The Zero Boys (1986)

 

Director: Nico Mastorakis

Screenplay: Nico Mastorakis

Cast: Daniel Hirsch as Steve Kerski; Kelli Maroney as Jamie; Nicole Rio as Sue; Tom Shell as Larry; Jared Moses as Rip; Crystal Carson as Trish

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

From Greek director Nico Mastorakis, The Zero Boys is about survival game enthusiasts. The opening is cool, a battle between war game enthusiasts with paintballs, even if one of the participants is disconcertedly in Nazi regalia, another inexplicably wandering the battlefield with a giant boa constrictor snake around his shoulders in the combat zone. The Zero Boys, the winners of this, intend to celebrate their win by going to the woodland to train and party with their girlfriends, having with them Jamie (Kelli Maroney), the woman won in the opening competition, not impressed by this herself and the Zero Boys themselves aware of the shitty circumstances are. Considering her boyfriend (the one in the Nazi regalia) put her on the line, everyone including their leader Steve (Daniel Hirsch) wants to make her participation more welcoming to sooth the awkwardness.

Since this is a horror film though, this is not a melodrama about the terrible nature of people, and their best virtues through team games and friendship, as a scream and the sight of a running woman is a warning even if it is dismissed by the prospect of an empty cabin they can have a party and stay within. This is, from this point, a pretty standard slasher film from this era, if with the distinction that this looks different from those of the early eighties as a later eighties one, from the lighting and the hairstyles. It is conventional, if with an advantage of these older films that there is no contrived back story that undercuts the creepiness of the unknown, as with finding a section of human vertebrae only to dismissed as a coyote, a bad sign of what is to come as a pure spectacle horror film.

That presents more menacing results in a conventional template, playing to the fear of rural Americana with the more sinister idea of the disposability one can find oneself in within pure isolated woodland with no one to call too, something more prominent at a time when technology was not readily available to communicate to the civilized world. The owners of the cabin are sociopaths and they reflect that Nico Mastorakis first made the notorious Video Nasty Island of Death (1976). It is a tamer film in comparison, surprisingly so, but there is still a head in a freezer, and a moment which reflects a nastier edge where the torment of a victim involves a plastic bag on her head. An obsession with technology is also clear with Mastorakis as, between Blind Date (1984) using video games, and com for Murder (2002) about the internet, there is a menacing here idea of video tape technology allowing one to record the murders one commit to watch them over and over, which of course Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) would be the most provocative take on in one of its most notorious scenes the same year of this. Among the countless films from the time, and following their narrative beats, here – involving Chekov’s taser – The Zero Boys is at least compelling is a slight thing.