Released: December 9, 2005
Director: John Landis
*****
Just how low can this "horror" anthology go? Pretty low, if Deer Woman has anything to say about it. Put simply, men are being mutilated by someone or something while they are in a state of arousal. These men are no longer recognizable, with hoof prints implying they were trampled to death by a deer. Enter a detective (Dwight Faraday, played by Brian Benben) who is on the outs with his force and the only one to believe in a half-woman, half-deer creature terrorizing the area.
And thus is the laughable story of Deer Woman. The whole idea behind horror, as far as I understand it, is to make the audience, well, scared. Show them something benign turning into deadly. Play on their fears, like dreams or the boogeyman in the dark. But a seemingly mythical half-woman, half-deer creature that stalks men for some reason we never really understand? What fear does that play up for the average man? Being killed because he's horny?
Maybe I'm too cynical or maybe the stories behind this series just aren't very good. The characters here are generic, stock people. The detective with the wacked out theory. The buddy cop who believes him "just because." The antagonistic cops. The exposition character who enters with information just in a nick of time. Why? To satisfy all the requirements of the genre. It's just plain silly, especially the visuals at the end of the film, which serve to destroy whatever horror there was in the first place.