick low budget British horror has a scenario right out of innumerable 1980’s American slasher movies: a Prom Night prank gone wrong (“She’s disabled but she didn’t die from it!”) rebounds on a group of twentysomethings when they are invited to a suspicious class reunion eight years later.
The robed, masked mystery-killer takes too long to eliminate a universally unlikeable ensemble cast, and tired clichés abound: mobile phones with no signal, the car that won’t start, the Hot Tub of doom. Occasionally, director Weston appears to have some grasp of executing a suspenseful stalk / slash set-up, but the shrill acting and lame script thwart his efforts at every turn. Hammer-based sadism is hurled in just for the hell of it, and the dialogue reaches an all-time low with the line “I don’t have time for catch me, rape me!” Worse still, the seemingly endless climax veers from a clone of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME’s corpse-filled party sequence to an increasingly ridiculous reworking of SCREAM’s finale, complete with killer(s) that talk too much and multiple characters stabbing each other to the point of unintentional mirth.
Review by Steven West
