This one comes from director Eli Craig, maker of the excellent "Tucker and Dale VS Evil", based on a book by Adam Cesare, and this kind of thing has been sorely missed. Once commonplace in the 2000s, this sort of niche "horror pisstake" made with love has a rather niche but dedicated audience. Unlike the bloody great "Tucker and Dale", the joke takes a while to settle: for the first 40 minutes or so it's a lame but rather well-made slasher movie very aware that it's lame, a sort of budget "Thanksgiving" (a good double bill to be fair) focusing on a bunch of dickish YouTube "prankster" kids Quinn (an excellently droll, extremely capable Katie Douglas in the first thing I've seen her in, good for her!) meets, and at first the joke is that none of the scares work on them because they are too jaded, which is in itself already pretty funny. But then the central joke about generational divides kicks in, and the red-herrings laid along the tracks are devoured in a conveyer belt of self-aware fun. Some of the jokes are swinging for the cheap seats (there's a good rotary phone gag), but the lowest hanging fruit is sometimes the most delicious: the final act is excellent fun, especially as the kills get better and Eli Craig brings some of that "Tucker and Dale" energy (a pitchfork kill in particular is good, one of the best and funniest since their review of "Rush" by Maneskin) to it all. Yet the movie is at its best when it is developing beyond the cliches and throwbacks of the genre: the characters are jaded to serial killer clowns, for example; and there is an absolutely fantastic reversal of that most crimson of fish in the character of "Rust" (Vincent Muller, also good in this), the hillbilly hunter. If you enjoy "Tucker and Dale VS Evil", "I Sell the Dead", "You're Next", or "Thanksgiving", you'll have fun with this.
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