When I wrote about The Ritual recently, I talked about the pleasure of a good genre entry that plays directly into the tropes and patterns within said genre, rather than spending a bunch of energy trying to subvert or comment on itself. Sure, a Cabin in the Woods-type deconstruction can be a lot of fun, but sometimes you just want to see a horror film attack without any winking or meta-angle.
There’s a downside to that, though. If you play to formula but don’t really have anything especially new or fresh to add to your riff on familiar forms, the results can often be stagnant and unengaging. The instruments are all in tune, but the music’s not really flowing, you know?
Which brings us to The Ranger. Director and co-writer Jenn Wexler’s punk-infused slasher picture is handsomely shot, well-acted, and has plenty of strongly-constructed sequences of terror and violence. But there is so little to distinguish The Ranger from its slasher brethren that even only a day or so removed from seeing it, I’m having a hard time mustering up much energy about the film one way or the other.
The designated final girl of this one is Chelsea (the very charming Chloe Levine), who we know from the opening prologue experienced…something, in her uncle’s cabin as a child, something that brought her to the attention of a sinister park ranger (Jeremy Holm). Years later, Chloe is a pink-haired punk wandering the road with her boyfriend Garth (Granit Lahu) and another couple, Jerk (Jeremy Pope) and Abe (Bubba Weiler).
One night at a club, the cops bust things up and Chelsea is left literally holding the bag containing Garth’s drug supply. Cornered by a police officer, Chelsea watches as Garth stabs the cop and then steals a van belonging to one of the performing bands. Needing a place to lay low, the group heads up to Chelsea’s uncle’s cabin, discovering on the way that they have accidentally abducted Amber (Amanda Grace Benitez), a band groupie that was sleeping one off in the van, and who truly is not bothered by the sudden change in life direction.
The gang reaches the mountain where the cabin is and immediately set about being as obnoxious and intrusive as possible (more on that in a second), which instantly brings them to the attention to, and earns the ire of, The Ranger. It isn’t long before he starts doling out bloody punishment to those who violate the rules of nature.
Right at the top, The Ranger indulges in maybe my least favorite trope of slasher films: With the exception of our heroine, the designated victims are such absolute fucking irritants that you quickly become impatient for them to start getting chopped up. I understand why filmmakers indulge in this, but it’s an absolute chore to sit through every time. Garth especially is such a hateful little shit of a human being that every scene with him starts to grate as the movie wears along. At only an 80-minute runtime, Wexler keeps the slashing confined to the film’s last stretch, which means you get to watch a lot of these brats being obnoxious jackholes before they finally start dying.
When the slashing does start, it’s disappointingly pedantic. The kills are mostly well-executed (natch), but they’re all fairly boring redos of deaths that have been done earlier and better. Jason Voorhees had more variety in his repertoire, even on the Fridays when he phoned it in.
Not that Holm’s Ranger has all that much in common with Jason. In the biggest difference between The Ranger and its forerunners, rather than a silent, stalking menace, The Ranger never shuts up, instead chattering endlessly about nature and park regulations and safety standards while he goes about his work. Having a sociopathic murderer running down a list of federal guidelines while his victims scream and bleed is actually a solid idea, and there’s one scene that milks some great, grisly laughs out of the contrast.
But mostly The Ranger being as chatty as he is just makes you appreciate the choice to keep Jason and Michael and all their brethren silent. You gotta have a Robert Englund in your back-pocket to pull this move off, and Holm is not that. His chattiness undercuts whatever physical menace that his bearing possesses, but Holm also isn’t charming or playful enough to make the chattiness work. In an ideal world, The Ranger being endlessly upbeat, polite, and talkative would make his character all the more unsettling, like Kathy Bates in Misery or Harry Groening as The Mayor on Buffy. But the combination never really works here.
Wexler admirably does not go for the easy jokes surrounding either punks or the slasher subgenre, two of the more maligned and easily-mocked cultural relics of the 1980s. What humor is in the film arises from the characters themselves, and there are some genuine dark laughs wrung out of the escalating nightmare that these kids stumbled into. But none of that really overcomes the by-the-numbers journey through the slasher playbook.
But I’ll tell you what’s really frustrating: With very little time left on the clock, The Ranger suddenly turns into a very different movie, one that is far darker, weirder, and more interesting than the hour proceeding it. This home stretch features Holm’s best, strangest work in the movie, while Levine tears into her material with abandon. For a brief moment, you can see the movie The Ranger might have been if Wexler had dumped the punk-ass punks and dialed into the sick, complex connection between her heroine and villain much earlier in the film.
Die-hard slasher fans will surely have a fun time with The Ranger. The BUFF audience certainly ate it up. But given the gigantic back-catalogue of actual ‘80s slasher movies, this can’t help but feel like a copy of a copy, handsomely made but with little to recommend it on its own.