A class of psychology students venture out to their ambitious professor’s winter retreat for a weekend in “Bumfuck, Michigan” as part of a mysterious experiment. A subjective camera prowls around the woods while a killer in a parka and gloves garrottes, beheads and axes almost the entire group by the 20 minute mark, assisted by the fact that the women wander around solo in the middle of the night as if SCREAM never happened. Subsequently, a fresh set of horny young folks arrive, not seeming too bothered about finding a sliced off nipple (!) in the snow (“This is so fake!”) and destined for a similar fate.

   Initially, this is a straight-forward old-school slasher movie, albeit with slightly more subversive characterizations than the norm : the men are largely doltish, and prove inadequate to the sexually confident, even predatory women. (Don’t worry, there are bare breasts, too, as well as an aborted threesome featuring two hot girls). The effective wintry backdrop and high body count are, however, weakened by a truly awful music score, lame attempts at humor, poor dialogue (eg. “that bloodsucker killed out friends!”) and extremely drippy relationship stuff in between kills.

   Almost inevitably, the movie has a trite twist that turns it into a shaggy-dog slasher movie a la APRIL FOOL’S DAY. The movie-altering climactic reveal leads to a circular ending whose origins lie in a film made over six decades ago (namely, DEAD OF NIGHT), and is all too familiar in the post-SIXTH SENSE cinematic universe. The best thing about this watchable but entirely disposable film is an admittedly bravura key-hole eye-gouging with a fleeting Fulci-esque close-up shot of ocular removal.