Berserker (1987)

Plot
Six young adults camping in the woods tell each other stories of the Viking berserkers, who would dress in the fur of slain bears and wear their snouts as masks. Then something big and hairy begins to kill them off one-by-one. Is a huge grizzly bear responsible or is it a berserker?

Review
Well the clue is in the title before you even think that the film will attempt to pull the rug from under you. Promising way more carnage than it delivers, Berserker is a rather feeble slasher film which should have been a lot better given the nature of the killer that the teenagers are up against. Every time I think of the word berserker, I instantly think back to the cheesy WWF wrestler from the early 90s who dressed up in fur and shouted "huss, huss" all throughout his matches. Seeing him chopping teenagers up in the woods would easily be more entertaining that what we get here. Even by the low standards that the slasher genre lives by, this is weak stuff and shouldn't even be classed as a slasher due to it's ridiculously low body count.

Despite it's intriguing plot, the film runs like clockwork and once you see the stereotypical teenagers head off to the woods, you know that you've been here before and they've simply replaced the generic masked killer with a Nordic Viking warrior. We are never really given much of the berserker to chew on either despite being the star of the show as the title suggests. We are given a healthy dose of the legend in the obligatory camp fire scene, explaining more about the berserkers and what they used to do but we never see the berserker, well...go berserk. He just stalks people and jumps out at them like any other slasher in a mask would do. He doesn't look crazy or even scary when he is finally revealed at the end of the film. I honestly didn't see the point in showing us the bear continually walking around the woods and trying to make us believe that there is no berserker. I mean the title of this film is Berserker not Bear so only a complete retard would think for one moment that it is actually the bear killing everyone. Having said that, during the kill scenes it's really hard to see who or what is doing the killing. We see a bear claw but it could be either the bear or the berserker wearing bear skin. The continual use of dry ice to crank up the tension with a bit of fake fog is a bit annoying and overdone too. Of course with both a bear and berserker being loose in the woods, there is a showdown between the two to prove to everyone that there was an actual berserker loose in the woods. The fight is ridiculous as the stunt guy in the berserker outfit wrestles a stunt guy in a bear suit. The inevitable reveal of just who the berserker was comes as a sort of Scooby Doo moment where the only other person in the entire film apart from the teenagers is revealed to be the killer. Quite why the person changes into this killing machine is not explained but the film is over by that point so we don't care.