Shredder



Kimberly and her five friends are headed up to the mountains to spend some time at a closed ski resort owned by her father. Or at least that’s what she told her friends to get them up there, anyway. In reality, the resort has been closed for years due to the mysterious murder of a young girl, whose death was never solved. So now much of the resort is practically falling apart, and Kimberly and her friends were basically just asked to go up to check the place out to see how much of a low-ball offer her father can put down on the place.

None of this, meanwhile, really matters to any of her friends. They don’t give a flying flip about open murder investigations where the killer has never been caught. They just came there to snowboard and ski. Which they do in abundance the next day, thanks in part to the still operational snow-lift. But they clearly should have paid more attention to the sheriff and the locals, because clearly someone up on that mountain doesn’t want them there. And that someone also seems to have a grudge against snowboards, one that’s strong enough for them to go to extreme measures in order to keep their mountain quiet and peaceful.



As December rolls around, so too do the winter themed films here at Random Movie Musings, of which I found out long ago are pleasantly plentiful. First up this year is Shredder, a Direct-to-Video outing from 2003 that was conceived and partially written by director Gregory Huson, after he got stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains one winter, and was forced to hold up in a hell hole of a motel before he could leave. My sympathies, friend. We’ve all been there. The movie is designated as a “horror/comedy”, which is something that always gives me pause. Especially because this was released just around the time when a lot of those stupid, “in your face” horror parodies were starting to get released, and beyond a couple jokes here and there, those rarely ever jive with me. But thankfully Shredder is not that kind of horror/comedy. There is some stoner nonsense and some juvenile humor regarding sex and who certain people want to go to pound town with, but beyond one recurring bit of black humor (which I actually liked) the humor is mostly pretty on par with other horror films that like to throw a few jokes into the script to liven things up. So, not too bad. Which means that, unlike other movies in that genre, I happily didn’t have to cringe my way through large swaths of the film.



So, fun fact, for some reason Shredder was released as Jason Z in Japan. I guess to somehow tie the film to the recent release of Jason X from 2001. Which… was a really weird choice, I gotta admit. Because just in case you can’t tell, this film is in no way related to the Friday the 13th series. There’s not a camp, or a lake, or a hokey-masked killer running around with a machete. The only thing linking the two films together is that they both involve a lot of horny nitwits running around an isolated location without any proper supervision. But in this case the nitwits are actually a bit more likable than their counterparts in the Jason series, so that’s a nice plus. The only annoying one is the bitchy girlfriend and maybe the perpetual stoner, but they’re both meant to be that way. Everyone else is pretty bearable for the most part. And that’s partially because this film, shockingly, has a decent pool of actors. Not great, mind you, but decent. Yeah, most of their respective characters are clearly tropes, but the actors fulfill their tropes with great skill, so beyond a couple of side characters that are barely in the film, I’m surprised to say I have little to complain about in the acting department.



Even the slasher bits are actually pretty decent for a low-budget teen slasher. They have a couple nice set pieces, thanks to the snow and the isolated location. There are a few tense moments thrown in there. Everything is spaced out a bit, so everyone’s not clumped together and dying at the end. And there’s actually a nice assortment of different deaths on display. None of it is great, as again, this is a low-budget affair. But there’s quite a lot of blood, and even a bit of gore, so the filmmakers didn’t particularly skrimp out on us. The skin fans, however, I think will be much happier than the gore hounds, thanks to the various bits of nubile flesh on display by a couple different actresses.



And like I said before, if you see the “comedy” designation and get concerned, you needn’t worry, because it’s not that bad. Okay, yes, some of the lame ‘teenage’ sex jokes and the ‘haha look at this idiot’ moments are pretty bad. But once you get past the beginning, those mostly go away. In fact, I’m not even sure it deserves that comedy designation, because it’s actually pretty light on the intentional humor. I think their longest “joke” is the extended montage of watching Kimberly’s boyfriend using various methods to try to break open the front gate so he can get the car in. But that’s not too bad, because they intersperse it with his friends having fun on the slopes. The best one though is when one of these fools accidentally hangs themselves on the ski lift with their own scarf. Proving that though they may be dumb, their winter game is clearly much stronger than mine, because every time I tie my scarf the damn thing either comes undone five minutes later or flops down around my shoulders. So clearly I’m doing something wrong.


