For four decades, we have scratched the ticket of 1980s nostalgia so thoroughly that the visual language of the decade and the exact nature of what we are nostalgic for is now indeterminate. We have now produced more works of nostalgia for the 1980s than we have original works from the 1980s to compare them to. It’s hard, then, to take Butchers Bluff at its logline and determine anything at all about it: a modern slasher film in the style of the 1980s. If you really want to separate your horror film from the crowded market you’d have to pitch something more like: a modern slasher film with no influence whatsoever from the 1980s.
Butchers Bluff isn’t lying. It’s a modern slasher film in the style of the 1980s. What happens in it is that a group of college students come to a small town in Texas to film their thesis, a documentary about the recent rash of Hogman killings. The Hogman is a classicly drawn slasher villain sporting a hand-sewn pig mask. Rather than defining a main character, the film captures the crew more neutrally as an ensemble, so you cannot really determine anything like a Final Girl concept, or who should and shouldn’t die, which makes the film both more curious and less focused as it holds no anchor.
With a two hour runtime and a bag of known tricks we’ve seen before, Butchers Bluff eventually wears out its welcome. While fine on a technical level, made with an understanding of the tropes and beats of the slasher genre, because the film does not find much of a point of view, it becomes harder the longer it runs to stick with its very traditional outcomes.
There are minor peaks and valleys. Little bits of weirdness with the off-kilter townsfolk stand out as highlights. It is a film with these small moments where it’s the film it could be and mostly otherwise feels like filler in-between these moments of eccentricity and common kill sequences.
Butchers Bluff plays it down the middle. It’s not full of surprises but is cozy and comforting in that it fits a common mold that we all know. Because there are now more horror movies that are nostalgic of the 1980s than there are good horror movies from the 1980s to pull from, this path has long felt like a creative cul-de-sac, a once-noble return to the basics now feels like a circular dead-end, like we continue taking the same route and ending up in the same place, but no longer have much to say for the journey.