New On Demand and digital from Seven Tales!
Directed/Written by Kevin Khachan.
Check out the trailer here!!
Twenty years ago, a woman was assaulted in her home by a masked serial killer/rapist. At the same home, now an Airbnb lodge, a group of rowdy youngsters are hoping to spend a weekend of partying hard with a little drugs and sexy time. But unbeknownst to them, these kids who refuse to abide by the owner’s strict rules, are being stalked by a masked killer. Could the killer have returned after all these years or is a new killer picking up where the old one left off?
I could say that RED RABBIT LODGE is your typical slasher movie and in many ways it is. It’s got a masked killer, who kind of looks like George W. Bush who is talking and killing pretty twenty something’s until it’s whittled down to the quiet one and the mask comes off, revealing the killer. It’s all pretty standard.
Except this film is not just that. It’s a mean-spirited film that I think is going to turn off a lot of viewers as in the opening moments there isn’t just a gory kill, but also a gratuitous rape sequence. It goes on for way too long and really sets the whole film off on a note that didn’t sit well with me. And those feelings don’t fade fast as the movie went on.
After the setting is established and the time jumps to the present, instead of dealing with the rape in a mature and resonant manner, the film cuts to another extended scene of the cast playing around in their bathing suits on the beach. Which to me, felt very surface level and doesn’t address the seriousness of such an assault.
Maybe it’s just me being a prude. But if you’re going to use sexual assault in your story, I think there should be some kind of resolution of the act or at least some kind of way of addressing it. Instead, we get gals in bikinis, almost every one of them gets naked at some point in a shower scene or sex scene and other than the initial assault, sex isn’t in the M.O. in the later attacks. So, it feels the opening assault was just there for shock’s sake.
One might argue that the strict rules the house mother applies to her borders, the rules that the kids immediately challenge and break, is a result of the attack at the beginning, so the trauma of that scene fuels the narrative. But there is no moment of realization where the killer or the kids acknowledge any of this.
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I know I’m harping on this topic too much for a low budget slasher movie. So, I’ll stop with the admission that this just wasn’t for me. There is gratuitous gore and the film does have an over the top, chainsaw swinging ending that I can appreciate. The film is also nicely shot. There are some scenes, such as the scene where a ballerina practices her moves, that could even be called quite beautiful. But RED RABBIT LODGE just wasn’t my type of slasher and I’ll just leave it at that.
