Written and Directed by Brendan Devane
Starring Stephanie Barkley, Marqus Bobesich, Wayne Charles Barker
In theaters March 5, and digitally March 9

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

I’m a sucker for the slasher genre. I always have been. What makes it so appealing is its cynical nature–not in outlook, but in the craft of storytelling itself–that it strips away all things unnecessary, things like “story” and “characters” and boils the horror genre down into a pure essence of itself. The slasher, then, is a template that is endlessly variable, in possibility and in quality. The subgenre hits the amazing, genuine brilliant highs of Halloween, a movie with the barest of plots, but is so effective in its design and payoff that its genius can’t be denied. And then there are the legion of imitators that have followed, sinking to some unfathomable lows, embracing sexism, racism and every other negative-ism people are capable of. 

A decent slasher hasn’t been made in some time. The Canyonlands harkens back to a simpler time of slashers, one that understands horror can be fun, not a slog through torture, misery and cynicism. The Canyonlands wears its heart and its influences on its sleeve. It isn’t interested in the nihilism of, “all people are bad,” though it's not naive enough to believe that people aren’t capable of horror themselves, and sometimes the scariest things that happen have happened in real life, and are caused and perpetuated by people. 

Stephanie Barkley stars as Lauren, a river guide in Utah, tasked with babysitting a group of contest winners. This rafting trip goes through a territory she vowed never to enter again after a bad experience that left someone permanently disabled and almost claimed her own life. She agrees, although she makes her objection clean. She does not want to go. She has been plagued by nightmares and it feels wrong to her. It feels like a bad omen. 

The contest winners, at first, seem like an easy and cheap shot at “Millennial” tropes (one is an Instagram influencer, one is a steroid-addled bro, one is a pothead, etc., etc.) but I think the movie’s real aim is to have the sweeping, broad strokes of characterization used to paint movies like Friday the 13th. They venture down the river, into the mouth of horror, and settle into a campsite for the night where the usual night of horrors we expect are waiting for them. There is a maniacal, ghost-like figure with a pickaxe waiting to get them alone before splitting skulls and hacking throats. 

Setting the film against the beautiful backdrop of the Utah countryside, filmed in Moab, Utah, gives the movie a reminiscent feel of Deliverance, where our heroes, outsiders, must battle against a faceless unknown, this time, albeit, with a supernatural twist. It also reminded me a bit of the unseen gem in the Slasher genre, The Final Terror. Both The Final Terror and The Canyonlands use the sub-genre as a starting point, but branch off and explore from there. 

The Canyonlands has a lot to say about America and its history of violence. It tries to be more than just a run-of-the-mill horror story, and its dedication to that is both its strength and its detriment. I think the movie works wonderfully in so many aspects, right up until the end. I think the movie shines when it splits its characters off into smaller groups, and they play off of each other’s energy. It’s charming when it’s having fun. One scene, in particular, really impressed me, where two of our characters face what they know is a worst case scenario, and you can feel the palpable horror in her voice when she tries, in vain, to diffuse the situation with the madman, saying she’s just lost, she needs his help. She knows it’s no use, but she has no other option but to try. 

I also admired the movie’s ability to stretch as much as it could with its modest budget. I’m going to sound like I’m dropping a massive hyperbole, but there is a scene where a character needs to climb up a cliff face and the way it achieves this is fantastic. Without the budget required to do this, the movie needed to use creative editing, and it does this masterfully. You never have a chance to think, wait, I never saw the character actually climb. It reminded me of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the editing allows Indiana Jones to somehow survive, whipped to a submarine, underwater, for a few hundred miles, without you, the viewer, ever thinking of it as ridiculous. The Canyonlands has a few moments where it is tasked with producing something outside of the realm of possibility and pulls this off through ingenious filmmaking techniques, rather than simply throwing money and shoddy special effects at it. 

The less said about the ending, the better. The mysteriousness of the plot worked up until that point, until the mystery surrounding the film needed to be explained. The mystery being sucked out of the movie also makes the ultimate denouement… silly. And the movie then proceeds to pull the ol’ switcheroo one too many times, to the point where the rug isn’t just pulled out from under you, it’s used to bludgeon you. 

The Canyonlands isn’t ruined by its ending. It’s simply unfortunate that its climax couldn’t live up to what had preceded it, which was a fun 1980s throwback, with some better-than-expected filmmaking and performances (seriously, Stephanie Barkley is great in this). The Canyonlands is still worth watching for slasher-deprived movie-watchers in need of a fix. 

This is Brendan Devane’s first feature and I think a first feature is as much of a resume as it is a movie itself. I think, based on this, he shows a lot of skill for building tension, and genuine admiration for his characters. I think he shows a lot of promise to do something extraordinary.