In horror movies, hunters often receive the short shrift. They’re almost always randos relegated to one scene for the sole purpose of being dispatched by Jason Voorhees and his ilk. They’re not introduced so much as placed in the way — a minor obstacle to “overcome” on the way to those nubile, horny teens.
A throwback to the slasher decade, the horror comedy Deer Camp ’86 upends that architecture, making the hunters the protagonists — not necessarily a change for the better. Here, five friends head to the woods to slay bucks and does, but risk getting slain themselves by a Native American spirit noted for its skull visage and Predator-esque clicks.
From first-time director L. Van Dyke Siboutszen, Deer Camp ’86 reminded me of the screen outings of the Broken Lizard troupe, in all the positives and negatives that comparison brings. On the plus side, that includes a willingness to “go there” without care of offending; conversely, they “go there” without knowing what to do with it.
Its humor is largely predicated upon two obnoxious varieties: gotta-take-a-shit and fucked-your-sister. Hanging over the telling of these jokes is an air of obliviousness at how unfunny the jokes are. Whenever neophyte scripters Bo Hansen and Riley Taurus place a sequence at bat with potential for inspired craziness, they fail to pay it off.
Nothing embodies the movie’s consistent swing-and-a-miss run than the extreme close-up of a tick burrowed into a hunter’s testicle. What happens? The parasitic arachnid is simply plucked from the nut; the entirety of the gag is that a ball sack fills the frame. All in all, hardly worth stuffing to mount on your den’s wall. —Rod Lott
