Delivering exactly what no one was asking for, Gary Whitson remakes his 1991 shot-on-video Hitchcockian slasher DEAD NORTH in 2012's THE PINELANDS MURDERS! The HD video may be crisper, but the story's just as muddled...
Anyone familiar with Whitson's prior analog atrocity will have little to surprise them here as - shockingly - there apparently was a script and Whitson hews to it VERY closely. All the hits are here: opening scene of a lover murdered in an affair gone sour; crazy war vet (originally it was 'Nam, here Iraq) who's constantly threatening to murder his wife; cheating couples aplenty; a private eye hired by a jealous husband to follow one of the girls; and the exact same tacky interiors that populate every W. A. V. E. movie (Whitson's own backyard fetish video company). In its one sensible alteration, the film gets through all this set-up in about half the time as its predecessor - it only takes the couples a half-hour to set out on their ill-fated (and ill-advised) camping trip rather than a full 60 minutes. That said, Whitson compensates by upping the Irrelevant Camping Footage factor by approximately 50%, meaning it still takes nearly an hour for the film to get around to the murders.
Cast in this iteration is marginally more attractive, while also marginally trashier - say what you will about '80s and '90s C-grade horror, but it at least reflects a time when it felt like every movie was populated by girls and guys next door. PINELANDS MURDERS may feature a far broader array of questionable tattoos and ill-advised piercings, but, thankfully, it at least maintains the clunky, amateur thespian charm of its predecessor: bad movie afficionados will find myriad moments to savor, like Riccardo Segarra (yum!) as amiable lunkhead Jeff perpetually sniffing a glass of Kool-Aid "wine" for some reason, or Heather Drew left to hysterically overemote for minutes on end as she's chased through the woods by the killer. As usual, Whitson's home video-level cinematography does no one any favors: worst served is poor Julia Luangrath, who Whitson not only saddles with a totally off-putting lump of a character, but then insists on filming from the most brutally unflattering angles imaginable.
Weirdly enough, a trip down the rabbit hole reveals a number of the players have persisted in indies and actually gotten a bit of traction: Luangrath, Segarra and Loren Lepre (stepping in for Whitson as jealous boyfriend Carl) all seem to have drifted in and out of each other's projects, and Lepre even managed to pull a small role in last year's breakout gorefest TERRIFIER 2. Appearing in a terrible shot-on-video slasher flick put out by a custom-tape fetish company is certainly an inauspicious start, but at least it means you have nowhere to go but up!
