[yasr_overall_rating]
Seven friends head to the Connemara wilderness in Galway, Ireland, for a weekend break to celebrate the first year anniversary of the death of a close friend. While there, they discover a beaten and bloodied male who warns them of three masked men who attacked him and took his girlfriend. As they make their way back, they quickly realize that they are not alone.
I have to give director Stephen Patrick Kenny kudos for making an Irish horror film. Before I left Ireland back in 1994 to move to the U.S., I had desperately wanted to make a horror film that would take place in the Dublin mountains and involve a group of friends who are stalked by a masked killer. Why? Because I grew up watching those kinds of scary movies and they had a great influence on me. Also, up to that point, nobody in Ireland had made one. Granted, originality would not have been a highlight as it would have ripped off every conceivable horror film with a similar plot, from “Friday the 13th” and “The Burning” to “Sleepaway Camp” and “Don’t Go in the Woods.” With “The Pigman Murders” however, while the above-mentioned theme is very much prevalent, it is rooted more in the tone of “The Blair Witch Project” and any other found-footage movie.
There were many who despised “Blair Witch” but it spawned the found-footage genre and there have been very few movies since that have come close to recreating the sheer terror and justifiable scares that film encapsulated. And what’s more, you never actually saw anything, everything was implied and/or heard off-screen. “The Pigman Murders” tries desperately to recreate that atmosphere but sadly, it fails on almost every level.
A group of friends led by Paulie (Mark Hutchinson), decide on the one year anniversary of the death of one of their closest friends, Brendan, to travel into the Connemara wilderness where they used to go camping. Paulie has hired a professional cameraman, Stefan (Marius Puodziunas), to film everything so that each friend can take time talking to the camera, reminiscing about old times so that when the trip is all over and done with, he can send the tape to Brendan’s family, as a sort of remembrance. Since graduating college, Paulie and the rest of his friends have all gone their separate ways but they reunite for this one weekend, in commemoration of Brendan’s death.
The weekend starts off innocently enough as the lads make their way deep into the wilderness but when they encounter a battered and bloodied man, half-naked and screaming maniacally, about three men wearing pig masks who tried to kill him and who took his girlfriend, the guys must decide on a course of action. They quickly realize that two of their group has disappeared and worried that they might have been taken, they set out in hopes of finding their friends but as darkness falls, one by one, they mysteriously disappear until only Paulie and Stefan are left. Scared and panic-stricken, the two men must devise a strategy that will safely take them back to civilization, away from their nightmarish discovery.
While the plot is most certainly unoriginal, and what movie nowadays is wholly authentic, it’s in the film’s presentation where the movie quickly grinds to a halt. Naturally, as the friends have a professional cameraman recording their every move for posterity, this is how we experience their lives and, ultimately, their deaths. As the movie begins, we get the obligatory camera glitches in the tape, insinuating that the footage may have been damaged along the way but these technical defects continue throughout the whole film and become an annoyance rather than an occasional legitimate effect. Adding this application every couple of seconds takes the viewer out of the movie and it becomes a stumbling block more than anything else.
The film’s lead actor, Mark Hutchinson, is given the most screen time and is genuinely likable and enthusiastic as the character of Paulie. His sadness when talking about his deceased friend feels authentic and you hope, as the movie progresses, that he will make it out alive. While the other actors are fine in their respective roles, they are really only in the film as fodder for the masked murderers. And therein lies the film’s other setback. We meet the masked men through a series of quick cutaways but they are never given any sort of backstory as to why they kill without explanation. Even the motives of Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers were clarified, in some cases, very briefly but it was enough to let the audience know who they were and why they killed. The antagonists here are masked men who apparently roam the Irish wilderness, seeking out random backpackers with the sole purpose of killing them, for no apparent reason.
Towards the end of the movie, as darkness falls, the screen goes completely black and borrowing directly from “The Blair Witch Project,” we hear the panic and hysteria of some of the friends as they are being butchered while others try to comprehend exactly what is going on around them. The film tries to create a disturbing and hellish scene, one destitute of vision but the end result feels more like a poorly planned attempt than a convincing and credible narrative.
Available now on DVD & Video On Demand
