One of the neat things about horror is that the genre invites the most wild of ideas, and nothing is too outrageous to make into a movie. "Viking berserker slasher" sounds like something that The Asylum surely must have cooked up in the past few years - but nay! This comes to us from the 1980s! And we should be glad that it does, because otherwise we wouldn't be treated to the soundtrack of very 80s music, nor the very 80s hair styles, and we wouldn't be assured of the presence of George Buck Flower in the cast. The 80s were unquestionably the hey-day of the slasher, with loving use of fog machines, and production values that are instantly recognizable in retrospect. Just as much to the point, where more recent slashers come across as seeking violence and brutality for their own sake, in the 80s the genre largely bore atmosphere that allowed titles to be violent, creepy, silly, and fun all at once. Happily, 'Berserker' carries all these qualities and more, down to the ambient score.
Of course, none of this speaks directly to the overall value of this feature - and that's the bad news, for in some crucial ways this is rather lacking. True, anyone familiar even in passing with slashers knows generally what they're in for. Yet I would note that in this case we see less of the killer than we do in some other fare, and mostly it's just a lot of the characters meandering through the woods. The violence notably falls on the less robust and visceral side of the spectrum as we see it, and for those tracking the body count, it's distinctly lower. Whatever your particular fix is when it comes to horror, you may not get your kicks here, and if you do, they'll be lesser. Worse: the biggest failing is indisputably that the picture doesn't remotely meet the promise of the premise. In other ways this is well done, including the blood and gore (albeit modest by most any point of comparison), and the cast give able performances commensurate with the material. The filming locations are gorgeous, and the production design is swell. But we can get these things anywhere. We can't get a Viking berserker killer Just Anywhere. And, well, as it turns out, we can't really get it here, either.
I think I got my hopes up too high with this one. I like Flower, and I remember Beth Toussaint very well from that one episode of 'Star Trek: The next generation.' The concept sounds great, and once we start watching, 'Berserker' definitely has all the right vibes of 80s slashers. What it doesn't have, unfortunately, is meaningful fulfillment of its concept. In turn, not only is the end result pretty weak as a slasher, but it falters even more disastrously in not making use of those ideas that from the outside looking in are what drew us in, and which could have been employed in imaginative and delightful ways. There are a lot worse ways to spend one's time, but the simple fact of the matter is that there's not much reason to spend time with this, either. It's best suggested for those who are fans of the cast, but otherwise, 'Berserker' is a lackluster horror flick you can safely pass on by.
