Thursday 4 May 2017

BERSERKER: THE NORDIC CURSE

CONTAINS SPOILERS

There's not much to say about yet another dumb 80s horror slasher in which a sextet of teenage morons are set upon by an immortal Viking lunatic in a bearhide cape. The aforementioned morons, out for a long weekend of camping in the woods (famous for its legends of Olde Norse monsters) and as much sex, beer and pot as they can get, trek out to the wrong camping lodge, argue, wander off into the woods to have sex, find corpses left over from the opening sequence, run around screaming, and injure themselves while charging through the undergrowth. Meanwhile someone or something is picking them off....

After a while you get bored with them and their colossally uninteresting antics, and you end up looking around the flat wondering which household items you'd most like to shove into their heads*, particularly with regard to lead dumbass Josh who's so arrogant, charmless and tiresome I would have been happier if the entire running time of Berserker: The Nordic Curse had just been devoted to him getting his skin clawed off in loving close-up.

There's absolutely nothing surprising, nothing unusual: everyone does everything they're expected to do in a cheap join-the-dots teenkill movie. Of course there's going to be a campfire scene in which one of them explains the scary legend and another leaps hilariously out of the darkness to scare the girl. Of course they're not going to take any notice of the sheriff or the campsite owner (George "Buck" Flower). Of course they're going to have sex in the woods in the middle of the night. They have to, it's the law. Events aren't helped by indifferent picture quality on the British DVD release and some genuinely, awesomely terrible rock songs. Made in 1987.

* Tin opener, metal coathanger and Allen key.

*

No comments: