Butchers, 2020.
Directed by Adrian Langley.
Starring Simon Phillips, Julie Mainville, Anne-Carolyne Binette, Michael Swatton, James Hicks, Frederik Storm and Nick Allan.
SYNOPSIS:
A group of teenagers find themselves in the crosshairs of a family of backwoods folk who think nothing of kidnap, rape and murder.
There’s a long horror family tree leading to a movie like Butchers. In fact, the marketing for the film is keen to trumpet its similarity to the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wrong Turn, with the likes of The Hills Have Eyes and Wolf Creek also running thick through its DNA. Sadly, the end result is not an enjoyably violent descent into horror’s past, but a reminder that there are dozens of better films you could be watching.
The setup is simple. It’s 1998 – camcorders instead of smartphones in this world – and a pair of teen couples are driving through woodland en route home from a birthday getaway. Birthday girl Jenna (Julie Mainville) is dating alpha male Mike (James Hicks), who is cheating on her with friend Taylor (Anne-Carolyne Binette), despite the latter’s relationship with the nice but nerdy Chris (Frederik Storm). Their slightly tense car ride ceases when the vehicle breaks down and Jenna nudges a trip wire, alerting sibling serial killers Owen (Simon Phillips) and Oswald (Michael Swatton) to their plight.
You’ve seen Butchers before. There’s nothing in the 90-odd minutes of director Adrian Langley’s movie – he also co-writes with Daniel Weissenberger – that hasn’t been played out over and over again in the last half-century of horror filmmaking. It has even been parodied courtesy of the utterly brilliant Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. There isn’t an original idea anywhere and the execution isn’t nearly stylish or slick enough to be able to get past the stale odour of generic tropes. Tobe Hooper or Wes Craven, this ain’t.
With that said, the performances from the central cast members are mostly pretty solid. Mainville and Binette do decent work as two women who are friends more out of social convenience than any deep affection for each other, while Phillips is convincingly horrible as a surprisingly eloquent murderer. “We don’t actually eat people around here,” he quips, adding “that’d be a little too cliché”. Sadly, Swatton’s Oswald fares less better and feels like an exploitative caricature of other movie killers portrayed as having some form of mental illness. The mostly unseen third sibling Oxford, meanwhile, is better left entirely unmentioned.
Many of the troubling elements of Butchers would be rendered slightly more acceptable if the movie boasted the sort of grubby, midnight movie grit of many of its predecessors. Instead, this feels like a sanitised and mass-produced incarnation of those shlock successes. But where the likes of James Wan, Leigh Whannell and Adam Wingard have found ways to innovate and follow in the footsteps of those who blazed the trail for them, Butchers simply delivers a drunken karaoke version of vastly superior genre classics.
For a film so steeped in the past of its genre, it’s shocking how horror-illiterate Butchers often seems. There’s no acknowledgement of its sources, no knowing subversion and very little suggestion – barring the occasional cannibalism jibe – that this type of film has been made before. It’s one thing to be totally unoriginal, but it’s almost certainly worse to be unaware of that unoriginality. Langley’s movie is a gory trudge through horror tropes, entirely lacking in any sense of gleeful malevolence or gritty thrills. Damningly, it just sort of exists.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.
