Berserker (1987)
"It's too late to run. There's no time to scream... Just close your eyes and pray to die."
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 that has been prowling the woods responsible or is it an ancient Viking berserker reincarnated into one of his descendants?
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 plodding slasher film which should have been a lot more exciting 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 have easily been more entertaining that what we get here. It was made in the late 80s when the limited creativity of the sub-genre had already been drained so don't expect any surprises; this is by-the-numbers and those numbers aren't high.
Despite its intriguing premise, the film runs like clockwork and once you see the stereotypical teenagers head off to the woods at this campsite, you know that you've been here before and they've simply replaced the generic masked killer with a Nordic Viking warrior. Think Sleepaway Camp, The Burning, Just Before Dawn, The Prey and, obviously, Friday the 13th. It’s almost as if the makers of Berserker thought that filming a campsite slasher would be a good idea but they just need to think of something unique instead of another guy in a mask. We are never really given much of the berserker to chew on despite being the star of the show. We are given a healthy dose of the legend in the obligatory campfire exposition scene, explaining more about the berserkers and what they used to do but we never see the berserker, well... go berserk. Once that campfire goes out, so does any chaos that we hoped would ensue. Berserkers were terrifying Viking warriors who dressed up in the fur of slain bears, work themselves up into a trance-like uncontrollable fury and then charge into battle seemingly with superhuman strength and courage. To face one berserker would be like facing ten or twenty men. Here, the berserker just slowly 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. Where is the high-octane energy and frenzied fury that they were known for? It’s such a disappointing waste of a cool premise.
Berserker’s glaring issue is that it literally doesn’t know what to do or where to go with its initial idea. This is solely down to writer-director Jefferson Richard and his ‘written in a day’ script. Forgetting the opening murder, there isn’t any more bloodshed until nearer the forty-minute mark, just smoking, drinking, having sex and inane bickering between the characters which makes you wonder why they’re friends with each other at all. Having such a small cast of characters really narrows down the threat because everyone appears to be safe for such a large swathe of the film. There’s no upping the ante in the risk stakes because nothing happens to anyone. I get that there needs to be exposition and build-up, but you need to make it pay off for the audience’s investment to be worthwhile. But there’s no chase sequence or final girl momentum heading into the climax and no final confrontation between the survivors and the berserker. When things start picking up pace, and I use that term loosely, Berserker pretty much ends.
The lack of any real berserker action - hell any sort of action - is a real shame because the story has the potential to be gory and violent. It doesn't even deliver on those counts though. There is very little gore but with a low body count, there's little chance for there to be any blood anyway. Four people are killed and two of those are within the first few minutes so you’re going to be holding on for a long time before you see any more violence. During the kill scenes, it's 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 (which brings me onto something I’ll address shortly). Berserker did have some trimming done to it by the BBFC when it was released over here, but the footage has since been reinstated and it makes little difference. The continual use of dry ice to crank up the tension with a bit of fake fog is a bit annoying and overdone too but there is at least some atmosphere in these night scenes, even if there’s nothing done with them aside from characters walking around in circles. The Utah woods also look fairly remote too which gives the characters a nice sense of distance from safety.
This brings me to the world's most obvious mystery. The film tries to string the audience along with the central question to build suspense: is the killer hunting these teens a huge grizzly bear? Or is it a human berserker? Dun, dun, dun. Cue surprised look during the finale. I mean the title of this film is Berserker not Bear so only a complete idiot would think for one moment that it is the bear killing everyone. It's like calling a film Dracula and then spending ninety solid minutes trying to make the audience guess if the mysterious nocturnal killer draining people's blood is a centuries-old vampire or just an aggressive stray dog that happens to be wandering around the castle. 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, it’s such a waste of time and effort which could have been used to work on the flimsy script. No one is buying this red herring.
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 to begin with and it wasn’t just a figment of the imagination. 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 is comes as a sort of Scooby Doo moment where one of the only two other people in the entire film apart from the teenagers is revealed to be the killer. Quite why the person changes into this killing machine isn’t fully explained but the film is over by that point so we don't care - there is something in the exposition scene at the beginning about berserkers’ spirits inhabiting their descendants when they’ve died in battle but the writers clearly gave up at this point. It’s such an unsatisfying conclusion to an unsatisfying film.
At least the film ups the ante on the sex quota, featuring a steamy sex scene in the woods. It's inter-cut with a scene of another girl being mauled by the bear so it's hardly erotic or sleazy but Beth Toussaint went on to play Tasha Yar's smoking hot sister on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Genre veteran George 'Buck' Flower gets more lines than usual but is saddled with a terrible Norwegian accent and we also get to see his hairy chest - not a pretty sight! He's not cast a homeless guy or bum in this one so he's pushing the boundaries of his usual range. Ironically enough, the biggest ‘star’ in the film appears to be ten-year-old Bart the bear, who would go on to appear alongside Hollywood juggernauts Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge.
Final Verdict
Berserker sounded great on paper and could have become a little slasher gem, but the lack of the berserker on-screen is disappointing, the bear doesn't have any need to be in here, and there are far too few characters and too many survivors for the titular character to come off as a credible threat. It’s slow-paced and aimless for most of its running time and is one to avoid unless you have a burning desire to see every 80s slasher film.
 |
Berserker Director(s): Jefferson Richard Writer(s): Jefferson Richard, Joseph Kaufman (story) Actor(s): Joseph Alan Johnson, Greg Dawson, Valerie Sheldon, Shannon Engemann, Beth Toussaint, Rodney Montague, Oscar Rowland, Beverly Rowland Duration: 79 mins |  |
|---|
