If you've ever been subjected to a community theater performance, it doesn't matter where you live, you'll already know why being compared to such is an inherentely bad thing. Most community theater productions involve crude sets, casts either too young or too old and grizzled to properly apply their minimal "talents", and a script stripped to it's most bare essentials. Unless you live somwhere outside of the ghetto, and if so, please send me a post card and tell me what life's like outside of the poverty zone. I'm sure it's a magical place with breakdancing robots and nothing but '70's cock-rock blaring at all times, or basically a combination of all my middle school fantasies. When you watch a community theater production, you instantly create a heartfelt connection between yourself and the actors, mainly because you can't help but feel their embarrasment bombarding at all times. I'm sure they thought that getting into acting might be a "keen" hobby and a "super, ass-rocking" way of meeting new people, but they apparently forgot that it involves laying your massive personal flaws bare for everyone to see, and ,most likely, snicker at.

"Slashers" feels like a fucking community theater project, to be more precise, a community theater project set in a high school haunted house. If that last sentence sent you into an conniptions of joy, then I really feel bad for you. But I have to admit, being that easily entertained must have it's advantages. What differentiates "Slashers" from other movies with bad acting and shitty sets, like, I dunno, "Tron", "Tron", and possibly "Tron", is that "Slashers" fails to make one single likeable character at any point. Even Jesus H Christ himself would take a swing at some of these guys, especially the character portrayed by noted nobody Kieran Keller, a character I've affectionately dubbed "Whitey", a character so white it eclipses all preconcieved notions about how dorky and frankly out-of-touch white people can be. He's like Bob Saget if Bob spent his time on "Full House" being a racist and trying to get with Joey's girlfriend, not that that wouldn't spice things up for the show.

The concept itself is thus: Japan's most popular and notorious game show is making it's U.S. debut. Instead of beating and degrading guests like MOST Japanese game shows, Slashers throws six contestants into a maze with three killers and whoever lives to the end gets the jackpot. The concept also has some serious flaws, like why do they only have one fucking cameraman, and why are the murderers total fucking idiots? If your show hinges on homicidal maniacs with the ability AND the guts to carve up a human being like a Christmas ham, you might as well get the best you can find. The three "murderer's". which isn't a realistic number since one of them never killed anybody before he got axed, seem like Wes Craven rejects, which is saying a lot considering some of the crap Craven has actually committed to celluloid. I mean, if your maniacs keep popping up on screen to deliver a long-winded, ultimately non-threatening speech only to run away because they ran out of gas for their chainsaw, you can dig a little deeper into the talent pool. It's like three versions of Sideshow Bob were trying to hunt down some community theater troupe. And as I mentioned before, there's only one cameraman, which is itself ingenieous and stupid at the same time. Using one camera and following the action as a cameraman is an interesting idea, but it hits a deadend because it guarantees that only those hanging out in front of the camera are axed, so as long as you can ditch the camera, nobody will hunt you down.

The gore is okay, though it's painfully obvious when a dummy is inserted into the scene. Nothing says realism than what appears to be rubber and paper-mache! I remember when I broke my hand and the doctor at the emergency room patched it up with just some plaster-of-paris and newspaper, that experience taught me quite a bit about the human body. Besides that it's the same old complaining from me, stilted dialogue, long periods of absolutely nothing between action scenes, and backstories more boring than they have any right to be. Some of the jokes about television production, specifically the "sex sells" stuff and the commercial breaks were funny, even though no reality TV show is shot live, so it seems kind of out of place. This ain't Monday Night Football after all.

I've done worse, and when I move in with my buddy Eric, it'll only get worse. That's not saying I wouldn't like my time back for "Slashers", a movie that could have used a big dose of some Michael Myers-esque motherfucker and less jawing. But hey, at least I didn't have to pay for it.