Schlitter: Evil in the Woods
Social worker Lucas (Louka Meliava) – along with his secret-withholding girlfriend Julie (Lena Lapres) and slightly rebarbative mate Arnaud (Come Levin) – visits the woods where his abusive lumberjack father (Bernard Eylenbosch) and doormat mother (Marie-Paul Kumps) were recently killed when their house burned down. He’s intent on salvaging a valuable pinball machine but his plan on getting there and back in a day is sideswiped by wheelchairbound neighbour Francis (Gilles David), who has saved a box of mementoes to pass on. Lucas is especially uncomfortable accepting hospitality because he’s kept quiet all these years about his father’s responsibility for the death of Francis’ son Mathias (Nelson Maerten), whose bloody apparition keeps reminding him of his guilt. Just as it looks like the kids will get away and on with their lives, their car won’t start and all sorts of excuses get trotted out – the upshot being that they’ll have to spend the night, with Lucas and Julie sharing Mathias’ unchanged room full of dinosaur and astronaut toys and bad memories.
Francis is folksy and disturbing at the same time – his hobby is constructing guillotine-like mousetraps … and there’s a lot of talk of the schlitter (slider), a form of wood-bearing sled which can only be used with an extremely high risk of injury. Pierre Mouchet’s EC horror comic-type story takes only 70 minutes to draw out a heavily foreshadowed tale of revenge, entrapment, retribution, sacrifice and tool-related splatter in the ominous woods. It benefits a lot from David’s faux-harmlessness as the schemer who seems to be playing cat and mouse with his prey but it capable of sudden spurts of violent action. It has a nice, rough-hewn woodsy look and some of the feel of 1970s American backwoods slashers improted into rural France.
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