After shutting down Slasherpool I haven't been in the mood for reviewing to be honest with you, but I just got back from the opening of Detour (aka Snarveien) and I just have to get this off my chest. Okay so most of you know that Norway is having a horror-boom right now thanks to Cold Prey and we all remember what happened after the horror-boom that Scream brought us back in the late 90s. Yes, that's right, every freaking horror script found great production values. This also seems to be the case with Norwegian horror films at the moment. Cold Prey was great, Cold Prey 2 was okay, Dead Snow was pretty decent, Hidden (Skjult) was also a pretty creepy story and even Manhunt (Rovdyr) had its moments of glory but Detour, wow, I'm struggling to find good qualities about this movie.

I'm sitting there in the cinema, excited for the latest Norwegian horror flick, which is said to be Norway’s answer to Hostel. It opens and all ready I'm excited, the opening credits are really cool and the shots of the Scandinavian woods are just beautiful. The movie opens with a young couple who are on their way to Sweden to buy cheap alcohol (yes, Norwegians do that a lot since alcohol is a lot cheaper in Sweden). On their way back they take a detour in order to avoid getting caught in customs. They are told by a cop standing in the middle of the road that they'll have to take another way due to a car accident further down the road. They follow his advice and head down another road instead which leads into the woods. After finding an unconscious girl in the middle of the forest the "horror" begins. They are now part of a live snuff-film and every move is being documented live online. The movie is about half in Swedish and half in Norwegian which makes it kind of confusing as it is a purely Norwegian horror movie (didn't even get a theatrical release in Sweden... yet, anyway but I doubt that it will).

Detour is not so much a Norwegian version of Hostel as it is a low-budget Norwegian Texas Chainsaw clone. In fact, it's pretty much what you would get if you'd put Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the remake), Untraceable and Zipperface (a low-budget DTV slasher flick) in a blender. It's really quite a poor slasher film and as I'm sitting there it just gets worse and worse up until the point where I almost left the cinema, but then suddenly something happened. It ended. After approximately 75 minutes the movie ended. It felt as if the production company had all of a sudden gone bankrupt and decided to throw something together because it was so rushed that it was ridiculous.

The acting is overall pretty awful and I don't have many good things to say about the directing either. Sure, it had one or two good scares and one suspenseful scene but it's not nearly enough to save this mess from potentially being the death of the Norwegian horror-boom as we know it. Had this been an American horror movie it would've been sent straight to DVD, most likely by some low-rent company as well. That's how bad this was. People were actually booing when the movie was over. As far as gore is concerned, it's pretty dry. The director said that he wanted to make a technological thriller, not a pure horror movie. Well there's nothing thriller about this movie, this is a pure horror movie of no value what-so-ever.

If you expect the same quality that you got from other recent Norwegian horror films, you're out of luck. Detour may look good technically but even an okay cinematographer couldn't save this mess from falling apart. Like most Norwegian newspapers said - it takes just a few too many detours and ends up in the middle of nowhere.