Blood Tracks

My review was written in May 1986 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

"Blood Tracks" is a gory horror film that although it was made last year belongs rightfully in the cycle of teen slasher features from five years ago. Prospects are modest in international markets.

Silly premise has a rock group amed Solid Gold (played by Swedish band Easy Action) on location in the Colorado mountains (actually filmed in Sweden) to shoot a music video. A large contingent of attractive femme models isalong, to provide th usual scantily clad decoration (even though it's cold and strictly snowsville, with frequent avalanches to boot).

While the troupe is holed up in a snug mountain cabin, workmen disturb the peace of a barbarian clan of savages living underneath an abandoned factory nearby. A prolog sequence shows how an ultraviolent domestic quarrel some 10 years earlier ended up with daddy dead and mom and the kids trekking to the remote spot where they're living and murdering primitively today.

When the rock entourage youngsters are not engaged in sex they're wandering out in the snow (this being a cornball horror picture after all) to be attacked by the primitives.

"Blood Tracks" emphasizes some grisly makeup effects, particularly one in which a girl suddenly is split in two from head to toe. Several sex and nude scenes are included, the silliest of which has blonde Mary (Karina Lee) making love to a musician out in a car when they're buried by an avalanche; when rescued she scrambles across the snow naked much to the merriment of the rescuers.

Cast is hampered by the use of post-synchronized English dialog, but the youngsters are good looking and that apparently is all that is required in this genre.

In the snowy hinterlands of what is presumably the U. S. Rocky Mountains (but is in reality Sweden), a drunken father bullishly intimidates and threatens his wife and children. The wife retaliates by knifing and leaving him with the kids in tow. Many years later, a film crew looking for an atmospheric location stumbles upon an abandoned factory, which is the hidden home for the wife and children, now living like wild animals, with scabby, yellow faces and bug eyes.

The film crew includes a real-life heavy metal rock band, Easy Action, brought on location with a group of models to shoot a music video. When an avalanche isolates the crew from civilization, the scary-looking family in the factory goes on the hunt.

For a simple stalk-'n-slash type gore movie, BLOOD TRACKS is pretty good. In 1985, it probably stood out amid the FRIDAY THE 13TH clones that proliferated. Though BLOOD TRACKS resembles THE HILLS HAVE EYES and DEATHLINE, in this case the social-outcast mutants are not cannibalistic but kill only to keep knowledge of their existence a secret. At least that's how it seems at first.

The makers of BLOOD TRACKS tried to make each successive murder sequence more elaborate and horrible than the last, so in the end whatever sympathy one has for the outcast family is long gone. The film crew members are not just killed, they are dismembered or burned alive in sophisticated traps. The murderous family acts so witless and undisciplined, though, these spectacles seem far beyond their abilities.

Despite the large number of inconsistencies and coincidences that pile up by the movie's end, BLOOD TRACKS is diverting enough to deserve a slightly dismembered thumbs-up.

Ah, the 1980s, when everyone with a camera and a barely coherent script was lensing slashers. With all this groundswell, it was only natural that this mania would extend to Europe, which is why we have this Swedish sausage product--I AM CURIOUS it ain't. As others have noted, it's pretty standard stuff: a group of folks (Swedish Hair Metal band and their groupies/video tramps, along with a retinue of stylists/makeup people/cameramen) descend on a location (a cabin in a snowy mountain region, adjacent to a condemned factory) ostensibly to film a music video. The trouble starts when the director wants to use the factory as a backdrop for said video. A fortuitous avalanche strands the group at the location. A feral, homicidal family resides in the factory. It isn't long before various members of the party wander into said factory at met their various, grisly demises.

BLOOD TRACKS is not the worst I've seen in slashers from this era (the second golden era--1984-just before SCREAM debuted), but it does have some flaws that lessen its impact. The nonsensical prologue in which we are given the origins of the murderous family doesn't make sense and could have been left off altogether. Clearly, this trope borrowed from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE/THE HILLS HAVE EYES and should have followed those films leads of just presenting the family cold, with no explanations. Another problem with the film is that, once we get inside the factory, it's so bloody dark you can barely see what's happening. This could just be the way the film was shot, so there may not be any way of correcting, such as remastering, high def, etc. If this could be remedied, it should be. The cast seems to be either British or American, or the film makers may be resorting to the Italian trick of giving native actors prosaic American-sounding names. The acting is OK, but these are not characters given to thoughtful, analytic discourse, so it works. A real rock group, Easy Action, was hired to portray the band, but they appear in the film mostly as a pretext, and the members don't get much dialogue. No real reason is given for the family's feral state (the prologue doesn't shed any clues to this) so they just are the way they are. There are a few PG-13 sex scenes, but the nudity is minimal. The action, once it gets started, is self-propelled and doesn't let up, which makes the less than 90-minute runtime bearable.

If you've seen all the slashers from this era and are looking for a forgotten entry, this one will do the trick.

