With a subgenre like the slasher, it’s especially hard to do anything new, one because just about every plot twist under the sun has been done already, and two, because several of the subgenre’s hallmarks are, for lack of a better term, not very “woke.” Many of the slasher classics from the late 1970s and 1980s—as well as the proto-slasher giallo films from Italy—haven’t aged well: they feature at times an uncomfortable melding of nudity (almost exclusively from the women in the cast) and gore, creating the “sex equals death” equation later satirized in Scream; gay and black characters usually die first, and if not first, they rarely survive until the end; and the killer’s or killers’ motivations are sometimes ridiculously pat, minimizing various mental conditions into psychopath perversities. When done right, slashers can be great fun, but when they fail, they fail hard.
GetAWAY, the new film from writer/director Blayne Weaver making its world premiere at the deadCenter 2020 Film Festival, falls right in the middle of this spectrum. It avoids enough of the worst slasher tropes not to be wholly problematic, though it does retain a few of them, so much so the film isn’t spotless either (for the sake of avoiding spoilers in this short review, I won’t name which ones remain intact). More broadly speaking, the story is neither original nor unoriginal, neither boring nor gripping, neither a total waste of time nor the best way to spend an hour and a half. Put simply, GetAWAY is a perfectly fine film, overall.
But Weaver’s aim may or may not have been to make the greatest slasher ever told anyway. He clearly knows the subgenre well and it seems he and his cast and crew had a pretty good time making it. Plus, Weaver, in his introduction to the film, advised the audience to “grab some popcorn,” indicating GetAWAY is a “popcorn flick,” or, in other words, not something to be taken too seriously. Indeed, you don’t have to have your entire brain switched on to follow the plot, which follows a group of college students going out to a remote set of cabins in the woods to shoot a slasher film, only to be offed one by one by a real-life killer. This of course should set us up for a Scream or The Cabin In The Woods-type meta-narrative, where at least some of the characters are all-too-familiar with the conventions defining the movie in which they’re unwittingly starring. But unlike Randy or Marty in the respective films above, no one in GetAWAY has the wherewithal to say, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen scary movies, and this isn’t a good idea,” even when they encounter the stock “weird redneck” character that warns the sex and party-hungry young adults of their impending doom.
It doesn’t take long after the “weird redneck” scene for people to start dropping like flies, slowly but surely leading to the reveal of the killer’s identity (we know from the onset it’s one of the students). If you’ve seen a ton of slasher movies, you’ll probably figure it out beforehand, but for anyone who hasn’t spent way too much time gobbling up the good and the bad the subgenre has to offer, the final twist may come as a true surprise. Either way, you’ll still be fairly entertained, even if you’re now wowed.
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