Directed by:
Heini Grünbaum
Denmark's very first slasher film? Possibly. Though I'm not entirely sure about that claim, it is currently the earliest one to show up on an IMDb horror title search. A teenage boy (Michael Andersen) is being harassed by a trio of punk bullies (Allan Teisen, Lars Svensson and Jakob Nyborg) at his boarding school. They steal his toboggan, throw rocks through his window, blow cigarette smoke in his face, steal his money, throw his bag over a fence, punch him in the stomach, knock him to the ground and do other not-so-nice things. Hell, the poor kid can't even take a piss in peace, as they barge in, beat him up and knock him out by bashing his head against the sink. Anyone who attempts to help the terrorized teen gets beaten up themselves so it looks like a pretty hopeless situation all the way around. Except... this kid is a big horror movie fan with a special affinity for Fredag den 13. (FRIDAY THE 13TH), so, like the rest of us horror nuts, he's seen his fair share of depictions of blood revenge. After one too many beatings, the kid finally snaps, steals a horror mask from a classmate taking a shower, gets his hands on a hatchet and gets to work teaching the bullies a lesson.
This entirely amateur effort, which never saw any kind of official home video release (the "world premiere" occurred in 2012 on Youtube), was shot on Super 8 with no sound. Technically-speaking, nearly everything about it is terrible. However, seeing how this was made for next to nothing by a 16-year-old director, it proves to be rather fascinating all the same.
The most interesting aspect is seeing what was popular overseas at the time and what was appealing to genre fans and possibly influencing independent European filmmakers at the dawn of the VHS era. And that turns out to be the exact same stuff that was influencing North American genre films at the time: namely Halloween and the aforementioned Friday the 13th. This steals most of its music from Carpenter's film, while prominently featuring the Danish Friday poster (which shows a bloody axe lying on a bed instead of the campers inside the killer's silhouette like the U. S. poster) as a reference point for the teen's revenge. Other posters seen on walls include Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior and Escape from New York.
The plot is minimal, the acting is nearly nonexistent and the lighting is awful throughout but this is sometimes fairly imaginative and even slightly (probably accidentally!) experimental in regards to the editing and camerawork. While most of it seems sloppy, there's the odd occasion where it actually does work. There's a lot of killer POV camerawork like any good slasher film and some minor gore effects of hatchet wounds spurting blood. Nothing to write home about here, but it at least manages to tell a coherent story and is an interesting, amusing little time capsule coming from a country not known for their classic genre output.
The original cut of this was 45 minutes but the director re-edited it to the currently-released 25 minute version, which is basically just 20 minutes with credits and some other trivia / information thrown in afterward. Grünbaum made a number of other short subjects in the 80s and returned with the feature-length slasher flick Flænset / Shredded in 2000.
★★
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