Day of the Reaper



While Jennifer and her friends are driving home from a day at the beach their car breaks down on a rural road and they’re accosted by a cannibalistic madman whom they’re able to subdue, but not before he kills one of them. Thinking the nom-nommy lunatic is safe in police custody, they try to go about their lives. But the madman escapes and manages to track almost all of them down, making Jennifer the only one left to try to figure out how to stop this seemingly unstoppable killing machine before he gets to her too.



I may have made fun of Sting of Death and The Brides Wore Blood, but of all my “Florida related” horror films this month, Day of the Reaper was undoubtedly the hardest one to get through. It’s plodding, it’s confusing, and it’s incredibly low budget does it little favors. But why it is the way it is also makes perfect sense and has to be taken into consideration…

The film is written and directed by Tim Ritter, who has made a bit of a name for himself over the years for making a number of cult horror movies like Twisted Illusions and Truth of Dare. None of which I’ve seen, but good for him for finding his niche. Reaper, however, was his first film, one that he made as an independent student project. And by student, I mean that he was only around 15 when he made it, and that he personally procured the movie’s $1,000 budget by taking a part-time job washing dishes. You really can’t get much more “independent student film” than  a bunch of high schoolers running around with a camera and a dream. AND THEN he shopped the film he made with his friends and classmates around to the local video rental stores to take advantage of the burgeoning home rental market, and managed to make a career out of that. And let me tell you, having been forced to make my own crappy movie during high school for a class project, I can only imagine the kind of cajones doing something like that took. That said, I shall do this write-up as I normally do, but just please note that everything I say after this must be partially viewed through the lens that this “professionally released” movie was made by a group of high school students in their spare time, and that I have the utmost respect for their efforts, and that they all deserve a standing ovation for all their hard work and I will try not to be too mean….

…But the movie still isn’t that good.



To start, the story is a bit confusing, with a lot of holes and a lot of “that’s not how things actually work” logical leaps. And I know things like that pop up in other movies, but here it’s VERY prevalent. So you can tell this was written through the lens of a 15-year-old. It starts out like a standard slasher film, with some unknown guy getting escorted in a car, and then something goes wrong on a rural road, and he gets free and kills the people transporting him, and the whole thing feels very Halloween-ish, which I’m sure was the point. But for some reason they have our killer dressed in a black hood, as if they’re personally escorting him to the gallows back in 1775. Except they’re getting into a 1970s car and driving down the road. Also, we later find out that he’s being escorted to his execution? So why does it look like some dudes dressed as orderlies are taking him there? Where were the cops? Don’t know, but already the movie is off to a rough start.



Then we meet Jennifer, who is the lone survivor of our black hooded friend’s latest killing spree. And we know this because she repeats all this about 3-4 times during a voice-over monologue where she’s introduced while sloooooooowly walking down the street, only occasionally looking at the camera when she’s not supposed to. Then we get a flashback of her and her dead friends at the beach (you know, back when they weren’t dead), where we’re treated to riveting dialogue like this:

“I think it’s time to go.”
“Yeah it looks like it’s going to rain.”
“Hurry up, I don’t want to get wet, you guys.”

Darlings, you are AT THE BEACH and drying off as you say this! So clearly you were already wet, likely from taking a dip in that large, vast, moist thing laid out in front of you that you all purposefully went to visit. So you’re already wet, what the hell are you going on about?


It’s like watching somebody’s weird home movies.

Oh well, doesn’t matter. Because their car breaks down a little while later, conveniently right near where our black hooded killer is hiding out in the woods. Except he doesn’t have the hood yet, so you can see his face. And he must not have liked their dialogue exchange any more than I did, because he immediately kills and eats one of them. But showing an amazing amount of gumption that you don’t typically see this early in a horror movie, the survivors subdue the dude by running his ass over and beating the snot out of him with a bat that they conveniently had in their car and brought with them on their beach trip. Oh, and one of them also threw their frisbee at him.


No judgement. Sometimes you’ve gotta work with what you’ve got.

So they tie him up with a length of rope that they also conveniently had in their car and call the cops like good little citizens. The responding detective then informs the ladies that they’ve been looking for this guy for a while, since they suspect he’s involved with the disappearance of over 100 people. Over 100! And nobody knew about this? You didn’t warn anyone!? WTF, dude! Something like this should have been on national news! Especially since we’re continually told later that this town they live in is so “small”. Like, define “small”. A couple thousand? Ten thousand? Either way, over 100 is still a lot of people. You’d think that – at minimum – the mayor of the town would be having a stroke just thinking about all the locals and tourists going missing on his watch. But this detective seems completely undisturbed by 100+ missing people who have likely been devoured by one dude. So suffice it to say that the script to the film is quite gloriously… er, questionable.



But this is a supernatural slasher, so the killer quickly escapes the police department’s high security jail by simply walking outside and crawling under a chain link fence with a convenient dip under it. And I assume he must have killed everyone at the station before they had time to process him, because he’s still wearing his bloody apron he was arrested in. Also NOW he has his black hood, though we never find out where it came from. I presume it’s some piece of clothing he swiped from one of his victims inside the station and then Martha Stuart-ed into a fashionable hood before he left. Perhaps part of a uniform or someone’s sweaty, used briefs. Who knows.


Don’t mind me. Just going on a casual murder stroll.

