PLOT SUMMARY: When Blake goes to her boyfriend's cabin to do her writing, she finds herself next on the serial killer's target list.
Slasher movies are usually brimming with over the top acting, maniac killers that are usually shown to have no clear motives, and the final girl who is always in a tank top; and that colour is usually grey.
And then there's always that one dialogue in the movie where the character will ask the killer, "Why? Why me?"
The response is usually a knife or an axe to the gut.
The makers of this movie couldn't come up with an engaging title so thought, why not name it after a word commonly used is slashers?
Of course, as the movie progresses, as a viewer, you won't be thinking "Why?" but, "Huh?"
Mainly because every serial killer we've seen has a modus operandi. They will use a single weapon type, for example, or maybe stalk victims before killing them or simply kill instantly.
What we see here is a killer who doesn't exactly have a type. Okay, yes, he will go after women only. She could be a doctor or a nurse in a hospital, a hippie-looking for a lift or a writer in a cabin or just a housewife.
And he sometimes uses an axe, sometimes a knife to stab and sometimes carve people's faces off to make a mask. He's all over the place.
He could be someone who is known to wander about the woods but then how did he end up at a hospital's parking lot?
WHY? Movie Plot
When the movie begins, a woman doctor is heading to her car at the hospital parking lot. As soon as she gets inside, the killer slits her throat, spluttering pink blood everywhere. The colour of the fake blood is really off here.
Next, we get to meet Blake, a writer who is dating a doctor and likes to fool around with him more than focus on her work.
And then of course she has writer's block, and of course, she needs her boyfriend's cabin to clear her head and get back to writing.
Her boyfriend, Dr Jack, is going to join her later and is planning to propose to her, something pretty much the whole staff at the hospital knows.
Now if the doctor from the first scene was working at the hospital, how is her disappearance/murder not a subject of discussion instead? Let's just assume that doctor worked at another hospital near the woods where the killer did most of his killing.
Since Jack is a doctor, he isn't too keen on having alcohol at his cabin nor does he want Blake to smoke, but she does what she wants.
She stops at the small store, buys cheap wine and then when the cashier asks where she is headed, and her answer makes him give worried glances to his friend, Blake doesn't bother asking if there is something she needs to know.
Nope. And the store owner too, rather stay out of that business rather than warn people to be careful.
There's a hitchhiker who was standing by the road with peace messages that Blake chooses to ignore. And when she exits the store, finds only the sign floating on the road and she imagines the hitchhiker probably found a ride.
Of course she didn't. The killer kidnapped her somehow even though we don't see him with a car. So did he pick her up on a busy road and no one batted an eyelid as she must have screamed for help?
Anyway in the next scene, she too isn't instantly murdered but tied to a chair, blinded, and has blood oozing from everywhere. Again a different method the serial killer uses.
Blake finally takes Jack's call even though she avoided his previous ones which is rude considering she is using his cabin for the weekend.
Of course, the call starts to break but not before he tells her where the key is.
In the meantime, the killer has claimed more victims. There is a gratuitous intimate scene which is wrapped up in five minutes when the killer doesn't bother dragging his victims out of their tents but just brings his axe down on the tent and hits the bullseye by striking the guy's skull on his first go.
The woman somehow manages the killer's chopping exercise and stages herself out only for the killer to turn her around and bring the axe straight up on her.
Then he heads to a woman's house who was making her breakfast and stabs her and pins her against the wall while he carves her face, eats her breakfast, and then wears her face as a mask. And then he goes after the dog before he leaves.
Blake finally arrives at the cabin and sees the front door open, and right before she can ask Jack about it, the call is interrupted and she simply goes forward to check out if there is an intruder inside who will respond to her hellos.
Unbeknownst to her, she is being spied upon by the killer who hides behind the bushes.
When no one responds to her hello, Blake turns around and closes the door to finally discover that the door doesn't close properly and needs to be locked at all times. Relieved, she gets her stuff from her car and the first thing she does is sprawl on the sofa and drink wine.
She hears a sound, gets up, finds nothing suspicious and then suddenly heard a loud thud. Someone has thrown a flower pot at her door. Blake locks the door and goes to bed but the killer has already found a way to enter, supposedly having found the key under the flower pot. He doesn't attack Blake immediately. Instead, he stands in her bedroom and watches her sleep.
The next day, Blake is wearing a grey tank top as she heads outside for a hike. You know the climax is coming up.
WHY? Ending Explained with Spoilers!
Blake is mindful about taking her phone and her manuscript and pen. She finds a spot near a stream and is working while the killer is presumably contemplating how to kill her because he has no weapons even as he has found plenty of opportunities to find her alone and could have killed her by now. But no. He simply watches and when Blake senses something, hides from her. He's more scared of her than she should be of him.
Blake is taking a stroll when she sees a dog hanging from a tree without a face. She freaks out, drops her bag and of course her phone which was in her back pocket.
She runs all around the woods, knocking on doors even though her neighbour isn't going to open it considering her face is all carved up.
Blake finally gets back to the cabin, realizes she's dropped her phone and no longer has any use for the charger, then gets into her car that doesn't start.
She spots someone in the rearview mirror and gets out to call for help only to see he's wearing a hoodie that is covering most of her face. She becomes wary and then terrified when she hears her ringtone coming from his pocket.
Blake runs inside and locks the door. Finding nothing she can use as a weapon, not even knives in the kitchen, Blake boils a pot of water, heats up her hair straightener, and breaks the towel rack. Then she switches off the lights and hides.
That is the cue for the killer to finally start walking from under the tree where he took shelter on a sunny day. Now that it's dark, he can finally emerge and not worry about getting sunburned.
On the other side, Jack is driving to the cabin and can't get through to Blake and when the killer does pick up the phone, he grunts. Knowing that his girlfriend doesn't grunt like that, he calls the local police and tells them about someone else using his girlfriend's phone to grunt.
The police send a patrol to find the source of the grunts.
Blake hardly manages to thwart the killer with the Home Alone tactics and manages to escape from the backdoor only to see Jack being captured by the killer.
There's more running around and more failed attempts to save herself until the killer grabs her and she awakens to find herself facing a tree from which Jack is hanging.
The killer advances and Blake screams why but before the killer can tell her, he's shot by the police.
Time passes and Blake lands a contract for her new book and her agent is more than pleased but Blake isn't.
In the next scene, she's the one walking to the hospital parking lot only to be murdered by having her throat slit. Exactly like in the first scene. And then she wakes up. How did she know the killer had done exactly that with the first victim we were shown?
Did she read it in the newspapers and then dreamed about it?
The scene is supposed to imply that Blake will forever be traumatized by what she experienced.
But that's not the end of the movie.
In another scene, we are shown a babysitter coming over to the house and then comforting a child who is crying about monsters in his room.
The babysitter assures him there are no monsters but the kid points behind her and asks "who is that then?"
Cue blood-curdling scene as the killer advances.
So...wasn't he shot by the police?
Were there more killers like him roaming around? That would explain why they all have different methods of killing. Clearly, they no longer roam in the woods now and have come to the suburbs to kill babysitters.
This could have been an entertaining slasher movie but the killer's character isn't defined properly which makes it hard for us to visualise him as menacing. It's as if the writer couldn't decide whether he wanted him to be a face carver kind of killer or someone who roams around the city and stabs women in parking lots and their houses, or someone who stalks women in the woods and then gets shot easily by the cops.
Just WHY couldn't the writer decide what type of killer they wanted to create?
Scare scale: 2/5
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