What do you get if you take a low-budget Friday the 13th knockoff, add some cop drama and ghosts, and take away all the fun and explanations that make any kind of sense? Well, I’m not sure…but “The Whistler” has to be pretty close
“The Whistler” is a cookie-cutter horror tale, where a massive lumberjack and his young waitress lover are murdered during a botched robbery. Thus, it’s no surprise when the huge log-splitter comes back from the dead to split the heads of those who murdered him and his beloved. Though I think “The Whistler” hits low water mark where, as our lead thug is about to rape the massive lumberjack’s lover, one of his cohorts whines “I don’t like this, Jemon! This is different!”
This is different. Uh huh. Even worse, it becomes plain that Grey is only trying to create an inner-city version of the legendary Jason Voorhees. He’s enormous, he’s masked, he’s perennially silent (without so much as homage to Jason’s appearances to the classic ch-ch-ch, ah-ah-ah aspiration), he favors blades, he has a tendency to appear and disappear as needed and without logical or rational (or canonical) explanation.
And in his mad rush to spawn the urban Jason Voorhees, Grey never bothers to explain where exactly the undead lumberjack got his new axes, or his studded facemask. At least “Friday the 13th” showed how Jason got his mask in the…third, was it?…installment.
There is something to be said for “The Whistler”, how it injects cop drama into its otherwise complete bastardization, but for the most part, it’s hard to get around that whole Jason knockoff
The ending features a rather insulting twist that makes little or no sense. Oh, and the disgusting revelation that there will be more of these. I hope not, frankly–this one was garbage enough
All in all, “The Whistler” is a poorly conceived knockoff of an American institution. It’s offensive for the sheer concept of it all, not to mention the shoddy way in which it was handled.
