[Stag Night]
Plot:Follows a group of chums on a bachelor party excursion. When they take the subway, they witness the murder of a transit cop and are pursued through the tunnels by the killer or killers.

Cast:Breckin Meyer, Vinessa Shaw, Kip Pardue, Scott Adkins.

My Thoughts:"The Hills Have Eyes"...in the subway of all places!

Review:"Stag Night", written and directed by Peter A. Dowling, follows four guys who are out in New York City for a "Stag Night". Basically, a night to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of one of their ilk. While on the subway, they have a brief skirmish with some girls, which doesn't get physical but is more of a verbal drunkeness thing. At any rate, they accidentally get off at a subway station which was shutdown in the 70's.

While trying to find a way out, and a way back to the surface, they witness a transit cop being brutally butchered by what seems to be a deformed humanoid. Now, the group is on the run as the deformed killer and it's clan attempt to take the young people out one-by-one before they can get topside. If you are thinking to yourself that you've seen this before. You probably have. "Wrong Turn", "The Hills Have Eyes" (original and remake), yeah, this is another one of those horror films where deformed, inbred-looking freakshows, are stalking normal folk with a big itch to slaughter them.

This movie however manages to be well-acted though, which atleast gives it some merit. Kip Pardue (Wizard Of Gore 2008), Karl Geary (The Burrowers), and Breckin Meyer (Road Trip), all give pretty decent performances. And the new setting, which takes things from a dusty smalltown, a backwoods rural area, or a large maze of dark, underground subway tunnels, where these types of people usually reside...to a maze of underground subway tunnels, helps the film keep a strong element of intrigue, eerieness, and a decent creep factor.

Which is exactly what this film needed to stay afloat because personally, I am sick and tired of all these inbred cannibal movies set in the south, or nowhere middle american U.S.A. This movie however, by changing the scenery, manages to atleast be watchable. The villains in the film are also kept hidden most of the time, which is a classic genre rule to make your movie monsters work for you. Not showing them too much, or keeping them hidden in the shadows, even when they strike and attack, always works as a tactic because it makes you wanna see what these people look like.

So what sets this group of cannibals apart from previous cannibal clans in previous horror films? Well, not much. There's the obligatory scene where the group of young people on the run discover the cannibals stomping grounds, which has a ton of personal items from their previous kills like wallets and ID's strolled around. Ala the shack scene in "Wrong Turn". But what does set this group apart is that they have taken in stray dogs and use them to attack and sniff out their human prey. So that nasty little new element manages to make the villains all the more menacing, dangerous, and deadly.

It also makes it that much harder for the prey to escape. And the maze of underground subway tunnels certainly do not help. As a New Yorker myself, I would imagine being lost in the cavernous subway tunnels beneath the streets at night would be a bad situation on it's own. But when you throw in a group of inbred-hermit types with a taste for human flesh, who are in hot pursuit, it makes that situation ten times worse. This movie has some pretty twisted and gory death scenes, and blood and gore is certainly not a factor here when it comes to lack thereof.

This movie has a lot of it, but spaces it out for the entire duration of the 90 minute film. Rather than packing all the really grissly parts into the first 20 minutes of the last 20 minutes. It's a really well-paced and well-extended picture. My only gripe with "Stag Night" would be that the characters aren't really likeable or interesting in the least.

Sure, the girls seem innocent enough, and one of the guys is getting married, so you'd hate to see someone become a widow before they ven walk down the aisle, but because the characters weren't written too well beyond the one-dimensional A-typical twenty-somethings, it's hard to feel any sadness or sorrow for them. Even as they're systematically dropped one by one by their tormentors. But beyond that, "Stag Night" is a slasher film which is worth seeing atleast once.

Positives:The dark, cavernous, maze-like structure of the New York City underground subway system added a cool change of scenery to what would've otherwise been, a typical killer inbred-cannibal film. The deaths are bloody, gory, and twisted. And the ending, mostly the final scene, is really shocking and surprising.

Negatives:The characters are too one-dimensional to garner any sympathy from the viewer on any levels beyond the basic ones.

Overall:Three stars out of four.





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