A group of strangers who have committed mortal sins board a Dutch tour bus, unaware that they are being driven to their doom.
As previously seen in James Whale's Frankenstein and Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness, a ramshackle windmill makes a great setting for a horror film: an ominous, shadowy sentinel, blades swooping through the air, the creaking and grinding of the internal mechanism seemingly bringing the building to life. It's a shame, then, that The Windmill Massacre doesn't make more of its eerie titular structure, the windmill merely somewhere for the film's killer to store his victim's bodies.
Most of the action takes place on the Dutch tour bus out of Amsterdam, in the woods surrounding the spot where the bus breaks down, or in the derelict church where the passengers seek refuge for the night, all of which is spooky and atmospheric enough, but I sure wish they had used the windmill to its full potential: no-one gets chewed up in the building's cogs, no-one is ground by its mill-stone, no-one is knocked for six by the whirling sails, and no-one falls to their death from the top.
Still, even though the windmill isn't fully utilised, this supernatural slasher still proves to be lots of fun thanks to a decent cast, slick direction from Nick Jongerius, and last, but by no means least, plenty of graphic gore. The no-nonsense script quickly brings its varied collection of strangers together for the slaughter, and proceeds to bump them off in imaginatively gruesome ways (severed legs, head stomping, evisceration, decapitation), pausing only for some backstory about the antagonist to explain what the hell is happening (old miller; pact with the devil; burnt to a crisp by villagers; now guardian of a gate to hell).
It's not groundbreaking stuff, but what it does it does well enough. 6.5/10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.
As previously seen in James Whale's Frankenstein and Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness, a ramshackle windmill makes a great setting for a horror film: an ominous, shadowy sentinel, blades swooping through the air, the creaking and grinding of the internal mechanism seemingly bringing the building to life. It's a shame, then, that The Windmill Massacre doesn't make more of its eerie titular structure, the windmill merely somewhere for the film's killer to store his victim's bodies.
Most of the action takes place on the Dutch tour bus out of Amsterdam, in the woods surrounding the spot where the bus breaks down, or in the derelict church where the passengers seek refuge for the night, all of which is spooky and atmospheric enough, but I sure wish they had used the windmill to its full potential: no-one gets chewed up in the building's cogs, no-one is ground by its mill-stone, no-one is knocked for six by the whirling sails, and no-one falls to their death from the top.
Still, even though the windmill isn't fully utilised, this supernatural slasher still proves to be lots of fun thanks to a decent cast, slick direction from Nick Jongerius, and last, but by no means least, plenty of graphic gore. The no-nonsense script quickly brings its varied collection of strangers together for the slaughter, and proceeds to bump them off in imaginatively gruesome ways (severed legs, head stomping, evisceration, decapitation), pausing only for some backstory about the antagonist to explain what the hell is happening (old miller; pact with the devil; burnt to a crisp by villagers; now guardian of a gate to hell).
It's not groundbreaking stuff, but what it does it does well enough. 6.5/10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.