Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films, 2020
Images from the Internet
Survival Knife
Directed by Mike McKown
Robot Monkey Studios / Wild Eye Releasing
102 minutes, 2016
Even before I start,
this is an interesting premise, if one looks at the time framing. In most
films, especially the slasher genre, it usually takes 20 minutes (not counting
the ubiquitous prologue) for the action to build (Act 1), another 40 minutes
for people to start up getting killed (Act 2, or, the ramp-up), and then the
rest of the film is where the action is packed and the killer is exposed and
sometimes done away with, usually by who is often known as the “Final Girl,” a
term I believe was framed by Carol J. Clover in her amazing book, Men, Women,
and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, which can be found online
as a .pdf.
Well, this film picks
up where Act 3 starts as its Act 1 (or perhaps one could call it an extended,
8-minute prologue since the credits run over it; it’s all semantics, so I’ll
leave that up to you, dear reader). Right off, you can see some nods to
previous films as a homage, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
where the masked killer, the Survivalist (Jesse-Lee Lafferty) runs his knife
along the wall (who would do that in real life?) in an abandoned factory (that
makes a great film set) like Freddy did with his glove in the furnace room, and
the one-eyed, eyepatch vengeance seeking lead in the Swedish classic, Thriller:
A Cruel Picture (1973).
Though the Survivalist
is mort and his body fried and now fertilizer, suddenly there are more killings
in the woods in his style, while our final girl Penny (Danielle Donahue)
is having vivid dreams of violence. Unlike One-Eye, there is no vengeance to
seek with her masked slasher gone, so the question is whether our PTSD-ridden
heroine, like the lead in Ms. 45 (1981), is fulfilling a need for action
triggered by past events? Needless to say, Penny is angry, and why wouldn’t she
be? No longer able to work (as a stripper, natch), her fiancée and all her
friends were the Survivalist victims, and the press is hounding her – well, one
reporter, anyway (Kaitlin Schoeb).
She also has to deal
with the likes of a too-personal psychologist (psychiatrist?), Dr. Lentz (Bruce
Lentz), a empathetic police detective, Jake (Lonnie Thomas), and a less than sympathetic
one, Kim (the wonderfully named Melissa Troughtzmantz), who are the procedurals
on the case to find the murderer. Speaking of which, I figured out the key
element of the murders just before the half-way point in the film (that is my
procedural).
Overall, this release
is pretty bloody and violent throughout, sometimes in the present and others in
flashback, but most of the time (as in other than one time), it is without
gore. There is, however, a few scenes of gratuitous nudity (all female), and
even a shower scene, which at one point was practically a given in slasher
films. And then there is the occurrence in the strip club, focusing a lot on
the action at the poles, beyond the storyline occurring at the bar.
The film uses mostly a
muted color palate early on, with dull hues tones, such as dark blue striped
shirts, or pillows with black and white patterns; there are no bright colors
like reds or yellows. Even the walls and plush chairs have gray tones, and the apartment
rooms are sparse. The flashbacks are shot through a sepia-toned filter. Even
Pittsburg, where it is filmed, looks a bit washed out in long shots in a bit of
haze of smog. I was impressed with the filming within the abandoned factory,
which is a mixture of bright sunlight and deep shadows. Occasionally the people
in the sunny bits look a bit washed out, but overall, I was struck.
The acting is mostly
passable, with some of the secondary characters being a bit wooden, but you definitely
can feel Donahue’s anger through her clenched, very white teeth, which is how
she talks most of the time (anger issues, remember?). The electric soundtrack sounds
decent without it being overly synth-sounding (I’m not a synth fan; too 1980s
even for me).
The story was written
by Jim Towns, who actually did a great job with this complex plot, even without
much exposition as to what life was like before the killings (other than Penny’s
engagement). What makes this a good tale? Well, just as it doesn’t start where
most films do, neither does it end there, as it continues beyond the point of where
one would expect it to be; plus, there a few false endings, and that is decent
writing for this release.
That’s not to say
there were not a few weak points: for example, Penny keeps kneeling and bending
on a bad knee (something I live with), getting up with relative ease. Also,
there is a distracting overdubbing in one scene that is really bad, involving
the name of a strip club which was obviously changed at some point after
filming (for legal reasons?). I’ll chalk that up to budgeting, so I will
forgive that.
Mainly, the film is a
bit long, and could easily have about 10 to 15 minutes excised (that’s what the
“Outtakes” feature on a disc is for). That being said, overall, I would say it’s
a well done slasher and psychological thriller that has some nicely done twists
and turns.
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