Tripper

THE TRIPPER is a slasher parody / political satire featuring neo-hippies, hicks, and the Ronald Reagan-masked maniac who hunts and slaughters them.

We're all invited to the "Free Love Festival" located in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Shockingly, bad things happen.

Director David Arquette makes sure to mix much mirth with the marauding mayhem. Gorehounds will rejoice over the gushy stuff, while any true flower children will most likely cringe.

Watch for a heinous-blonde-wig-wearing Courtney Cox near the end...

In "The Tripper," a slasher movie with a political conscience, a serial killer wearing a Ronald Reagan mask stalks a group of anachronistic hippies (so anachronistic they have cell phones along with their tie dye t-shirts and psychedelic van) who have come to the forests of Northern California to celebrate free love and partake in unlimited drug use at a Woodstock-type outdoor event.

The Red State/Blue State divide is never far from the filmmakers' minds as a bunch of gun-toting rednecks go up against a group of Flower Power love children who suddenly descend on the area. The saving grace, if indeed there is one, of this gory, but not particularly disturbing, splatter-fest is the tongue-in-cheek humor it manages to display from time to time. Otherwise, this odd little mixture of horror movie clichés and outdated political satire (does anybody really care about the Reagan administration any more?) falls strangely flat.

...because based on the evidence of "The Tripper" he's an average-at-best director and a distinctly second- or even third-string screenwriter, though no doubt hamstrung by the scripting contributions of Joe "Darkness Falls" Harris. I'm sorry, I admire good intentions as well as the next guy, but only when they rise above mundane infernal construction projects, if you catch my drift. "The Tripper" is essentially a vanity project, and suffers accordingly.

The production values are alright for a relatively low-budget affair, especially the at-times lovely DP work from Bobby "Arlington Road" Bukowski, and the acting varies from earnestly professional (particularly leads Lukas "Mars Attacks" Haas and Jaime "Sin City" King) to egregiously self-conscious (most notably the ever-moronic-but-somehow-likable Jason "I owe Kevin Smith everything" Mewes and Paul "I AM Pee-Wee!" Reubens), with various shades in-between, including a slumming Thomas "The Mist" Jane as a local sheriff doing his best to keep a straight face. No one, though, collectively or individually, is able to redeem the sophomoric script.

I won't bore my gentle reader with yet another synopsis; you can find that in profusion elsewhere. "The Tripper" is, at best, a slasher film pseudo-parody that plays things too seriously to be genuinely funny, and too tongue-in-cheek to be remotely scary. Arquette should have gone for one or the other, not both. It's a watch-once film that I'm quite relieved I found at the library instead of wasting money buying or renting it.

In the 80's, after seeing his father and lumberjack foreman being hit by a protester against the deforesting and arrested by the police, the boy Gus kills the protester with a chainsaw. In the present days, Samantha (Jamie King), who is traumatized after being abused by her former boyfriend Jimmy (Balthazar Getty), travels with her pothead friends in a van to the American Free Love Festival, a rock-and-roll concert in the woods. Near the location, they are assaulted by three local hillbillies, but they succeed to arrive in the festival. Meanwhile, Mayor Hal Burton (Rick Overton) and Deputy Buzz Hall (Thomas Jane) try to give a minimum of organization to the event. However, a deranged psychopath serial-killer wearing a mask of Ronald Reagan uses an ax to kill the pacific stoned hippies.

The slasher "The Tripper" is a great disappointment. David Arquette certainly had the intention of making a cult-movie and was supported by a good cast (probably his friends) including a cameo appearance of his wife and a great cinematography and lightening, but unfortunately the story never works. Jason Mewes is comfortable performing his traditional role of pothead; the sexy Jaime King has a good performance in the role of Samantha but the good actor Thomas Jane is displaced in his silly role. Further, the political anti-war jokes and speeches of the Republicans and Ronald Reagan are boring. In a cheap manipulation, the Brazilian DVD highlights the name of Courtney Cox-Arquette in the movie, misleading her fans. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Perseguição Assassina" ("Assassin Pursue")

OK now this movie wasn't completely horrible because the whole idea of a psychopath obsessing himself with Ronald Reagan and then dressing up like him to go kill hippies actually worked and was pretty frightening. But the gore was really fake looking and the characters were just completely dumb because they were really high the whole movie and didn't pay attention to anything that could have saved their lives. I like David Arquette, but I think he needed to rewrite this one a little before he made it and make the gore a little more realistic as well. Overall I give it a 6 out of 10 because it had a good storyline, but it kind of failed as the movie continued on. I would only recommend this to those who like brainless horror films with dumb characters and fake gore.