The Caretaker
The Caretaker starts on Halloween as several college friends gets ready to go to an organized dance. Well that’s what Sonya (Jennifer Freeman), Chole (Victoria Vande Vegte) & the delicious Ella (Kira Verrastro) think but pranksters Snail (James Immekus), Topher (Andrew St. John) & Ricky (Diego J. Torres) have other ideas & decide to hire out a limo to take them all to a seemingly long abandoned house in the middle of a Grapefruit orchard, as you would. They have set up some fake scares to frighten the girls as they tell stories about insane killers but things go horribly wrong when a real insane killer show’s up & starts, well, killing them.Directed by Bryce Olsen this is pretty much a fairly straight forward teen slasher with the now obligatory Scream (1996) styled twist ending which is laughably bad here & makes little sense (why, if the killer was trying to protect his daughter at a party, did they kill that random guy at the start?). I suppose the main problems I had with The Caretaker was that it takes ages to get going, seriously this is one really slow moving film. The character’s are ridiculously good looking young cardboard cutout teens that usually populate these types of slasher films & the film is slow. All of the kills are off-screen which is an absolute no-no for a teen slasher, what’s the point of a teen slasher is there’s no pay-off in seeing these teens bumped off in a variety of gory ways? It’s slow too. The film takes itself too seriously & there are a couple of oddball character’s in the limo driver & Miss Perry who seem like they belong in a different film & did I already mention that the film is slow & virtually nothing happens for the first 70 odd minutes? The Caretaker feels like a cheap slow moving reenactment of the classic slasher Hell Night (1981) with the young teen party goers who end up at an old house with various legends as a set-up to scare some girls & then run into the real thing as it were only a lot less interesting, a lot slower & frankly not as good in any regard. A really dull, boring, bloodless & slow teen slasher that I am not sure who it will appeal to. Certainly not me.Aa I have already said there’s no gore at all, sure there’s a few dead bodies seen with some fake blood on them but no proper special effects or kill scenes which to me is odd since surely the whole point of a teen slasher are the kill scenes? The film just doesn’t satisfy on any level I’nm afraid & if it weren’t for some brief female nudity then surely The Caretaker would pass a ‘PG’ all day long. Another big problem I had with The Caretaker was the setting, the house used looks very middle-class, not that big & unimposing unlike the huge spooky cobweb strewn mansion from Hell Night for example. This boring location has no atmosphere at all & since the house is so small (only one storey) there’s not a whole lot of stalking going on.Filmed in San Marcos in California this has reasonable production values & at least it doesn’t look like it was shot on a camcorder, there’s none of that shaky look or ultra quick editing either which is nice but since the film is poor anyway that’s hardly a recommendation. The acting is alright, there’s a couple of ‘names’ in the cast including Jennifer Tilly & Judd Nelson who obviously needed the money.The Craetaker is a bloodless bore of a teen slasher with all the usual lows but none of the hoped for highs, there are dozens of much better teen slashers out there for anyone to be bothering with this.
