[Spiker]
Plot:A nightmare come to life, the Spiker is a massive pink-eyed albino and a maniac killing machine whose physical endurance borders on the fantastic. He escapes from an asylum and returns to the small town he terrorized years before, where he slashed his victims to pieces with railroad spikes and buried the bodies under the train tracks outside of town. When a group of local teens decide to camp out at an abandoned house, they are attacked by the Spiker and discover a web of terrible secrets hidden there.

Cast:Carson Grant, Ginger Kroll, Josh Folan, Lou Martini Jr., David 'Shark' Fralick, Frank Zagarino, Elizabeth Giordano, Giselle Rodriguez, Michael J. Hein, Matthew Jared, Michael Fedele, Adam Shonkwiler, Linda Johnson.

My Thoughts:The Spiker is uh, very...white.

Review:"The Spiker" is another B slasher movie which recently arrived on DVD. The film tells the story of an albino serial kilelr named The Spiker, aptly named that is. Who murdered 27 people over a 5 year period using railroad spikes as his weapon of choice. He then buried most of them underneath the railroad tracks. And sometimes, more and more victims are accidentally dug up and attributed to his body count. Now, he's imprisoned. Until a judge decides that he can be rehabilitated. So they are ordered to transfer him to a clinic via a boat.

He of course escapes during the transfer after killing a few of the unlucky sob's assigned to overseeing his transfer, and then escapes into the water. The cops think he's dead because well, between the water temperatures in the winter, and the fact that where he dived was far away from land...there's no way he could've possibly survived the swim. But they forgot that this is a B slasher film, and the killer ALWAYS survives like..EVERYTHING.

Hence the spiker emerges from the waters without even the slightest wrinkle in his prison jumpsuit, thwacks some random guy, steals his railroad spikes...and prepares to go on a new killing spree. He finds the perfect target to be a group of kids who visit one of their friends relatives cabin in the woods to have some fun. The cabin however holds alot of secrets connected to one of the girls family members, and that relative has a deep connection to the spiker.

Now, they must fight to survive long enough so they can unravel the mystery before the spiker, well....busts a spike in their asses so to speak. "The Spiker" could have been a really good B slasher film. But it does some things very wrong that kill it's chances. For one, the spiker is an intimidating force, he's large, twisted looking, albino, and a vicious killer. But he looked alot cooler in his orange prison jumpsuit. For some reason, the writer has the spiker grab a coat before he arrives at the cabin to slaughter the unsuspecting teens.

And this isn't one of those cool-looking black leather coats either, it's kind of like a "Highlander" Mccloud-lookin coat. And it just doesn't make any sense why he snags a coat because he's a slasher, and slashers coat or not, are never discovered by their victims because their victims are too oblivious, dumb, drunk, or high to notice them even lurking in the bushes with a giant railroad spike. So you're thinking maybe he grabbed the coat because he was gonna get cold during the night?

Well if that's the case, then how'd he manage to make a swim for land in zero-degree temperatured waters, and emerge without flinching? Looking past that, there's also lots of other stupidity that's rampant in this film. The teens, while not as annoying and tedious as your average slasher film teenagers...do have their "ugh" moments. Like for example, the girls are all cheerleaders, yet one of them is also a goth practitioner of witchcraft, and does seances and stuff.

A major contradiction considering the goths who dabble in talking with spirits, rarely if at all pull double duty as members of the high school cheerleading squad. I'm sure the writer thought it'd be a break from the norm to have a character so diverse, but the character is not only terrible for the reasons I just listed, but then there's the seance thing. How many times do seances, which these kids hold to get into contact with some of the spiker's victims...lead to big trouble?

Probably 100% of the time if you're keeping score at home. And as if the kids don't have enough problems when the title character decides to make his move and starts picking them off one by one...then there's that wayward spirit called up by the seance who holds a family lineage connection to the lead girl in the film, and by the way..did I mention the lead girl is psychic? Yes..like Jazelle in "Jeepers Creepers"...and Minx in "Jeepers Creepers 2" ...this girl has "the gift".

A gift so great that she still, despite being able to see the future cannot prevent her friends from becoming corpses at the hands of the spiker, who it's revealed later on is just a big softee who has a thing for girls who play the piano and isn't as cold-hearted as one would think. The revelation of his motives for killing is just laughable. And as if the thing with the coat didn't kill his on-screen mystique enough, the answer to why he kills pretty much shreds that mystique to pieces.

Then there's the ending, which makes no sense whatsoever and just felt like a cop out rather than a period at the end of the overall sentence. "The Spiker" does contain a few good deaths, oh wait...I mean a few good deaths as in when the spiker uses his railroad spikes to actually kill someone.

Which is only about 70% of the time. And even when he does he most tosses them with skilled-precision instead of getting up close and personal, which is something a hulking killer should do when he practically dwarfs his victims in size and strength. "The Spiker" is a low-budget slasher with alot of potential, but then again potential only gets you half way to the dance. You need to be able to execute, and this film doesn't.

Positives:A few good deaths sprinkled throughout the movie, good-looking women.

Negatives:The spiker isn't handled very well by the writer, the seance plot arc could've been overwritten as something more original, the spikers overall motive is just pathetic, and the ending is terrible.

Overall:One and a half out of four stars.





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