'Shredder' gives snowboarding mass-murderersa bad name

Shredder (2003)
Steve's Rating: 1 of 10 Stars
Starring: Scott Weinger, Lindsey McKeon, and Juleah Weikel
Director: Greg Huson
Rating: One of Ten Stars

Seven college-aged Beautiful People head to a bankrupt, closed ski resort for a weekend of illicit snowboarding, skiing, and fun. However, they find that they are not alone, but that an axe- and icicle-wielding maniac is killing them one by one.


"Shredder" is a movie that I'm sad is such an awful piece of trash. It could have been a really good film, as it's got a cast with more acting talent than I expected, and the set-up has lots of potential. But the raw material was squandered on a monumentally bad script and a weakly directed film.

The problems with "Shredder" are too numerous to mention, but the biggest are these:

Numerous plot-holes so large that the massive snowplow that the killer menaces the snowbunnies with could easily pass through them with room to spare; characters that behave in such a nonsensical a fashion in context of what unfolds on the screen that not only will you be scratching your head more than hiding your eyes, but you'll be wondering if anyone bothered to read the entire script before the film was released to the public; a cast of snowboarding jackasses so unlikeable that you'll WANT the masked killer to murder them all, and a film so boring and lacking in suspense that you desperately want him to kill them all faster; and camera work so pedestrian that it makes snowboarding and skiing look dull. (And, dammit, someone keep the idiot who who thought it was a neat effect to drop a few dozen frames in long shots of snowboarders and skiiers from ever getting into the editing room again. The first few times they did that, I thought my dvd player was acting up.)

Perhaps the only interesting thing about "Shredder" (aside from the decent actors trapped in an awful movie) is that it reaches Ed-Woodian levels of badness, but also grants Ed-Woodian levels of insight into the psyche of the writers. It's apparent that what passes for the script here was created by someone who hates snowboarders and ski bums as much as the story's insane killer: Virtually all the girls are sluts, while most of the guys are dope-smoking idiots who wouldn't know what do to with a woman if she begged them to hop in the sack with her. (The only two exceptions to this characterization of snowboarders are a pair who are outsiders, even as they are part of the clique.)