 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Cannibal Troll • Year: 2021 • Country: UK • Director: Scott Jeffrey, Rebecca Matthews • Main cast: Georgina Jane, Barbara Dabson, Nicole Nabi, Faith Kiggundu • Runtime: 84 minutes • Production company: Proportion Productions • TRAILER
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Cannibal Troll (2021) is one of those horror survival slashers that although doesn’t bring anything new in the panorama still can become an entertaining one hour and a half. The premise is probably something you have heard and seen before: a group of girls in their middle twenties (okay, one of them brings her mother, but don’t worry because they kill her off fast) go on a trip to the woods only to encounter themselves fighting for their lives when a strange creature quoted to be a troll is chasing and murdering them one by one. Add some variations to the story, some personal relations between the characters, some background side stories, and you get the full picture.
But although so far this sounds like a total display of unoriginality, which it is, the movie gets salvaged thanks to a dynamic direction and a good sense of the distribution of the action during the running time. The dialogs are not outstanding in any form, but the filmmakers managed to make them flow in a more natural way than many other films of these sorts we have seen before. Also, most of the actresses displayed a convincing performance, which helped to the overall sense of lack of interest something to hang on to.
In the technical aspects, most of the film was shot in the woods. Still, some nice camera work in some of the chasing scenes helps the audience to keep connected with the film. The typical shaky in-hand camera used to exhaustion in many other movies would have killed the mood here. But considering all the running up and down the forest of the characters, the scenes were carefully planned and executed.
In a conclusion, Cannibal Troll (2021) doesn’t bring anything new to the subgenre. Heavily influenced by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), most of the sequences could almost serve more like a copycat of those classic films than a homage. But, in a global sense, it is an entertaining flick for your spare time, which sometimes it is more than we can say of other titles out there.
RATE: 4/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt12176546