Again, she did this to herself….

Anyway, that’s not supposed to be the funny part. The ‘joke’ with that scene is that, apparently, no one notices that this chick is missing/dead for like, hours. And not because no one else used the ski lift for a long time, but apparently because they’re all a bunch of oblivious idiots. Because we get several scenes where everyone’s up on the mountain doing their own thang, and the film keeps cutting back to show us this gal, still hanging from the lift chair by her brightly colored scarf (the tensile strength of that thing must be wild), going round-and-round-and-round on the lift, for who TF knows how long. It’s creepy and it’s dark, but it may be the greatest stroke of brilliance the film has.


The killer eventually gets so sick of their obliviousness, that they take her corpse down themselves and throw it in front of the lodge so that the idiots can’t ignore her anymore.

One thing I initially thought was really odd about the movie was how so many people in the film seemed to absolutely hate snowboarders. Like, it is one of the film’s core plot points. People give them dirty looks, they drive by with bumper stickers on their vehicles that basically say “I hate snowboarders die-die-die.” It all felt a little extreme. But upon further inspection (I live in the south, wtf do I know about winter sports?), I guess there really is a certain subset of skiers/ resort goers that absolutely despise snowboards, to the point that some resorts still ban snowboarding. Either because they’re too hoity-toity to allow it, because they don’t have designated snowboarding areas and the snowboarders “ruin” the slopes, or because the poor behavior of a few misbehaved eggs ruined it for everyone else. Whatever the reason, it is a thing. So I guess that part of the plot was surprisingly accurate, even though the movie sort of took it to the extreme.



Now, all that said, what are the downsides? Weeeell, the plot for one. You’d think a teen slasher involving some crazed killer living up in the mountains would be pretty straight forward. Killer lives in mountains, kids encroach on mountains, killer kills them, the end. Simple. But surprisingly there is a lot of miscellaneous nonsense up in this here film. That whole “murder mystery” surrounding the little girl’s death? Turns out that was just an accident. But the kid’s corpse is still hidden up in the mountains somewhere because…uh, reasons. And there’s this whole subplot they try to build about how the killer is obsessed with the “resort rules” and that the reason that they kill people is because they’re breaking the rules, with the camera frequently focusing on ‘rule’ brochures and signs throughout the film. But the killer’s ACTUAL motivations all lead back to the little girl’s death, so all the focus on that feels like a total waste of time.



But the real issue is that there’s just too much focus on the ‘teens’ (who are clearly in their twenties) and their obnoxiously petty and lame relationship issues. Kimberly is stringing Cole along with the promise of sex, but just wants an obedient puppy to do her bidding. Her cousin Pike has the hots for Cole, but Kimberly has told everyone her cousin is a lesbian. Robyn doesn’t care about Cole, but wants to boink the blond hitchhiker they picked up as soon as humanly possible (as does Kim). Skyler is a virgin who’d be happy to boink anyone, but has his mind set on the cute waitress at the bar they stopped at. Kirk doesn’t want to boink anyone, he just wants to shred. And everyone except Cole wonders where the hell Chad is, especially Kimberly, because she specifically invited him so that they could boink. What does any of this have to do with the plot involving the killer skier? Diddly squat. Will you care? No. Why TF is it here? Who the hell knows. But it takes up the first 3/4ths of the film, so you have to put up with it in order to get to the much better 25 minute finale at the end. But thank goodness there are a few deaths scattered amongst it all, or I might have wanted to gouge out my eyeballs.



Truth be told though, I actually kind of liked Shredder. I admit that it’s not a great film (not by a long shot), but for a slightly sleazy, low-budget slasher, it has enough good points in its favor that it’s actually very watchable. It looks good, has a nice location, there are a few good deaths, some decent tension, and the acting doesn’t totally suck. It sucks that the plot feels more complicated than it needs to be, but even with the issues I still think it’s a decent mid-tier, teen slasher. Not great, but not something I regret watching either. So if you’re looking for something wintry to put on in the background this season, then this may be worth a look.

Shredder is available on a variety of streaming services.

Shredder is also available on DVD (though it may be out of print) and as a Bluray from Scorpion Releasing.

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