Coming out in the golden age of low budget straight to DVD horror, 'Shredder' is as you would expect it to be. Yet, for some reason or another I had held out high hopes for this film based on the poster. A slasher set in a ski resort, how could that possibly fail? This has all the ingredients to make for a very entertaining horror, that some how manages to stumble at every hurdle. There is something about a snowy setting that no matter how bad the cinematography is, usually everything that plays out on screen usually looks pleasing to the eye. Some how this film manages to make even the most beautiful of set locations uncomfortable viewing. The only well produced scenes director Greg Huson manages to muster together is a few scenes featuring the group of central characters skiing and snowboarding. These scenes where remarkably entertaining, feeling like something from a Tony Hawks video game with punk music soundtrack to accompany it. I'm going to be honest, with a film like this, we are only her for one thing, decent kills and a half decent slasher to execute said kills. And although this film does somewhat deliver on the front, it just takes that little bit too long to get there. When we finally do get introduced to the killer, he/she is basically just a someone in an all black ski suit, which is serviceable enough but lacks in creativity. I also found the kills to be fairly average and disappointingly the majority of them are shown off screen, barring one or two. The couple of kills we do see are done quite well, featuring entirely practical effects and a creative use of makeup. It's just a shame we didn't get more of this. Considering the standard of the overall production I didn't quite find the cast to be as insufferable as you might expect. Granted, the writing department doesn't do them any favours but even with the terrible dialogue they have to work with, I found the majority of them to deliver it with a decent enough standard. The issue with their insufferable dialogue is that the first 40 minutes is spent on their character exposition and development as a group, it's all very uninteresting and quite frankly is extremely dull. I would be seriously hard pushed to tell you a single characters name or their connection to one another. It's early 2000s straight to DVD tripe like this that I'm actively trying to find at the moment. I grew up on movies like this and its very rare these days that I can find one that I've not only never seen but I also find enjoyable. 'Shredder' falls in to the category of unseen but certainly not onto the category of enjoyable. The killers reveal and motive makes very little sense and once I'd reached the closing moments, this film instantly made me regret that 1h 30 minutes of my time I had invested into it.
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