Fall Break

A fairly interminable slasher, Fall Break follows several friends as they head out to a waterfront condo to close the place up for the season – with carnage ensuing as said friends are individually knocked off by a crazed killer. It’s a standard yet workable premise that’s employed to consistently underwhelming effect by filmmakers Buddy Cooper and John Douglass, which is a shame, certainly, as Fall Break opens with a silly yet promising origin story for its maniacal killer and even boasts an unusually peppy (and thoroughly catchy) theme song. From there, though, Fall Break segues into an exceedingly tedious midsection that’s far too uneventful to even partially hold the viewer’s increasingly dwindling interest – with the lackluster atmosphere compounded by a uniformly awful assortment of performances. And although Cooper and Douglass offer up a series of appreciatively brutal kill sequences, Fall Break limps into a violent yet entirely uninvolving climax that ensures the whole thing finishes on a seriously lifeless and somewhat endless note.

* out of ****