Terror Trips – Film Review

Six friends start a business providing guided tours to the shooting locations of the world’s most famous horror films, until they discover the one spot where the terror is real.

The saddest thing about Jeff Seemann‘s Terror Trips is that it’s easy to tell it was entirely made from a place of love for the horror genre. There is so much heart, soul, passion, and care injected into the film to the point where it’s legitimately upsetting knowing what unfolds throughout the course of the movie.

Long story short, Terror Trips is one of the most boring and uneventful horror films of the year. It runs at an extremely brisk eighty-seven minutes including credits, and yet so much of the film focuses on this young group of friends travelling around to various filming locations.

It’s part of the movie’s story, but they drag it on for far too long. It takes about forty minutes or more for something remotely “creepy” to happen in the script. It’s interesting to see what unfolds throughout the last stretch of the film, but it’s impossible to shake the feeling that it’s all too little too late.

This film definitely would have benefited from a higher budget as well, because so much of the film look as though they had to skimp on some genuinely important elements. This is a slasher film, and yet whenever somebody dies, it’s always off-camera.

Sometimes, off-camera kills can be effective, but other times, it’s difficult to brush it off because after all, we’re watching a horror movie. We want to see these kills with our own two eyes. The film definitely would have been ten times more entertaining had the filmmakers secured the proper budget that would have allowed them to show some legitimately brutal kills.

The villains in the film are actually quite believable and realistic for the most part, despite the fact that they don’t really do a whole lot. They’re not shown too often, but when they are, they can be quite effective. The main group of friends are all likeable people as well.

And, amazingly, they’re all smart. There are few things more annoying in horror films than a group of characters who make the dumbest decisions imaginable. Here, that’s not the case. In fact, one truly brilliant part about this film’s script is that, oftentimes we will see somebody make a smart decision, and quote a horror film to show that they’re not dumb.

There’s one incredible scene in which one of the many villains lay supposedly dead on the ground. But, for one of our protagonists, that’s not enough to convince him they’re actually dead. He pulls out a scalpel and stabs them right in the neck, before saying “Zombieland, rule number two. Double tap.”

Terror Trips had the potential to be a brilliant and engaging horror film, but it instead falls flat due to a majorly boring script that waits far too long to get to the nitty gritty.