Ditch Boys – review

Directors: Louis Bellavia & Thomas Hatz

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

A mad scientist, a vampiric creation and a wood full of teen party goers. This should have been a fairly easy flick to get to at least a beer-goggle watchable state. Unfortunately, it made some mistakes that absolutely damaged that journey, I’m sorry to say. To be fair it is a directorial and writing debut for both of the directors and I’m sure with future projects they’ll build on this but for now, what went wrong?

rising

The film opens with Victor (Jonathan Hansen) getting a call he gets to the morgue where the mortician (Joshua Dowd) is creeping around the body of a large man. Victor has headed to another cadaver, that of his wife Karen (Alexandra Faye Sadeghian). Creepy mortician makes creepy comment. In Victor’s lab he injects Karen’s body with something. We see him, his back to the corpse, as she sits. We then flick to a man in a car, needing a poop. He spots a porta potty and uses it, something starts rocking it and he leaves – that something is on the roof and leaps at him…

Victor with Karen's body

We then get a montage of various people and here I’ll stop and cover the issues so far. The film is aimed at comedy and so the creepy mortician and the guy pooping are meant to be comedic… they weren’t really, at least for me. The kids we see in the credit montage are going to the party but this montage is pretty much all the character building we get and it really isn’t much. There isn’t even really that much to match them to slasher stereotypes and thus there is no connection later when they get to the party (and we see precious little of that). One of them, however, phones Lou (Adam Bramson).

stoned

Lou is a stoner and drug dealer, along with his pal Tom (Nicholas Scott), and they are our primary characters. In this scene we get Tom checking their stash and see a body in there that freaks him – it is Olivia (Teagan Sawyer), wearing makeup to get him. Then a cop comes in, Uncle Phil, and gets some drugs from them. None of this adds to the film particularly, though Phil does tell them to be careful in the woods. Generally the two bicker, and (along with a series of poop jokes and them getting stoned), this is all they do. They are both primary protagonists and comedy characters but they are not built beyond very basic stereotype and the comedy is… well, lame to be honest. They are not likable but, even then, we might care about their peril if the characters were more rounded.

turning

Keeping our attention on Lou and Tom, they head into the woods and then decide to smoke crack. This leads to a psychedelic montage with strange filter and song (and the details of the song appearing as though it is a music video). It was a brave choice and whilst it might not have worked in the flow, I appreciated what the filmmakers were trying to do. They then spot Karen in the woods and bee-line to her. Now we have already seen her appearing with blood on her face and know that Victor is freaked when he discovers she has gone to the store. Lou and Tom freak her out and she turns – veiny, eyes changed and a maw of sharp teeth. She chases them through the woods and they fall in a pit.

Karen bloodied

So, they spend the majority of the film down there, kept there by Victor (who gives them food and water but not assistance to escape the pit) in order to protect Karen’s secret until he realises it has all gone to far and gets them out and they team up with him to end the nightmare. Meanwhile we get Karen attacking folks – but we have no real connection to any of them – and also an extended flashback to Karen and Victor working together, falling in love and her death (in a robbery gone wrong). Whilst the flashback did build their characters much more than any others it also destroyed any pace in the film.

mirror moment

Did anything work well? Yes, the makeup effects around Karen were good and there was some good gore effects (though some body part prosthetics were better than others). However, the film didn’t concentrate on this enough to bolster the film and the issues with pacing, poor characterisation and the comedy missing (at least for me) undermined that positive element. As for Karen, we get some pseudo-scientific babble about her DNA mutating too quick to cure her but essentially she is a raised corpse, who is self-aware (when in human form hating the other side and revelling in slaughter in monster form), with sharp teeth and we do see her lick blood (whether she eats flesh, drinks blood or just kills isn’t explicitly clear). There is a mirror moment when she loses her reflection but it is a psychodrama moment rather than lack of reflection.

licking blood

I do hope that the filmmakers continue their journey. However, they would be as well avoiding comedy and thinking both about pacing and establishing characters at least to the point of the audience caring – even the cannon fodder. 3 out of 10 because I can see some nuggets that could be developed. The end of the film suggests that they have a sequel in mind.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK