Ah, the 1980s, when everyone with a camera and a barely coherent script was lensing slashers. With all this groundswell, it was only natural that this mania would extend to Europe, which is why we have this Swedish sausage product--I AM CURIOUS it ain't. As others have noted, it's pretty standard stuff: a group of folks (Swedish Hair Metal band and their groupies/video tramps, along with a retinue of stylists/makeup people/cameramen) descend on a location (a cabin in a snowy mountain region, adjacent to a condemned factory) ostensibly to film a music video. The trouble starts when the director wants to use the factory as a backdrop for said video. A fortuitous avalanche strands the group at the location. A feral, homicidal family resides in the factory. It isn't long before various members of the party wander into said factory at met their various, grisly demises.
BLOOD TRACKS is not the worst I've seen in slashers from this era (the second golden era--1984-just before SCREAM debuted), but it does have some flaws that lessen its impact. The nonsensical prologue in which we are given the origins of the murderous family doesn't make sense and could have been left off altogether. Clearly, this trope borrowed from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE/THE HILLS HAVE EYES and should have followed those films leads of just presenting the family cold, with no explanations. Another problem with the film is that, once we get inside the factory, it's so bloody dark you can barely see what's happening. This could just be the way the film was shot, so there may not be any way of correcting, such as remastering, high def, etc. If this could be remedied, it should be. The cast seems to be either British or American, or the film makers may be resorting to the Italian trick of giving native actors prosaic American-sounding names. The acting is OK, but these are not characters given to thoughtful, analytic discourse, so it works. A real rock group, Easy Action, was hired to portray the band, but they appear in the film mostly as a pretext, and the members don't get much dialogue. No real reason is given for the family's feral state (the prologue doesn't shed any clues to this) so they just are the way they are. There are a few PG-13 sex scenes, but the nudity is minimal. The action, once it gets started, is self-propelled and doesn't let up, which makes the less than 90-minute runtime bearable.
If you've seen all the slashers from this era and are looking for a forgotten entry, this one will do the trick.
