Living in a small town, a group of high-school teens preparing for their homecoming celebrations finds the whole thing interrupted by a series of strange deaths throughout the community, and after realizing that the killer is a figure from the past looking to settle scores must stop him.
This was a better-than-expected if still somewhat flawed indie slasher. One of the better factors about this one is the strong sense of mystery built up with the storyline throughout here. With a fine motivation backstory about the potential killer being a bullied kid at school who finally snapped and went crazy, the time jump instead to the current day involving the series of strange deaths affecting the older crop of students that were bullying the strange kid sets this one up quite nicely. Focusing on the idea of the bullies getting their comeuppance while still trying to deal with the strange details that emerge involving how everyone gets interconnected with each other throughout the years, the mystery about what's going on is handled pretty well with the whole thing taking quite a few decent turns for its decent storyline. As this also features some decent slasher film attributes in a fine mask and some violent deaths even though they're not on-screen, these are enough for a solid enough series of positives. There are a few issues with this one that bring it down. Among its biggest drawbacks is the fact that it spends so much time trying to establish the necessary groundwork for the killer's motivations that it drags itself out far longer than needed. Rather than focus on the generalities of what's going on, the idea of spelling out how terrible his homelife is with his verbally abusive mother, being bullied at school, and not having any kind of friend to turn to before snapping is all dredged up to the point that it feels like overkill about his life before getting to the point. It's not needed to go this deep on the kind of simple-minded revenge setup when the standards and conventions of the genre mean that hitting the bullet points of everything and getting to the main storyline can be quite effective which is what's missing here. That carries over into the rest of the film as the investigation angle leaves this with quite a few large periods with no stalking or action as the majority of the kills are weakly executed without much stalking or on-screen gore, all of which lower this one overall.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.
