So, yeah, when I saw this movie advertised, I was immediately interested in watching it…probably to no one’s surprise, since I watch so many horror movies. I knew it was going to be a slasher movie and that a killer would be picking off victims…but the trailer made me think that there might be more going on than just a masked killer picking off a group of teenagers.
Sadly, I was disappointed by this movie.
I’ll start with the opening scenes, which pretty much guaranteed I wasn’t going to care about any of the characters. From the crowd gathered outside the store for the Black Friday sale, to the owner of the store sitting at home enjoying Thanksgiving dinner and not caring enough to be at the store (complete with evil stepmother), to the teens who got let into the store before every other customer and proceeded to flaunt the fact they were there…there was only one character who really seemed to feel bad about the utter carnage that had been caused. Bobby tried to help a man who was bleeding out (after a consumer snatched a product from the wounded guy), only to get hurt himself…but did anyone else make even a token effort to help those who’d been trampled/crushed/hurt? Well…no. Maybe if they’d shown a shred of decency and compassion, they wouldn’t have been picked off by a murderer. And maybe I wouldn’t have been watching the movie waiting for each of these awful people to get their comeuppance. The killer actually showed more compassion than any of their victims ever had, considering they fed the cat after killing one of their victims.
There was a lot of gore…a lot of violent deaths…in this movie. Here in the UK, it was given an 18 rating and it definitely deserved that. Not sure that amount of gore was really that necessary, though! Less is more, filmmakers. At a certain point, I just get desensitized to the gore and violent deaths.
While there were attempts to provide red herrings in this movie, they didn’t really go anywhere; and, in fact, my oldest nibling correctly identified the killer when they saw the trailer. So the mystery/thriller/big reveal just…fell flat. And the killer was a better, more sympathetic character than the victims they were killing. And it’s really not necessary for the killer to explain an earlier comment they made about a victim making a good dinner as having a double meaning! Subtlety, you don’t exist in this movie.
So, to be quite honest, this movie was disappointing. None of the characters were particularly likable, and I really only kept watching to see them all get their comeuppance. I felt character development was dropped in favour of making the deaths as gory and gruesome as possible.
Ink of Blood 