As Good As It Gets

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Well, here's a slasher film that comes from Sweden for a change - but don't expect it to be less dumb than any of its American counterparts. BLOOD TRACKS is a pretty lively film, with a huge death count, and lots of sex and cheap gore effects to appeal to the exploitation crowd. It has its failings - much of the climax takes place in the dark, stupidly, so that you can't see a damn thing, although this may be a fault of the print (along with the awful pan and scan job here in the UK) - but no more so than any other low budget horror yarn from the period. As well as this it's short, has a fast pacing and an interesting isolated setting in the form of the spooky mountains, which I always like the use of in a horror film (whether it be THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN or THE WEREWOLF AND THE YETI!).The cast members are even more dumb than usual, with a group of people wandering around an old building at night and deciding to split up to search for a missing companion - yeah, that's clever. The female cast members are all vain and unlikable, and so are most of the men for that matter. It doesn't help that the truly hideous fashions and hairstyles have also dated badly since the time in which this was made. The dialogue sounds cheesy and overdubbed, although I do commend the film-makers for getting maximum use out of a piece of stock footage of an avalanche.The murders - despite being noticeably cut here in the UK - are all varied and kept interesting, as well as being short and to the point - there's little of that stalk-and-slash nonsense here. Characters are impaled, axed, burnt, shot, and fall foul of deadly traps. Of course, it's all done in the nastiest way possible. You can't feel too sorry for the truly stupid cast members, though, who decide to have sex in their log cabin while a family of murderers lurk around outside and occasionally peek through windows. Speaking of the bad guys, you almost feel sorry for them towards the end of the film! For some reason their faces have been dipped in oatmeal by the look of it. Although cheap and cheesy, I did get a kick out of BLOOD TRACKS, due to it being a straightforward celebration of death with minimal dialogue and lots of violent action.

Back in the '50's, a woman murdered her husband and ran away to an abandoned chemical plant with her children, stuck living like sub-human hermits forever. Several decades later a Swedish rock music group has decided to travel to the small town nearby to film a music video near the old chemical plant, unaware of the eerie family hidden inside.Blood Tracks is a very underrated slasher film; it was never very popular but was a classic b-movie. The rock band performing in the film was called 'Easy Action'.I thought it was a little cheap, and the nude woman in the car scene was unnecessary, but nonetheless it was an entertaining film. The plant in the film is actually not abandoned; it's a fully functioning power station in Sweden.Great little slasher, check it out!

Easy Action were one of the first Swedish glam rock band and was formed in Stockholm in 1982.In 1983 they released their self-titled debut album and had a minor hit in Sweden with the song "We Go Rocking".In 1985 the band appeared in cheap survival horror "Blood Tracks" made by B-movie producer Mats-Helge Olsson.Easy Action broke up around 1986 after having recorded "That Makes One".If you are a fan of this cheesy glam rock group then check out "Blood Tracks" with its corny murderous family hiding in a a snow-swept disused factory.The family lives close to the cabin where 80s Swedish rock band 'Solid Gold'(Easy Action) have just arrived to film their latest smash video."Blood Tracks" is a dull horror movie with flat characters and almost zero gore.Still I have seen worse.5 blood tracks out of 10.

This rates alongside "Terror on Tour" and "Hard Rock Zombies" as one of the all-time worst heavy metal horror pictures made in the early to mid 80's. This time we've got a horrendous heavy metal hair band called Solid Gold -- they're a typically ghastly bunch of primping, posturing, totally charmless and colorless poser dorks with lots of eyeshadow, tight leather pants, and hideously poofy, billowy, overpermed coiffures -- who along with an entourage which includes a pompous a**hole director, a handful of ugly, scrawny, bitchy groupie slut girlfriends, and assorted nerdy crew members go to a remote snowy mountainside woodland area to shoot a music video. These dolts run across a family of grimy, hirsute, grotesquely malformed spotty-faced inbred savage cannibal creeps living in a dilapidated, booby trap-ridden abandoned factory who naturally proceed to systematically butcher the jerky interlopers who've disrupted their peaceful, albeit primitive cut off from the rest of civilization isolated existence.Mats Helge and Anna Wolf's by-the-numbers hackneyed script clearly rips off both "Raw Meat" and "The Hills Have Eyes," but sorely lacks the depth and substance that made those two superior fright features such potently effective chillers. Instead the luckless viewer has to contend with grossly unappealing characters, folks who do such idiotic things as stupidly poke around dark areas by themselves so they can be easy prey for the cannibals, awful dialogue ("I'm gonna freeze my t**s off!"), drab direction which miserably fails to bring any style or vigor to the generic body count premise, stiff acting from an insipid no-name cast, bland cinematography, zero tension or suspense, an objectionable "have sex and die" theme ("Hey, you ever do it in the snow?"), a dreadfully dated and thuddingly redundant head-bangin' score, slack pacing, and an irritatingly open-ended conclusion. Only some decent gore make-up, the fact that several groupie sluts take their clothes off, the gorgeous Swedish countryside, and a fairly lively burst of frantic last reel carnage offers a little relief from the overall shoddiness of this stupendously lackluster clinker.