Blades (1989)

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) There’s a long and strong tradition of horror comedies going for a parody of horrifying plot devices while trying to be funny about it. The trick, however, is making it funny—when that doesn’t work, you can be stuck in a film that doesn’t seem to do anything right. There is, notionally, something amusing about Blades—trying to transform Jaws into a golf-course horror film by way of an autonomous killer lawnmower. You can even see how using protagonists best known for being golf professionals would be somehow amusing. (Although, as a Canadian, my pick would be hockey players spending the summer on the links.)  But Blades simply and continually flubs the most elementary condition of horror comedies: it’s not funny, and it’s constantly pulling its punches as so not to be an extreme horror film. What remains isn’t much of a film. Coming from Troma, it’s surprisingly toothless and, well, safe: it’s as if writer-director Thomas R. Rondinella thought so much of the premise that he stopped putting in any effort after that. The result is a failure of execution built on a very thin foundation. A disappointment if you were expecting anything… which isn’t necessarily absurd considering the number of horror comedies that at least got a few smiles out of their audiences.