Ashburn Waters is an Australian take on the "ultra-low budget slasher movie made by a couple of friends over a weekend" genre. Let's not start pretending that we have high expectations or have set a high bar for a movie like this; we know that at best, the acting is going to be a C+, the effects/costumes are going to be a C-, and if we are lucky, someone on the crew understands how to capture sound. Ashburn Waters is on the better side of movies of this ilk, but that's not saying its good. The acting is mostly kind of okay, but there are some really bad deliveries, but no one here does bad enough to specifically call out; everyone seems to be at least trying. The story is boilerplate and although it's only an hour and twenty minutes, it feels so long. I understand the goal was to create characters that we care about before they start getting sliced, but I really don't; every character is an obvious horror cliche and I found them all annoying. While nothing is particularly good, there is one piece that is bad enough to be noteworthy, the monster/demon. I get that there were budgetary constraints, but I'm not freaking out about a ghillie with light up eyes. They have a good enough camera that I can see things clearly and then they expect to carry a horror movie with somebody looking like a rejected Pokemon cosplay slapping people to death. No. No. No. Just paint some dude's face red and we're already better off. There are exactly two things I expect out of a slasher movie, cool kills and a creepy looking bad guy. Ashburn Waters gives us shots of dead bodies with some blood on their faces and walking seaweed. Every Friday the 13th movie was terrible, every single one, but at lest there was a scary man and we got to see a guy get his head chopped off; we got something out of the movie. I got nothing from Ashburn Waters. The only thing I can compliment it on is that the sound was very good for a movie of this budget. I didn't notice any ADR and although there were a few times where the sound level dropped dramatically enough that I had to turn the volume up just to hear the dialog (not that I could understand everything because every man in this movie has a very thick Australian accent), overall is was well done. Maybe if you really want to support Australian Cinema, check it out, but otherwise I can't say I recommend it at all.
