Easter Killing

A year after graduating high school, several youths in England are invited to a vacation home by a mutual friend thought to be dead. They all show up due to guilt, along with a couple guests, but a mysterious person in a huge bunny mask starts picking 'em off one-by-one. Will anyone survive?

"Easter Bunny Massacre" (2021) is a low-budget Brit slasher with no-name actors influenced by "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and "I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer" just with a cabin-in-the-woods setting.

I saw the director's previous film and was impressed by the relative proficient filmmaking so decided to give this a shot. The technical quality is actually a slight step down, probably due to much of the flick being shot indoors (as opposed to his other one). But the cast and writing are good for the most part, except for a couple of eye-rolling cliches. The moody score creates a reverent tone, reminiscent of the song "A Deeper Kind of Slumber" from 1997.

Speaking of the tone, I appreciate how the proceedings are kept serious despite the amusing nature of the killer wearing a blood-soaked bunny mask. Yet I couldn't help wondering how the slayer was able to move around so stealthily wearing such an awkward piece. Wouldn't you have to see and hear properly to do what he does?

The female cast is quite good, highlighted by brunette Sarah T. Cohen (Janey), redhead May Kelly (Amy) and blonde Antonia Whillans (Heather).

The movie runs 1 hour, 25 minutes, and was shot in Somerset, England, which is a 3-hour drive west of London.

GRADE: C-/C.

I get it that slasher films have been around a long time now and pretty much every creepy and unsettling mask has been used by some knife-wielding psycho. So, I guess someone thought it would be clever to use an 'Easter Bunny' costume as the maniac chopping the cast up. And that might have worked, if they'd leaned into the general silliness of it all. But instead, the film-makers tried to play this one with a straight face, as if it was an outright horror.

The film begins with a gaggle of twenty-something actors trying to pass themselves off as late teens, partying round a campfire before they head off to uni. Unfortunately, they have a but more of a heavy night than they expected and when they wake up they're all covered in blood and a girl with a weird Anglo-American accent is in pieces. Naturally, they don't call the police, but instead do their best to cover up whatever 'crime' they may or may not have committed and just do their best to live their lives. Unfortunately, a year later, they're all lured to a hotel by someone who knows what they did last summer... sorry Easter. Yes, you may have heard that plot somewhere back in the late nineties.

So the film isn't funny when it could have been. It isn't original. The gore is pretty much non-existent and the film often grinds to a halt sometimes when it realises it hasn't got anything new to say and starts throwing in pointless flashbacks just to pad it out. But - possibly worst of all - is that the dialogue and acting is pretty awful. I won't blame the actors as I've seen a couple of them in other things and they're perfectly fine when given better to work with, but the script lets them down here.

Overall, this film really doesn't have anything going for it, which is a shame, as it could have been a nice, cheesy little entry into the genre, but there just isn't enough here that's original, scary, gory or just good to really recommend it.

Oh, I said it wasn't funny. I take that back. The 'killer rabbit' costume was pretty funny, but that was probably not the film-makers' intention when they designed one of the most unthreatening and unintentionally funny 'murderers' ever.

Heading out into the woods, a group of friends are reunited years after an accident with a friend at a remote house for Easter weekend to relive the incident and find closure but when they start disappearing realize one of them might be the same one who murdered their friend and stop them.

This was a decent enough slasher with more to like than expected. Among the better ideas here is a surprisingly strong and engaging setup that comes about due to the involved storyline at play. Setting this one up immediately with the idea of the group being at the center of the central mystery that befell them years ago when their friend was mysteriously murdered while they were out partying and were never able to uncover who did it only to then be brought back together years later to a house in the countryside that sets about trying to both uncover the real culprit and stop the killer returning to finish them off works incredibly well. It's a nice way of getting the group of friends established rather quickly, determining the nature of their relationships with each other, and getting everything started for the killer's identity to be worked out in a fun investigation, providing a fun way of getting this set up. With that established, this one gives off some rather strong and decidedly enjoyable stalking and slashing when that comes about. The main house, where everything comes together, is an elaborate Easter style setup with the main layout decked out in festive rabbit pieces, straw baskets, and miniature eggs of various sizes and colors, so it feels appropriate to the holiday. As well, when the whole thing shows the streamers or wall placards that are placed there in nearly every shot of the group in the house or outside, it has a festive look that matches the brutality and ingenuity of the killer to strike using a majority of the symbols within the killing method. Dumping victims in boiling hot chocolate, stabbing with decorative knives, or using the different objects around them to kill them becomes enough to provide some positive points to this one. There are some big problems within here that do come about. The main issue here is a leaden pace that makes for a highly ineffective tempo that will likely render a lot of the goodwill with this one pretty moot. It takes forever to get past the group reuniting and catching up once they arrive at the house, which flies in quick counter to how it managed to work out the pace before involving the accident and what happened to them in quick succession. With that in place, everything about the mystery is somewhat underwhelming, with the whole thing making no sense, how they could recall events they had completely blacked out on, while failing to let the police handle everything. As this is somewhat matched by the lack of spectacular effects, a cheap-looking mask for the killer, or generally flimsy production values, it all manages to bring this one down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language, Violence, and mild drug use.

This is so bad. Might as well call it "I Know What You Did Last Easter". Plus the way they kept cutting back to the party feels like a bad "Murder, She Wrote" mystery. Plus if they were blacked out stoned, how can they keep remembering things that happened? The blood was obvious cherry syrup. Lastly, the bunny suit was pre-blood covered at the first movie. I guess dry cleaning between takes wasn't in the budget. In fact I think it had a budget so low that even the Asylum would be ashamed of it. It's cheap, it's dumb and it's boring.

Terrible, don't waste your time and money watching it like they wasted theirs making it.

Amateurish direction and cinematography akin to a student film at very best.

The script writing would be acceptable perhaps if it was written to be purposefully so bad that it was meant to be a comedy.

As a horror film, I had to keep turning it off over and over again; not because it was too scary but because it was so bad.

Promised myself to finish it and much like a dinner spent with terrible people and food you felt like you had wasted your evening, without gaining anything from it.

Begging you not to watch this film, it is not even funny bad, it's just meant for the bin.