Unquestionably one of the dumbest, dullest and most redundant slasher/exploitation hybrids of the entire 80's decade, "Blood Tracks" is a Swedish-American co-production that desperately attempts to cash in on the success of "The Hills Have Eyes" and other similar mountain-survival horror flicks, but tremendously fails. The most transparent problem of this film project is the lack of budget. The acting performances are weak, the choreography looks amateurish and – worst of all – three quarters of the film is shot without lighting. During practically all the death sequences, you find yourself staring at a fully black screen with only a bit of loud screaming in the background. The basic plot outline isn't too bad, actually – albeit very derivative – but in spite of this and the reasonably high body count, "Blood Tracks" is an insufferably boring and retarded 80's movie. The intro sequence is undeniably the best of the whole film, as a worried mother of three slays her alcoholic and abusive husband and flees into the snowy Colorado Mountains. Many years later (forty according the synopsis on the back flap of the DVD), a cheesy and ultimately gay rock band called "Solid Gold" journeys to the area, along with groupies and backing vocals, to record a video clip. Their atrocious music and annoying behavior quickly causes avalanches so immense they find themselves trapped and cut off from the world. The family from the intro, by now completely bewildered and having developed cannibalistic appetites, resides in a nearby abandoned factory and prepares for a luxurious smörgåsbord. The influence of "The Hills Have Eyes" is obvious, as it is even hinted at that the self-exiled family engaged in naughty inbred games, but they're not the least bit menacing or scary. The band members and their dim-witted entourage form the least amiable horror characters I have ever seen. They say imbecilic stuff (like "the snow is cold" and "hey, let's do it in the snow"), make stupid decisions and honestly deserve to die in the most painful ways imaginable. The Colorado filming locations – actually shot in rural Sweden – are beautiful to look at, but that's pretty much the only positive thing I can write about "Blood Tracks". They're quite a bit of sleaze and nudity, but none of the female cast members are attractive or sexy. If I remember correctly, even that dreadful similarly themed movie "Terror on Tour" was better than this.

OK, so this isn't SILENCE OF THE LAMBS or ALIEN. But what the heck is going on here with these viewer comments? I almost wonder if we all saw the same movie, which is indeed about a Swedish big hair heavy metal boy band (called Easy Action, in real life: their not half bad power ballad accompanies the closing credits) that travels into the frozen north to shoot part of a music video near a huge, creepy, evocative looking abandoned factory. A family of mutant hermits has taken refuge amidst the worn out machinery, broken down furnaces and endless catwalks. Various members of the video crew, band and their entourage of eye candy groupie babes wander into the abandoned factory where the hermits set upon them. Most are killed (though nobody gets eaten) and some of the women taken prisoner back to the hermit's hovel, presumably for mating purposes that are not explored on camera. Thank God.

When evaluating this actually quite watchable film over three or four screenings I noted that it's really two movies in one, and what I think is going on here with the other user comments is that folks are being distracted by the seeming awfulness of the first movie -- the big hair boy band shooting their video -- and ignoring the second -- the fight for survival inside of this immense abandoned factory. And they are letting their (understandable) disdain for the whole 80s arena metal big hair band thing cloud their judgment over the ENTIRE production, 2/3rds of which has little to do with the rock band. Their groupie girls still parade around half nude or better for the entire length of the show, some of the killings are rather ingenious (though sadly even the longer 85 minute print of the film I located seems cut for a few seconds of explicit gore) but there is a sort of ambiguous quality about the family of hermits that makes their fate somewhat bittersweet.

The family is apparently the same people shown in the very beginning of the film where an abused Swedish house mom kills her husband in a pique of self defense, then flees the scene with her four toddler kids. Who then presumably grow up to be the mutant, fur wearing hermits seen during the bulk of the film. The one problem I had with the movie's logic was how did they get so mutated but the mom remained more or less unscathed? The male hermits are all covered with festering sores, leprosy like skin diseases and scuttle about like creatures from a post apocalyptic wasteland thriller. The director, Swedish filmmaker Mats Helge, apparently had an affinity for the subject of a deformed hermit living in dehumanizing conditions who lashes out against it's invasion by technically advanced pop culturists as seen in his 1991 film FORGOTTEN WELLS, which seems to be a distillation of BLOOD TRACKS' more successful themes.

The comparison to THE HILLS HAVE EYES is indeed valid, but how did these cretins end up as we see them? Interestingly the story paints them as victims who have simply become territorial, staked out this abandoned factory and only start killing off the rock band entourage when their territory is violated by people who ignore a big KEEP OUT THIS STRUCTURE HAS BEEN CONDEMNED sign. If you ignore stuff like that you sort of deserve whatever fates await you, and the abandoned factory set is very cool looking, well selected as a real world location, and handled like a creepy woodland camp setting. A lot of the action in the film actually reminded me of ALIENS with it's carnage scenes set in labyrinths of industrial type structures of inter-crossing catwalks, yawning abysses, shafts of unnatural lighting and atmosphere of disused & decaying metal. There are certain segments like the one with a victim being lit on fire and falling off a catwalk that seem to have anticipated some of ALIENS' action sequences: Did Gale Anne Hurd manage to catch BLOOD TRACKS and find inspiration? It comes from the damndest places sometimes ...

I don't say this movie is actually "good", but it IS interesting, and for 1980s slasher type horror that isn't a common trait. I like how different the setting and style of film-making feels when compared to your usual Summer Camp Horror slasher. There is also a weird juxtaposition of these disfigured mutants stalking fashion oriented metal groupies around a cold, dank, dilapidated factory. And the concluding images actually contain an homage to the 1977 Yul Brynner vehicle THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR which again re-enforces the post apocalyptic thing. Maybe in it's original Swedish form this was meant to be a post industrial paranoia picture about how the materialistic youth culture of the 1980s had turned their back on the traditions of industry, then find themselves haunted by it's ghosts in the form of this family of mutants. The leader of which actually seems to make a gesture of religious atonement during the closing moments ... Or does he? See, the movie leaves some interesting questions unanswered in an interesting way, and each subsequent viewing reveals new elements you maybe missed the first time. Usually a slasher film is a cut & dried affair, what you see is what you get, but there seems to be something going on here in this movie that appears to exceed the sum of it's parts. And you can't blame the Swedish for liking their power ballad arena rock bands.

6/10: Worth seeking out for being somewhat different, which should always be considered a good thing.