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One of these rural US-American small towns that's just a bit too
idyllic for not something to be wrong - something like a young couple
(Larry Sprinkle, Penny Miller) being killed by a person unknown while
making out by the river. But that's not very likely to spoil the next
day's town fair in the slightest, especially since their bodies aren't
found. At the fair, a bunch of teens (Susan Kiger, Jennifer Chase, Jody
Kay, John Kohler, Andria Savio, Curt Rector, Josh Gamble) make plans on
how to bid a fitting farewell to summer before they all have to go their
separate ways in fall, and finally decide to have a bonfire by the river,
followed by telling scary stories at the cemetary. One of our youngsters
(Jody Kay) goes skinny dipping, and freaks out when she (literally) bumps
into the corpses of the couple avove, but then her throat is slit before
she can alert the others - who aren't really all that bothered by her
absence as they proceed to the cemetary, and when rain catches them they
move on to a long abandoned house nearby. But the killer has caught up
with them and now picks and kills them one by one ...
Now truth to be told, this film doesn't score very highly on
the originality scale - nor has it set out to as it clearly tried to jump
the then current slasher bandwagon launched by films like Halloween
and Friday the 13th - but
that's not to say the film isn't fun to watch still, not only as a time
capsule, but also because it really tries to not blindly follow the
slasher formula but add a little more substance to the bone by showing an
already crumbling facade of small town Americana as an interesting
backdrop for its massacre - but that said, once the action starts it hits
hard, as the film doesn't exactly hold back when it comes to violence,
there are jump scares aplenty, some nice macabre details, and the finale's
fittingly tense for sure, making for good vintage genre entertainment.
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