The Zero Boys

It’s refreshing to see a horror movie knee deep in the slasher movie era try to break from convention. Lord knows, the decade was full of dull, carbon copy garbage like The Mutilator and Final Exam. But you can also stray too far from the template and strip away the essentials, and then what do you have? You have The Zero Boys. A troupe of champion paintballers take their girlfriends out for some trucking and partying in the woods. They also happen to have real guns, and have seen horror movies. When the signals start popping up that there’s sinister doings afoot, The Zero Boys don’t make the mistakes you normally see. All the stupid mistakes you see most teenagers do, this over avoids. They stay in groups, they arm themselves, they watch each other’s backs. It’s smart. It’s also TOO smart. It spends so much time building up the characters, it doesn’t want to kill them off, so we get dead bodies of people we’ve never met popping up to satiate the body count. But we don’t see the kills, so the movie still lacks the one thing a slasher is built around: kills. And while the movie eschews hulking, masked monsters, Joe Estevez dressed like Mr. Rogers does not cut an imposing profile. But worst of all is the movie just drags a lot. You never get those bursts of adrenaline from the stalk-and-kill moments of other slashers, so it’s just stalking and evading, and that gets tedious. 90 minutes of it is TOO tedious. It’s a curiosity, and certainly better than a lot of the rote Friday/Halloween clones there were in the 80’s. But if you’re making a slasher and you’re hell bent on subverting tropes, the one trope you kinda HAVE to include is right in the genre name. Otherwise, you’ve just got people running around a forest. Tag isn’t scary.