O Vale Assassino

Anyone that can not get with the cheese in this movie is way too salty for camp horror. It's got more than what you get from modern horror. Synth music scores, t&a, kewl rock, reckless nightime teenagers, awesome fog effects, running around screaming, cool lighting, under-rated actors, oh the list goes on. But don't expect the modern critics to get it, they are all too busy writing 100 movie reviews a day for movies they never watched. This is a good horror movie from the eighties.

Boasting an insane, bear-mask wearing, cannibalistic Viking for a killer, Berserker promises to be a cut above its mid-80s slasher contemporaries. Unfortunately, director Jefferson Richard does nothing to capitalise on this cool concept, instead preferring to travel down a path already well-worn by countless other stereotypical horrors.

Dumb, horny, pot-smoking teens vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods; a country cop with no patience for city kids; a creepy campfire tale to set the scene; alfresco sex followed by death: this one packs in the clichés whilst neglecting to make the most of the one thing that could possibly have saved it from mediocrity—its bad-ass-sounding Norwegian nut-job.

For most of the film, all that is shown of the titular berserker are fleeting shots of a clawed paw; frequent shots of a grizzly bear wandering in the woods even go to mislead viewers into thinking that the killer has somehow taken on ursine form (although a fight between the berserker and the meandering grizzly eventually clears up this confusion). In the film's closing moments, we finally get to see the killer, and it soon becomes patently obvious why Richard decided to keep him hidden for so long: he looks crap!

Also serving to make the production look super cheap and unconvincing are the terrible lighting and smoke effects designed to create a creepy atmosphere, but which just look plain daft, and the crap gore effects which consist of a few naff claw scratches and a smattering of fake blood.

Thanks heavens for the fact that the film has a half decent cast (including a turn from prolific genre legend George 'Buck' Flower) and that gratuitous outdoor shagging scene—otherwise it would be a complete waste of time.

A group of teenagers (who actually look to be 30) head up to a cabin for some fun and sun, but come under attack by an ancient viking beserker.

An awful film with poor acting, direction, and writing, even by slasher movie standards. Sloopy editing doesn't help much either. Features more sex and nudity then usual though, but even that can't make this entertaining. My rating: 3 out of 10.

One of the neat things about horror is that the genre invites the most wild of ideas, and nothing is too outrageous to make into a movie. "Viking berserker slasher" sounds like something that The Asylum surely must have cooked up in the past few years - but nay! This comes to us from the 1980s! And we should be glad that it does, because otherwise we wouldn't be treated to the soundtrack of very 80s music, nor the very 80s hair styles, and we wouldn't be assured of the presence of George Buck Flower in the cast. The 80s were unquestionably the hey-day of the slasher, with loving use of fog machines, and production values that are instantly recognizable in retrospect. Just as much to the point, where more recent slashers come across as seeking violence and brutality for their own sake, in the 80s the genre largely bore atmosphere that allowed titles to be violent, creepy, silly, and fun all at once. Happily, 'Berserker' carries all these qualities and more, down to the ambient score.

Of course, none of this speaks directly to the overall value of this feature - and that's the bad news, for in some crucial ways this is rather lacking. True, anyone familiar even in passing with slashers knows generally what they're in for. Yet I would note that in this case we see less of the killer than we do in some other fare, and mostly it's just a lot of the characters meandering through the woods. The violence notably falls on the less robust and visceral side of the spectrum as we see it, and for those tracking the body count, it's distinctly lower. Whatever your particular fix is when it comes to horror, you may not get your kicks here, and if you do, they'll be lesser. Worse: the biggest failing is indisputably that the picture doesn't remotely meet the promise of the premise. In other ways this is well done, including the blood and gore (albeit modest by most any point of comparison), and the cast give able performances commensurate with the material. The filming locations are gorgeous, and the production design is swell. But we can get these things anywhere. We can't get a Viking berserker killer Just Anywhere. And, well, as it turns out, we can't really get it here, either.

I think I got my hopes up too high with this one. I like Flower, and I remember Beth Toussaint very well from that one episode of 'Star Trek: The next generation.' The concept sounds great, and once we start watching, 'Berserker' definitely has all the right vibes of 80s slashers. What it doesn't have, unfortunately, is meaningful fulfillment of its concept. In turn, not only is the end result pretty weak as a slasher, but it falters even more disastrously in not making use of those ideas that from the outside looking in are what drew us in, and which could have been employed in imaginative and delightful ways. There are a lot worse ways to spend one's time, but the simple fact of the matter is that there's not much reason to spend time with this, either. It's best suggested for those who are fans of the cast, but otherwise, 'Berserker' is a lackluster horror flick you can safely pass on by.

The berserkers, we learn, were a special breed of cannibalistic Viking warriors that used to wear bear masks and skins and attack their enemies with a primal rage. The premise of six kids being hunted by one such "creature" in the middle of the woods on a dark night may sound scary, but this film is too much like so many others to make it so. It does feature the requisite amounts of blood and sex, and also more-than-requisite amounts of wandering around, while the persistently ominous score keeps on playing and playing. (*1/2)