In 2017, cult director Ryûhei Kitamura offered a great installment for the TIFF Midnight Madness section, Downrange.The film is a rare genre mix that notablytakes the bare bones of a slasher and combines them with survival horror tropes for maximum tension and lots of bloody kills. Downrange starts with the most common slasher situation possible — a group of young people find themselves in a very wrong place at the wrong time. While carpooling, their car breaks down on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere. Soon, they realize it wasn’t an accident: a sniper is hiding somewhere nearby, waiting to take them out one by one. Even though the villain here doesn’t have a traditional slasher weapon in the form of a sharp object, this campy and very bloody Grand-Guignol still gives us familiar tropes — only to pull the rug from under the viewers’ feet in the final few minutes.
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