Reeker

5 youths on a car-share trip to a rave in the desert find themselves stranded in an abandoned cafe / motel, with no mobile, landline, television or even radio signal.
They begin to get fleeting glances people so injured that they should by rights be dead, and are then stalked by a man/creature that reeks of death, and carries an assortment of modified power-tools

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While watching my poundland films at the beginning of the month (either Them or Dark Floors) I had to sit through unskippable trailers while waiting for the menu to appear. As much as I loath unskippable trailers, I would struck by one in particular, that appeared to be for a zombie comedy, and had a lot of scenes of people with half their heads missing and whatnot, who were still functioning perfectly and seemed not to have noticed the predicament they were in. That movie was "No Mans Land: Rise of the Reeker". I was aware of a horror film called "Reeker", although I had never played it much attention, and wondered if this were an alternate title; a quick google search told me that it was actually "Reeker 2", Reeker's prequel. Although the original had never interested me, the prequel looks boss, so this morning I watched the original that I may be up to speed to watch the one that interested me.

Having done so, I'm not sure how a prequel can work, but that's a question for another day (tomorrow to be exact).

One of the kids was blind - which was a nice idea, and was well used to both dramatic and (darkly) comic effect, but I would have liked (especially given the film's title and the nature of the 'villain') for his enhanced sense of smell to have played a bigger roll.

Speaking of dark comedy, there were plenty of funny moments, but not so many that I think the film could be classed as "comedic", that said there were moments (particularly in the films opening) that left me sure that they were originally going for "Horror-Comedy" but came up short i the laughs department.

It's a low-budget independent production and (with the exception of a few glimpses of what looked like crew and equipment in the reflections of windows, and the worst ever "missing arm" costume) the crew have made a decent job of polishing it up to look like a "real" movie - kudos!

The ending was very clever, and pieced together things that I'd completely forgotten about and/or overlooked,  I guess the 'old school slasher' feel of this one had thrown me off of looking too closely.

All in all, the movie was interesting enough, but was a little too slow-paced for my tastes relying I guess on the ending to elevate it (which it did, although not enough to forgive the slowness).