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Shredder
Today’s feature is the 2003 snowboarding-themed slasher movie, Shredder.
Shredder was directed and co-written by Greg Huson, whose only other notable credits are for editing a variety of Playboy documentaries. His co-writer for the film was Craig Donald Carlson, who apparently served as an electrician on the killer puppet movie Pinnochio’s Revenge.
The cinematographer for the film was Charles Schner, who was a camera operator on Carnosaur 3 and Captain America: Civil War, and worked on a variety of television shows including The Mentalist, My Name Is Earl, and American Horror Story.
The editor for Shredder was Andi Armaganian, who has done extensive cutting work on the television shows Arrow and Smallville.
The musical score for Shredder was provided by Alan Derian, who was composed music for a variety of low budget features, including Red Line, Beatdown, Beneath the Blue, and Eye of the Dolphin.
The team of producers for Shredder were Jerry P. Jacobs (Disaster Movie, Cyber Tracker), Geof Miller (DeepStar Six, House IV), and Rory Veal (Lovers Lane),
The effects work for the film was provided by the team of Jerry L. Buxbaum (The Kill Hole, Bullet), Mark Villalobos (Army of Darkness, The Mangler, The Prophecy), Minky Billups (Baby Geniuses, Mission Impossible: II), and Scott Billups (Barb Wire).
The cast for Shredder included Scott Eric Weinger (Aladdin), Lindsey McKeon (Saved By The Bell: The New Class), Billy O’Sullivan (The Van Dyke Show), Brad Hawkins (Boyhood), and Candace Moon (Lions For Lambs, Speed Demon).
Shredder was briefly released to theaters in parts of the northwestern United States, where snowboarding is a big hobby.
In Japan, there was apparently an attempt to market the film as a Friday the 13th sequel, going by the title of Jason Z, which was an aping of the 2001 hit Jason X.
The reception to Shredder was very negative: it currently holds a Rotten Tomatoes aggregated audience score of 24%, alongside an IMDb rating of 4.5.
Shredder is plagued with awful characters and dialogue from start to finish. There is a constant barrage of lines like “You are so killer!” and “Somebody kill me!,” and more utterances of the word “dude” than I have ever heard outside of The Big Lebowski. The characters are by and large immature brats of high class birth who aren’t identifiable in the slightest, and basically only exist to be “shredded.” By the end of the film, I hated snowboarders as much as the killer, and couldn’t help but pull for the masked skiier to finish off the bunch.
Shredder tries to ride the line between horror and comedy, presenting an assortment of red herrings and ludicrous character deaths. Personally, I got a slight chuckle out of the sheer silliness of the frozen corpse inside of a snowman and the snow angels made with killed snowboarders. However, most of the attempts at humor just don’t work in the slightest, and come off as either in poor taste or just extremely lazy. In a lot of ways, it bears similarities to Scream in how the characters are written with an awareness of slasher movie tropes, but without any sense of subtlety.
Overall, Shredder is a fairly generic slasher movie that clearly had aspirations of being more. As it is, though, there isn’t a whole lot to recommend here. Horror fans might enjoy it for the generic slasher that it is, but it certainly isn’t anything unique to go out of the way for.
Misan[trope]y 