Rabies

Director: Aharon Keshales & Navot Pupashado (2010)
Starring: Lior Ashkenazi, Ania Bukstein, Danny Geva
Find it: IMDB

The fuckin' all-over-the-place tale of a useless serial killer and the victim he keeps losing in the woods. When a gang of teenagers accidentally run over a man, they have no idea what they've just unleashed upon themselves. As they decide to split up, things go from bad to worse.

Rabies, a recent Israeli slasher movie, is not the film you may expect it to be. As a fairly large group of characters bumble about in the woods, it resembles an odd cross between Tucker and Dale vs Evil (except much better) and the Brit flick Severance (except slightly better). There's so much going on that it's hard to keep track of at times, with threats and antagonists developing every which way but loose. That's deliberately vague, because Rabies' various twists and turns deserve to be seen firsthand, rather than spoiled by some shithead on the Internet. It doesn't always make for the most coherent story, although it is far more fun and original than most slasher-in-the-woods movies of recent years. In the midst of it all, there's a subplot about a man whose main motive to escape is so as he can delete an offensive message from his estranged missus' answering machine.

Rabies is consistently useless, but when a film is so enjoyable, it's hard to care. Sure, its killer and his victims make a few n00b mistakes (what sort of psychopath ties a bound and gagged victim's hands in front?) but that's all part of the charm. In a script in which one character remarks to another that "watching a girl pee is the sexiest thing in the world" (put that on your Fetlife fetishes list and smoke it) and a dog chides its owner for smoking, there's simply too much to love. Its subtitle is 'A big slasher massacre'. What more do you want?