Review: Bloody Homecoming / Cert: 15 / Director: Brian C. Weed / Screenplay: Jake Helgren / Starring: Jim Tavare, Rae Latt, Lexi Giovagnoli / Release Date: March 10th

Accidentally murderous teenagers battle a pissed off fireman’s-outfit-wearing psychopath in Bloody Homecoming, a cheap riff on the likes of I Know What You Did Last Summer, minus a great deal of the panache and sheen that made the latter so palatable.

Strains of Halloween in the film’s musical cues aim for something better, but they’re not fooling anyone. Everything – from the masked psycho to the high school setting and sinister notes left in lockers – has been done and parodied endlessly to death since the nineties. There’s even a creepy janitor who should have been played by Michael Berryman or Brad Dourif. The influence of Wes Craven and his most successful imitators (chiefly the underrated Urban Legend and the aforementioned I Know What You Did Last Summer) looms large over this uninspired slasher melodrama.

A more seasoned director and cast of better actors might have salvaged something, but Bloody Homecoming is an absolute, abject exercise in low-budget laziness. It gets better once it does away with the high school hijinks and starts with the killing, but it never rises above the level of mere distraction. Neither nasty nor original enough to be memorable, it’s not even bad enough to earn itself an ironic watch. Not that it doesn’t try with lines like “yes, I am nice, Lauren!” and a ten minute gloating speech from the villain that felt overdone the first three times they did it in Scream.

It’s always good to see a slasher villain bedecked in a blue-collar workman’s outfit (it worked well for the Maniac Cop and Harry Warden) and Bloody Homecoming has a good one, but in this case it’s utterly wasted. There’s nothing wrong with staying firmly within one’s comfort zone, but Bloody Homecoming isn’t any good at that either. This bloodless homecoming is a decidedly limp affair.

Extras: None