Loon

Director - Brandon Tobatto (Blood for Blood)
Starring - Ryan Gray (Blood for Blood), John Nieman (Natural Disasters), and Trevor Moates
Release Date - 2014
Genre - Horror
Tagline - "He's just a little out of his mind"
Format - Streaming (online screener)

Rating (out of 5):

     The modern slasher has been steadily on the rise and it has been leaving a bloody mark on the indie world.  These indie slashers are popping up here and there with a good portion of them being extremely entertaining while others end up being a steaming pile.  Sometime last year I became friends on Facebook with a producer who was currently working on a slasher titled Loon.  I was doing a little looking on Facebook and I found the page for the film.  The poster reminded me a lot of the slasher flicks I grew up on.  This brought in a wave of nostalgia and had me excited to see the finished product.  Sadly, the film was not scheduled to be released until the middle of 2014 so I had to wait..and wait..and wait.  However, last month that same producer reached out to me to review the film and I gratefully accepted. 

     The film opens with a brother and sister going in an "abandoned house."  I say "abandoned house" because it is clearly a small shed built just for the movie.  While looking inside they find a picture of a small dog.  Moments later a giant man wearing a clown mask appears and chases them off.  The two kids move away and return some years later and they are now teenagers.  They meet up with some friends and decide to venture out to the old house.  They cross paths with an elderly woman who warns them about going out there.  The teenaged youth do not take her warning seriously and venture out there anyway.  They search through the house until a few of them decide they have had enough and head off to smoke pot.  That is when the clown-faced killer strikes again.  He starts hacking his way through the group of teens before a desk-jocky cop intervenes and shoots the man before sustaining injuries of his own.  He awakens in the hospital and starts doing some research where he learns who the man is and that he is not dead.
     To pull of an 80s throwback slasher you have to make a character that could rival any slasher icon and toss him, or her, into a story that fits the character. That is what makes slashers so damn fun...aside from all the killing.  Sadly, Loon skipped on most of this.  The acting in this one is a little on the bad side.  The cast really showed their love for film but lacked experience.  This made most of the scenes hard to watch.  The story for this one would have been fun but it felt like it had more than one story going at once.  We had the teenagers in the shack with a killer story going along the cop's story and the old woman and the mentally disturbed man in the woods.  The film just felt pieced together and did not flow that well.  Finally, the film does have some brutal kills but most are taken off camera where they lose their effectiveness.  The special effects are not that great either but the camera tricks helped cover them up.  With all that being said, the cinematography is beautiful.  This is easily one of the beautifully shot films I have seen at my short time writing reviews.  Overall, Loon is a valiant shot as the slasher but does fall short.  Though the film is flawed it does deserve at least one shot.