In a Violent Nature 4K 2024 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

A group of students finds a pendant on a chain in the woods and, taking it, accidentally resurrects the unkillable maniac Johnny. He sets off in search of his treasure, and everyone who gets in his way will be killed.

Review 4K Movie

On Friday the 13th, a merry group of young people find a locket in the woods. They better not have taken it - because now the immortal killer Johnny the Lumberjack has awakened and is coming for them!

Undead director and screenwriter Chris Nash must be a very funny man. I see it this way - the man took the standard “Friday the 13th” framework (forest, lake, youth, immortal zombie-healthy masked man) and started randomly turning familiar clichés upside down. And then started flipping them backwards.

The main trick is that in a “slasher regular” we're always following the heroes being hunted by the villain. The heroes are right there in the light, we know who they are and what they're doing. And the villain pops up like a devil out of a snuffbox and crumbles them one by one. We know he's hiding, and we know he's going to kill, but we don't know who, and when, and how. Hence the suspense. But what's the villain doing in the woods between kills? Admiring the decomposing corpses of animals? Looking up at the sky? Walking aimlessly in the thicket?

“Undead” immediately overturns the laws of the genre and allows us to ‘play for the villain’ - ie, everywhere to go behind his back and watch as he moves from place to place, tracks down victims, kills, goes on. Pros - relatively new look (although in Jallo shooting murders from the first person - a fairly common method, but not the whole movie!) Cons - the very saspense disappears. Now we know exactly where the monster is hiding, because we are stuck behind his back! We don't know what method he will use, and our budget doppelganger Jason Voorhees named Johnny is quite inventive in his logging equipment - axes, hacksaws, traps, stones and even a strange device for horizontal splitting of firewood, which works on diesel.

It's worth admitting that after 10-20 minutes this move gets tiresome. In the old-fashioned 4:3 format, the wide back of the murderer takes up almost half the screen, and it's a bit boring to stare at it. Chris Nash solves this problem by increasing the degree of bloodiness. If the first murder is not shown to us at all (I thought that we have here a child rating), the further, the tougher - the creepy even by the standards of experienced fans of horror murder in the style of “yoga” you will remember for a long time. In the references Nash mentions Gus Van Sant's movies, and I remember very well how the hero's aimless wandering through the bushes in “The Last Days” pissed me off. He's even out of the frame for long stretches there. Johnny is more disciplined - we almost always see him.

But sometimes the director seems to forget about his own decision and switches to the point of view of the victims - here they sit in a circle by the fire, and here we follow the heroine in the woods. This causes double feelings: on the one hand - relief (finally we can connect to someone for whom we can worry), and on the other - disappointment (if you break the rules, then from the beginning to the end).

As if tired of wandering behind the maniac's back, the camera occasionally pans upwards, which gives a rather unusual point of view. In the end, I caught myself thinking that I wasn't watching a slasher or a bloody story, but an exercise in technique - how long can the director keep us in the antihero's focal point? From what point will he shoot the next murder? At what point will he close the camera's view to slowly replace the actor's body with a mannequin?

There's a beauty in all this technical exercise - you can sense that the authors love and understand the genre they're working in, and they play with the rules for the best of reasons - to avoid being like everyone else. In a way they succeeded - “Undead” is really worth remembering, but not for the sake of the sequel (which is quite possible), but for the sake of reproach to the rights holders of the “Friday the 13th” franchise, who can't share their profits. Look what the younger generation is doing while you're wasting your time. Sign your rights papers and make us a proper old-fashioned movie about a big guy in a hockey mask! Johnny's wearing some kind of minion mask from Ugly Me. It's embarrassing!