"Blood Trails" is truly a mixed bag and I honestly can't decide whether I should be harsh or mild in my user comment. On one hand, it's an admirably tense nowadays horror flick with brutal gore, lovely filming locations and identifiable main characters, but on the other hand it serves cliché after cliché as well as a banquet of stupid & illogical twists. I liked the realism of the character drawings. Anne and Michael are going through a severe relationship crises and decide to head out to their favorite holiday resort; a cabin surrounded by thick woods where they can practice their common hobby of mountain biking. But there's more. Brief flashbacks indicate that Anne had a one-night-stand with a rude cop, and when he suddenly appears on his mountain bike as well, a cruel & bloody chase through the woods begins. The first half hour of "Blood Trails" is really good, showing Anne struggling with her inner demons and the flashbacks gradually revealing what psycho her one night lover was. The film also features the extremely vile and presumably unique murder-by-bike sequence! Just in case you always wondered how you can slice someone's carotid artery using only a bike, this is your movie! Okay, so far we had amiable characters and impressive bloodshed, but unfortunately the movie then becomes pretty bad & irritating. How the deranged killer managed to exactly trace the couple, I'm still prepared to overlook, but Anne then makes so many stupid decisions that she almost deserves to die. Why didn't she at least try to wait wait for her rescuers atop the mountain, since they were just a couple of minutes away? Doesn't she realize she's the one acting like an escaped crazy woman when she meets the woodchoppers? Why stop and thoroughly study the road map when you can drive far away from the forest? The last twenty minutes are dreadfully boring, and a very shameless attempt to cash in on the success of torture-porn highlights like "Saw" and "Hostel", with the demented killer patiently explaining to Anne why exactly he's so looking forward to kill her. "Blood Trails" was shot and produced in Germany, but promoted for the international market. Director Robert Krause is a German as well, and this film is his long-feature debut after two acclaimed short movies. The make-up effects are quite impressive and definitely not intended for the eyes of squeamish, but a slightly more coherent narrative and more logical twists would still have been better.
