The Windmill Massacre

I was driving through Telluride, Colorado and came across Telluride's "Horror Show," a horror movie festival... The town is a small Victorian town in the middle of the mountains which made the experience all that much greater.

As I got into the cinema, I was actually the last person to get there, I saw that the movie was from Holland and had a good feeling of it; Nowadays, modern American Movies in the horror genre are not entertaining to me - they are full of clichés, bad actors and cheap scares.

After seeing this movie, I was pleasantly surprised because I did not know what to expect... and this is the best way to experience a movie... just know that it is good.

The movie has a legend-fairy-tale type of feeling. It has good acting and well developed characters, each one unique. The movie develops the relationship within the characters. There is gore worthy of "the walking dead." And finally, it brought me back to an era of movies like "Freddy Krueger" when they were magical in their own way.

In conclusion, I do recommend this movie. It is not the best, but it is worthy of the attention of a horror buff. A good horror movie focuses on characters, and character development with good old fashioned scares, thrills and kills; and this one supplies that.

I didn't love it but also didn't hate it. The premise is fairly interesting, but I was hoping for more spooky-haunts than slasher-film. The more they created in the film just didn't fit the slasher execution. Still, this is the best windmill horror film of all time...

Windmills are cool - we all know this. So naturally when I saw there was a horror movie centered around a windmill, I was all in. When I saw that it wasn't another shitty found footage movie, I was even more intrigued. After watching it, I can honestly say it's one of the more enjoyable horror films I've seen recently (and there aren't a lot of those, let me tell you). It's a slasher flick basically with an interesting setting and some creative and gory kills, at least two of which genuinely took me by surprise and gave me a bit of a jump. The windmill backdrop itself is the movie's biggest plus although I was disappointed they didn't make better use of the location scenery. Most of the movie takes place on what appeared to me to be an obvious set. Had more of it taken place where they filmed the initial windmill stuff it would have been better, in my opinion. But I guess that would have made doing proper special effects more difficult on a low budget. As it is, there's nothing really 'wrong' with the set, just that I think it would've been more effective using more of the location shooting. Anyway, the cast is good. There's a guy who reminds me of Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles. There's never anything bad about that. As I said before, the kills are mostly creative, and some of the gross-out stuff is funny. It's definitely worth a look if, like me, you are tired of most of the horror output today, which seems to be found footage and knock-offs of horror classics like Exorcist and Poltergeist.

Call me a sentimentalist, but I really love it when countries bring forward movies that are somehow linked to their own heritage, culture or fauna! For example, I love it when Australia makes another movie about a giant killer crocodile, or when Austria releases a splatter flick about Lederhosen zombies, and I was really excited when I found out that The Netherlands was going to bring out a folklore horror movie about windmills! I'm not a Dutchman myself, but I live next door in Belgium and spent a lot of time traveling around in The Netherlands. The country is full of windmills and, especially when you drive past them when night is falling, they often look eerie and sinister out there in the open fields, so it's about freaking time they finally form the decor of a horror movie! Of course I'm slightly biased, and I probably awarded the film with at least one more point than it deserves, but "The Windmill Massacre" is good entertainment with a more than adequate screenplay, above average performances, a reasonable amount of suspense and quite a lot of exhilarating gore and bloodshed!

First and foremost, the film rather cleverly solves a typical issue that Dutch speaking productions always struggle with! It sounds horrible when Dutch or Belgian actors/actresses attempt to speak English, so instead of that, "The Windmill Massacre" almost exclusively stars native English speakers that are supposedly tourists in Amsterdam. That's just smart, period! Following a whole bunch of separate clips that only start making sense later in the film, 7 people (an Aussie girl, a former model, an Asian student, a mariner, a surgeon and a British father with his teenage son) board a ramshackle tour bus that takes them on a trip past several idyllic windmills. The bus naturally breaks down, but when two courageous passengers head towards a nearby windmill for help, they painfully experience that the miller – Hendrik – is a nastily deformed and bloodthirsty type of avenging demon. This group wasn't coincidentally put together, as it turns out they all have committed horrible sins and now they have to pay for them. For a horror flick from The Netherlands, "The Windmill Massacre" has a solid and compelling story to tell (especially in comparison to other recent titles like "Dood Eind" or "De Poel"), and you'll even gladly overlook the rather many clichés and improbabilities in the script. The film also features loads of gratifying gore and delightful make- up effects. Hendrik, the deadly miller, looks like a hybrid between Jason Voorhees and the Chatterer Cenobite from the original "Hellraiser". There's a cool urban legend linked to his existence (something about selling his soul to the devil) and enjoys things like stomping people's heads with his boots or throwing rusty chains in people's faces. Good, unpretentious entertaining Holland should be proud of!

The rather blandly named, The Windmill Massacre, breaks the golden rule of a good slasher flick and pays the price.

Let me start by saying this is a film with definite potential. Its far from utterly bad. It employs a good cast of capable actors, a rather novel and fresh premise, plus some good horror elements. That said, it breaks the key rule of any good slasher flick, its not all that scary.

Th reason The Windmill Massacre is not overly scary lies in its scripting. After the first death, there's very little uncertainty as to who, how and when the next person, will die. Indeed, there is a "lead in", that tells you for the most part, whats about to happen to who, next.

The net result is a film robbed of the sudden death, "jump in your seat", surprise factor. That's what good slashers are really all about. Not the final dispatch but the dread and tension, leading up to that suddenly and violently realized moment, when the killer strikes.

Its a shame too, as this film looked promising. Even making a second film may not solve this issue, as the approach taken is more or less, "locked in". That is, its intrinsic to the legend built around the killer. As it stands then, a moderately entertaining horror film, that offers some entertainment value, but could have been so much more. Six out of ten from me.