Schlitter: Evil in the Woods (2024)

"Like a SAW film if John Kramer was a French Lumberjack"

Pierre Mouchet's highly entertaining, gory, revenge-driven horror thriller gets a deserved UK release on Digital from Signature Entertainment.

When he was a boy, Lucas was witness to his brutal lumberjack father accidentally running over Lucas' best friend Matthieu. Years later he is summoned back to the family home after a fire has destroyed it and two charred corpses were found within. Matthieu's father never found out how the boy died and he seems overly willing to help Lucas and his friends. Is he as friendly as he seems? Is he actually wheelchair-bound? And doesn't he seem to have an unnatural penchant for designing complex animal traps?

The title smacks of comedy but schlitting apparently refers to the lumberjack practice of shifting logs using a sledge. That said, while SCHLITTER is played dead serious, if you're the kind of person who can chuckle at the cheekily outrageous excesses of a SAW film this is going to be right up your alley. In fact while SAW has Jigsaw, Schlitter's villain could perhaps be nicknamed Bandsaw.

If there's one quibble to be had it's that the ending is a little abrupt and could have done with a bit more wit and a little less grimness, but seeing as this is modern French horror we're talking about here, this is still the lightest and most entertaining genre piece to come out of the country for many years. A real treat. Let's have a trailer:

SCHLITTER: EVIL IN THE WOODS is out on Digital from Signature Entertainment on Monday 26th August 2024