But then he tracks down and kills all the other ladies he encountered on that rural road. Likely because he’s still sore about having that frisbee thrown at his face. The first one is some chick who has decided to get over her recent bout of PTSD by going back to the beach where her friend was murdered. She gets there, strips, walks knee-deep into the water and frolics for about 10 seconds, gets out, lays down in the sand for a minute, and then gets up to walk around the nearby shrubbery, because there were other people on the beach and they needed to film somewhere where those randos wouldn’t interrupt the shot. So she strolls through the trees, and while she’s being stalked by our black hooded killer friend we get to see her hair go from perfectly coiffed, to sopping wet to the point where you think it may be a different character altogether (maybe that rain they mentioned earlier finally showed up?), and then back to being perfectly dry again, just in time for the killer to show up and get all stabby-stabby. So if you’re hoping to see things like “continuity” here, it’s really “abandon hope, all ye who enter,” cause it just gets worse from here on out.







In fact, you should probably give up on seeing much in the way of technical prowess altogether. I give Tim and company an A for effort, but not much else. The acting is… Well, let’s just say I don’t think any of these people would have been chosen to be background characters or extras in their high school play, and just leave it at that.


Damn it, get out of the shot, Gary!

The film quality itself also isn’t too hot, as most versions you’re likely to find will still have all the original VHS artifacting. So expect a lot of pops and scratches, and several scenes looking way, way, WAY too dark.


What am I looking at? What is this for? Why is it even here?

Then there’s the sound, which is kinda mixed. Now, the soundtrack isn’t too bad, I suppose. At least if you’re into the synth stuff. But everything else is… I don’t know. I’m assuming Tim didn’t have a boom mic and was relying on the mic in the camera he was using. And let me tell you, those things suck. They either pick up nothing or everything, never the sounds that you actually want or need it to pick up. So all of the dialogue was obviously re-dubbed after the fact. Except it wasn’t synced properly. So you’ve got all these mouths moving and then a good 1-2 seconds (or more!) pause before you actually hear anything. Which is a little disconcerting, because it doesn’t just happen for one or two scenes, it goes on for the entire movie, all 71 glorious minutes of it. So that’s a little jarring.



The one thing you can tell they put real effort into is the gore. Because there is a LOT of it, and it’s spaced out throughout the entire film. And some of it looks really good for something put together by high school students, especially the bathroom scene, which is a drippy, gooey mess. But other parts really show their budget. The hands and limbs look like sawed off mannequin parts, no movement, just hard stiffness. And when one guy gets chopped up with an ax, when they cut back down to the aftermath it’s just a bunch of bloody clothes and random bones thrown together. So it’s a bit of a mixed bag in that area. I think I was actually more impressed when they weren’t trying so hard. Like when they decapitated a man on the beach and just showed the actor’s head sitting in the sand. Because that means they actually had to spend time digging a hole so they could bury that dude neck-deep in the sand to get the effect. But whatever, I’ll give them extra credit on this part, because it’s clear that’s where most of the time and money went.





The film’s biggest issue though, is the pacing. Because the movie falls into the typical “first film” trap of the filmmakers not realizing how short their movie actually is, and then having to extend scenes just to fill in some time. So expect a lot of wandering around in the woods and long, unnecessary walking scenes. Like when Jennifer gets attacked by the killer after he escapes and she manages to get away by jumping into a van and speeding off. Being the good little citizen she is (minus the fact that I think she just stole that van), she immediately goes to call the police and stops at the nearest payphone. Except they inexplicably have her park as far away from the phone as she can get. But instead of having her RUN to the phone (cause, you know, she was just attacked by a crazy person who killed all her friends and was SUPPOSED to be in jail) we instead get to watch her casually tread across this open field to the phone, dial the police in real time while accompanied by added rotary phone noises (for anyone too young to know, payphones used buttons *clicky click click click*), talk to the police, and then casually make her way back to the van (that, again, pretty sure she stole) to meet up with the detective. Meaning that we get to watch Jennifer slowly walk across the same open field not once, but twice… In real-time. I think we spend more time watching this chick walk through grass than we do listening to the reasoning behind the killer’s motivations.



And there’s more weirdness to Day of the Reaper, of course. Like Jennifer being asked to be used as bait to lure out the creepy psycho killer two separate times and just going along with it without any complaints. Or her hiding from the killer behind the skinniest tree they could find, while wearing a bright pink shirt, and the killer STILL running right past her (maybe a black hood without any eye-holes was a bad idea, my dude?). And then giving us an ending that throws together a bunch of very random explanations at the last second that the movie never spent any time building up to. So beyond the surreal atmosphere and some decent bloody bits, the movie’s not great. But (!) as a student film, I think everybody did a good job. They put together a whole movie, and you can tell everyone is trying really hard. It’s certainly better than what I could have done under the same conditions. So good for them *clap clap* I think it was a good first effort. For most people though, especially those who go into this not knowing that this was made by a bunch of high schoolers, this film is going to feel like little more than a really cheap, poorly made slog. So depending on what kind of film you’re willing to watch, and your patience levels, adjust your expectations accordingly.

Day of the Reaper is available on a variety of streaming services.

Day of the Reaper is also available on DVD and Bluray, the latter exclusively from SRS Cinema with a shiny new HD transfer from the original super 8mm film that hopefully looks better than the crappy VHS transfer I watched.

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