Scarred starts as the Hansen family, Father Frank (George Williams) Step Mother Heather (Maxine Bahns), Son Ben (Johnny Mack) plus Daughter Kim (Julian Berlin) & her friend Alex (Charity Shea) all make their way out deep into a forest where they plan on having a nice family bonding camping trip. They set up their tents & are about to settle down for the night when local park ranger Jesse (David Austin) pulls up on his quad bike, he then proceeds to tell them a scary story about an abused child who supposedly had her face cut off by her abusive Father & who now roams the forests in search of a new face. The Hansen's don't believe a word of it, Jesse rides off & they prepare to go to sleep for the night. However, Heather decides she needs to take a dump & while out in the forest on her own is attacked, killed & has her face sliced off by a badly scarred & disfigured girl (Hannah Leigh), it's not long before the rest of the Hansen's are attacked as she continues her quest for a new face...
Written, produced & directed by Jon Hoffman & Dave Rock, who also edited the thing, Scarred is total crap. The script is as dull as dishwater, it takes itself very seriously, it's incredibly predictable & unoriginal. If your going to make a teen slasher & you have no talent or a decent script at your disposal at least give the audience what they want, blood & boobs. Is that really such a hard equation? The character's are poor, the dialogue is poor, the whole set-up is rubbish & there's absolutely no pay-off whatsoever for sitting through this crap. Scarred is just a mindless slasher with a poor killer, stupid situations that are designed solely to separate the character's so they can be killed, virtually no exploitation elements & a lack of anything exciting going on. This really is pretty bad stuff. Towards the end of the film Ben has his leg injured & for the remaining 15 minutes constantly screams & whines, add that to the fact that the killer can't talk & just screams & growls the last 15 minutes of the film are highly irritating & painful to listen too, in fact I actually pressed the mute button on my remote control as it was giving me a headache as if the film was doing that already. The predictable ending sucks as well.
Directors Hoffman & Rock are obviously part of the growing crowd of people who think just because they have a digital camera they can make a horror film. To give them credit where it's due Scarred is a reasonably well made film & better than I had expected although there's a real dullness throughout, the cinematography, lighting & locations just don't evoke any sort of atmosphere or tension that a slasher film such as this needs to be effective. There's no build up of tension or any scares. The gore is of the tomato ketchup variety with only a half decent scene at the end when someone has their face sliced off & the killer tries it on (shades of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) & Leatherface?). There is no nudity at all either.
With a supposed budget of a bout $200,000 Scarred is nowhere near as badly made as I was expecting & all things considered including it's lowly straight-to-video status it's fairly impressive, that still doesn't make up for the fact that it's complete crap though. The acting was OK although not brilliant.
Scarred brings nothing to a limited & already over crowed sub genre & there are far better examples out there, you really shouldn't be wasting good money on this.
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