Body Count (1986)
Directed by Ruggero Deodato
Oh man Body Count, I searched for you for years. Amazon Prime says it is currently unavailable in my region, the DVDs on Amazon are all Region 2, it isn’t on youtube, isn’t on shudder, isn’t on any other known streaming service. I kept telling myself I was never going to see this movie. I read about it in “The Slasher Movie Book” and it annoyed me that I couldn’t find it. Luckily, thanks to twitter and my buddy Y2Stump he was able to hunt it down on a Russian website so I could check it off my list. After all the wait was it actually good though?
The stream I had was actually pretty good, kinda dark but I have nothing to compare it to. Basically, the plot centers around a group of high school friends on spring break (naturally) camping (naturally) in an old campground ran by a strange couple and their military son. The son and father both talk about the Indian Shaman that terrorizes the area and has killed numerous people fifteen years prior (always). The teenagers seem unaffected and decide to stay anyways. One by one the kids start getting killed off by the shaman, but is there more than meets the eye?
Not many things are really original with this film. The plot is typical, the characters are cliché, and the kills aren’t anything too elaborate. It is kind of hard to gauge the acting in this movie because the dialogue is poor. Not awful but far from good that’s for sure. The acting isn’t good, but I have seen worse from the genre. The son Ben is probably the worst and he’s so bad its funny. Think the “OH MY GOOOOOOOD” kid from Troll 2 levels of bad, yeah. I will give this credit for establishing some characters though, at least most of them. We have Cissy the hot girl, Sidney the chubby jokester, Tracy another attractive blonde exercise fanatic, Tony the somewhat tough guy, and a few more that I can’t remember off hand. One thing I was disappointed in is that the girl I thought was the hottest dies first. Its funny I remember the guy on the dirt bike vividly but I can’t remember his name, either way he’s with the hot girl mentioned previously and he gets thrown off a mountain hilariously.
Special effects are kind of light in this movie. You get a wide variety of stabbings, chest, throat, hand etc. Nothing too over the top. The Shaman stabs Tracy in the back of the head and the knife sticks out of her mouth, that was kinda cool but nothing I haven’t seen before in a slasher. Someone later in the film gets an axe or hatchet to the face and that one made be go “whoa!” but other than that it is just typical. That’s really what hurts this film. It is typical. Nothing makes this stand out too much, the killer looks cool, but at the same time kind of looks like C.H.U.D.D. meets Andy Warhol. The kills are tame, the acting is bad, the story is as cliché as the come and is it memorable? Not at all. The poster is nice, I will give it that but as a film it is so middle of the road that I can’t give it too much credit. The ending isn’t even memorable, that is even a trope.
Body Count really does hit that middle of the pack area in the slasher genre for me, sitting right there with Final Exam. At least with The Mutilator the kills were so crazy bloody that it is memorable, with this there literally is no aspect of it that makes it stand out. If someone asked me “hey what is the most vanilla slasher movie you have ever seen” I’d quickly say “Body Count” and that is the major fault with this movie. Even though it is cliché and meh, why hasn’t it had a US DVD and Bluray release? Many horrible movies, far worse than this have received proper releases. Hell you can buy Rocktober Blood on DVD and this is head and shoulders above that. I’m happy I was able to watch this finally and I could tell in the first 15 minutes that it was better than most of the shitty slashers I’ve seen before, which I respect. Since there aren’t many things that command a rewatch this may be a one off for me. I would give Body Count a solid C. If the kills were a little more imaginative or brutal it would get a higher grade.
