Get your throttle twisted hard by the Canadian two-wheeled slaughter show Death Cycle, written by Dave McLeod and directed by Gabriel Carrer. Members of the ultra-rich Sullivan family have gathered together for an emergency meeting. Caterina “Cat” Sullivan (Sasha Ormand) explains to her cousin Ray (Justin Bott) that she and her brother, Eddy (Matt Daciw), were at a charity gala earlier in the evening. Cat and Eddy consumed a lot of liquor, and Eddy was driving them home. When Eddy hits two girls crossing an empty road, he gets out to inspect the carnage. When he sees that one of the victims is still alive, Eddy stomps on the girl’s head until her skull caved in. To the Sullivans’ dismay, the dead girl’s sister, Abby (Kristen Kaster), was still alive when Eddy and Cat left the scene.
Being an influential family, they pull a lot of strings to get Abby’s police statement discredited and the investigation dismissed. They seem to have gotten away with it until a killer in motorcycle gear murders Eddy and Ray. Cat calls her estranged brother, Luca (Matthew Ninaber), to look into the whole matter before she gets killed too. Luca follows Abby, who is still on crutches, around, spying on her running errands with the help of her friend, Ben (Wes Hill). When Luca contacts Abby, posing as a journalist writing about the incident, Abby confronts him for following her around. That is when Luca starts digging further into how members of his family were being killed by a two-wheeled murderer.
Death Cycle is good, but it gets in the way of itself too much to be great. The big missteps in Death Cycle all occur in the structure McLeod deployed for his screenplay. Instead of going by the meat and potatoes slasher framework, McLeod tries to get fancy and puts way too many forks on the plate. First off, we are given a very limited roster of suspects of who the killer is. It plays like a tennis game that uses a red herring for the ball. Suspicion bounces back and forth, with no real consequence as to who it ends up being. This skips the famous slasher element of not knowing which of your friends wants to kill you.
“Cat calls her estranged brother, Luca, to look into the whole matter before she gets killed too.”
Also, by having all the kill scenes told in flashback, all the tension and dread of the stalking is gone. You are just watching how dead people died, robbing the audience of much of the catharsis. It’s exactly the same structure Flanagan used in Fall Of The House Of Usher, and it doesn’t fit at all here. Death Cycle also shares that series theme of a corrupt rich family getting their comeuppance. This eat-the-rich theme would work great in a slasher, but by also using the same framing device with an interrogation with flashbacks, it crosses into blatant copying when it didn’t have to. Instead of celebrating the return of the motorcycle slasher, harkening back to Night School and Letzi’s Nightmare Beach, it comes off as a Flanagan rip-off.
Despite having its wings clipped by the script architecture, Death Cycle still manages to fly high in the slasher sky. This is due to Carrer’s excellent direction, where he delivers crisp visuals with inventive lighting, giving it a high-end look. The compositions are ghoulishly clever, and the editing is as tight as a drum. The metal score is truly the star of the show; it is a perfect example of what hard rock can bring to a motion picture. You will hear saber-tooth fangs closing down upon you from your speakers.
Death Cycle also has what the crowd is looking for: exceptional splatter. The gross-out FX are superior and truly disgusting, right from the opening gunshot wound to the face. The head stomping is completely vicious, as are the following courses of the dismemberment feast. There are several clever splatter stills here that could go into the scariest coffee table book ever. And, in the end, the success of the slasher is measured by how much blood is on the dipstick. If you have time to kill by watching people get killed, this will work. Despite its fancy flaws, Death Cycle is a two-wheeled thrill kill fest that runs on blood instead of petrol.
"…a two wheeled thrill kill fest that runs on blood instead of petrol."
