What is In A Violent Nature, if not a bad shark movie in slasher form?
In A Violent Nature, aka “Jason Goes For A Walk”, is a Shudder Original, where the only originality on offer is the implacable fidelity to the killer’s point of view.
When a bunch of vacationing…teens? No, they all seem way too old to be teens. Millennials maybe? Whatever they are, there’s not a one of them that has a character bio longer than a single sentence. Anyway, when a group of irritating axe fodder come across a cheap Lizzy Duke necklace in the wreckage of a fire tower, they make the perfectly reasonable decision to help themselves to someone else’s property. Unfortunately, this magically resurrects unstoppable, mute killer Johnny (Ry Barrett) who sets out to slowly stalk the group. Like, really slowly. No – even slower than that.
While Chris Nash’s film does largely restrict the audience’s awareness to Johnny’s point of view, our actual point of view is that of a third person shooter where we’re playing a character who walks very, very ponderously around for extended periods of time. It might have made more thematic sense if the totemic object that raised Johnny from the dead wasn’t his mum’s tacky necklace but his Fitbit, because this is a crazed killer who likes to get his steps in. How The Proclaimers missed out on a needle drop in this I’ll never know.
It’s a little while before it becomes abundantly clear that In A Violent Nature is the slasher version of a bad shark movie. The performances might be just shy of adequate, but they get worse as it goes on. There’s a consistent self-consciousness to all the dialogue that feels more than a little staged and a little over-rehearsed. The practical effects and make-up are decent but kills are mid at best, with any innovation (one victim literally get pretzelled as her head is pulled through her torso) is undermined by the poor performances of the victims and a log-splitter splatter kill is so poorly filmed and edited it ends up slow enough that you’ll check your watch more than once before it’s done. But nothing – nothing – can top the moment when Johnny, in a scene no doubt intended to be the peak of terror, dons a vintage firefighting mask…that looks exactly like a steampunk Minion.
If you cut the scenes of one character or other tramping through the forest, this movie would be about half an hour long and even with those scenes (and the excruciatingly bad sound design that accompanies them) left in, the movie still needs a bizarrely tension-free ten minute car ride (and tediously drawn out bear attack story) tacked on the end to get it to a multiplex-worth 90 minutes.
A neat idea does not a good horror movie make, and In A Violent Nature isn’t a good movie. It’s not even a so-bad-it’s-good movie although it could have had a shot at being a pretty good comedy if they’d had the guts to do it. I think the only reason Shudder put this in cinemas is because they knew if anyone streamed it, they would have switched it off long before Johnny hits his 10,000 steps a day.
