The basic plot of Camp Slaughter revolves around a group of young people who go for a weekend at a house in the woods that happens to be next to a castle occupied by a degenerate family with a history of mental illness. Murder ensues. Sound familiar?

As a basic horror film, the movie succeeds on most levels. There is some gore but it is not overdone. There is brief nudity but not gratuitous. There are several nice looking video effects and some blue screen work that are revealed in the DVD extras.

The plotline is a bit thin when it comes to explaining who the odd family is and why they are behaving in such a strange fashion and it leaves a lot of unanswered questions about them. Without the documentary on the disc, which reveals much of the story background, I would have been left in the dark about the basic premise of the story.

Even so, the movie is quite enjoyable since the acting is excellent, the photography is creative and the editing is well done. Particularly good were Annika Marklund as Karen, Christian Magdu as Adrian, Karin Bertling as Constance, and Fred Anderson as the overweight, long-suffering Fluffy. This is a most impressive effort by Martin Munthe and company, and probably belongs on the Microcinema list of best films.

Besides the lack of story background, my only other complaint about this film is that the set lighting and post-processing leave many scenes so dark that some of the action cannot be clearly seen. I ran a video configuration program on my LCD television to make sure it was set up properly and even put the DVD in my computer to watch it there - same results everywhere I tried it. Also, the documentary extras on the disc are plenty bright so I could only conclude that the scenes were made intentionally dark to create a moody atmosphere. The movie has a lot of production values that are obscured by the low light conditions. This is disappointing since the movie is otherwise one of the best micro-cinema efforts I have had the pleasure to watch.

The film was shot using a Sony PD150P and an Optex 16×9 converter. It was post-processed using Magic Bullet, Digital Film Lab and a few After Effects adjustments. The entire dialog track was post-synched and they did a very good job. If you get a chance to see this film (which is in English), note that the cast are speaking Swedish in many of the behind-the-scenes extras on the disc but there are English sub-titles available.

This film needs to be reprocessed to increase the luminance (brightness) to make it viewable on the average television set, and I’m sure the producer would then find a distributor eager to take it on!

No rabbits were harmed during the production of this film… I hope.

Three and a half stars.