Crazy Nina goes skipping down the road at night, singing “mama’s going to buy you a mocking bird” and scoffing chocolate till she comes across a group of guys and gals skinny-dipping in a nearby lake. While spying on her brother Jacob Wilson (Robert Cleaner) getting hot and heavy with his girlfriend, Nina is approached by two leery youths who, unimpressed by her offer of chocolate, lure her into the woods. Shortly after that, a shovel-wielding maniac erupts out of the woods and hacks Jacob’s girlfriend to pieces. Witnessing the murder is bosomy blonde teenage TV reporter Sabrina Myers (Vanessa Vee), unable to intervene since she and boyfriend Matt are frantically screwing in the back seat of his car. While Sabrina turns sleuth, to the annoyance of her police chief father (Mike Vega), a fresh batch of horny, fun-loving teenagers arrive in the small-town Austrian holiday resort and fall prey to the shovel psycho.
This Austrian, micro-budget tribute to early Eighties slasher films is plagued with so many problems you don’t know where to begin. From being shot on a continually out of focus camcorder, to the enthusiastic but woefully inept Austrian cast who spout cod-American dialogue in their thick Teutonic accents, everything by all logic ought to add up to an unwatchable catastrophe. And yet somehow Silent Bloodnight is so shoddy and silly it crosses the line from bad to oddly endearing. There is something curiously charming about co-writer/directors Elmar Weihsmann and Stefan Peczalt’s desire to evoke all the clichés of the slasher genre in such low-rent fashion, and the ramshackle but good-natured experience becomes somewhat akin to watching a home movie made by your horror-loving best friend.
Weihsmann and Peczalt produce a handful of fairly suspenseful sequences, including the idiotic boyfriend whose jokey attempt to drive away from his girl backfires when they’re both slaughtered by the killer, or the swimmer who happens upon a severed head in the lake. Of course the ridiculous still outweighs the sublime by a fair margin, especially given how instead of a hockey-masked maniac our killer(s) sport outfits ranging from a farmer’s hat and denim dungarees ensemble to a bed sheet. Yes, that’s right, a bed sheet. Moments to cherish: the scene where Matt is so busy spanking Sabrina (!) he doesn’t notice the killer sneaking behind them; the easily distracted actor playing Police Chief Myers’ deputy who delivers all his lines straight to actress Vanessa Vee’s chest; the genre’s first death by jar of bees; the directors cross-cutting between Sabrina’s flight from the killer and a gratuitous sex scene set to the rhythm of a reggae beat; the revenge scheme that makes no sense since none of the so-called witnesses being bumped off remember anything about the crime.
Making the experience slightly more bearable is voluptuous Vanessa Vee, who resembles a toothsome Austrian Melissa George, as the woman who does all her investigative reporting in a skimpy string-bikini. Vee fails to deliver a single convincing line-reading (“Daddy, der vaitress vas allergic to bees!”) but like the filmmakers scores points for almost childlike enthusiasm plus a penchant for quoting Sherlock Holmes. In a bikini.
