Have a Nice Weekend

HAVE A NICE WEEKEND is one of those very independent American movies that might have been released to a single theater in Arkansas for three days before burrowing itself into the ground, only to be exhumed years later by a rinky-dink video distributor. Once you manage to obtain a copy of this obscure film, you'll have no trouble understanding why it has been banished to the netherworld of forgotten cinema...it's because it kind of sucks.

Although it's pitched as a horror/slasher story, this is actually more along the lines of an underdeveloped Agatha Christie-style mystery. A group of nondescript characters are brought together on a small private island. Murders take place, characters side-glance each other suspiciously, and...does this sound familiar?

Not only is the film working with stale trappings, it doesn't even deliver a substantial quantity of bloodshed...this is a tame, timid, unfurnished wipe-out, devoid of estimable qualities besides having a nice-sounding music score. The flatly written characters are played with understandable disinterest, and the film dog-paddles toward an anti-climatic dud of a resolve. It's pretty bewildering that three writers were necessary in preparing this nothingburger, and that one of them was the director of the almost brilliant INSERTS, which was released the same year.

All said, this might be of minor interest to the most sworn archaeologists of proto-slasher cinema. It won't be such a nice weekend for anyone else. 3/10.