The slasher formula is fixed yet, paradoxically, also flexible. You know the drill: people are going to be dispatched one by one in grisly fashion, until the murderer is eventually unmasked, apprehended or eliminated in such a way that the underlying issues remain only partially resolved and there is always room for more serial killing in a sequel or indeed in film series. Yet within these established parameters, any number of variations is possible – and while The R.I.P. Man is instantly recognisable as a slasher, its wildcard is the killer himself, revealed right from the opening scene, but coming with a mix of motivations as madly messy as his modus operandi.
(Fictive) Tarkers Valley – in (real) Sussex – is unhappily accommodating a deranged pattern killer. As Alden Pick (Owen Llewelyn) – bald-faced rather than masked, and mute only because of a medical condition – works his way through the local student body, his acts come deeply overdetermined: each of his victims first receives a text with the ominous message “R.I.P.”, with their birth- and death-dates, and with a tooth emoticon (🦷); each kill is prefaced by the appearance of a wind-up chattering teeth toy; and Alden does not just murder his prey, but mutilates their mouths with a power drill, taking a tooth as a trophy. This dental fixation relates to the congenital anodontia which has left Alden, as one character (James Wingate) puts it, “all gums” – although that condition hardly explains the psychopathic tendencies that saw him institutionalised for years, nor accounts for his obsession with the specific ritual practices of the (entirely invented) historic Italian clan of fellow sufferers known as ‘Dentes’ (from the Latin for ‘teeth’).
Meanwhile, the letters R.I.P. that Alden has emblazoned across the mouthguard – which he wears, presumably, in his everyday life as well as when he is killing – appear to be placed there simultaneously as both threat and improbable consolation to his horrified victims, and as a bizarre evocation of the initials of his hopeless psychiatrist Ray Igor Petersen (Stewart James Barham). And while Alden is certainly collecting strangers’ teeth to fill his own mouth, his choice of co-ed targets has been determined by an elaborate, somewhat scattergun revenge scheme related to his abandonment in childhood.
So stochastic are Alden’s actions that both his victims, and the investigating police, struggle to comprehend the rapidly unfolding massacre. “This serious tone doesn’t suit you,” Donnie Slattery (Maximus Polling) – one of several affluent, near interchangeable students in the film – will tell his parents Clive (Paul Coster)and Deborah (Charlotte Marshall) when they sit him down to fill in the gaps of a family history that connects them all to Alden. Donnie’s words serve as metacommentary in a film where, for all the overt ludicrousness of the killer’s appearance and methodology, everyone else plays their part with an incongruous earnestness that somehow just makes everything funnier. Po-faced to perfection, neither Donnie and his friends nor indeed the police officers seem ever to laugh or crack jokes or say anything that is not gravely functional, so that it is left to Alden alone to smile toothlessly and have some fun with all his stalking and deathtraps.
The R.I.P. Man is not without its problems. The screenplay is perfunctory and full of artless exposition dumps, the briefly sketched characters never hint at any sense of groundedness or greater depth, and the uneven sound mix at times feels a casualty of the film’s low budget. Yet it comes with an unhinged quality – and a tonal wrongness – that practically shout cult. “Listen, some things are better left unseen,” declares DC Stewart Townsend (played by the film’s director Jamie Langlands), in another piece of ironic metacommentary. Yet devotees of giallo-esque lighting, and hardened slasher fans looking for an outsider entry to their beloved genre or for a new, possibly iconic horror villain, may well disagree, and want to see every bloody, batshit detail with their eyes – and mouth – wide open.
strap: Driller killer: Jamie Langlands’ low-budget slasher introduces a new psycho-slaughterer, challenged no less dentally than mentally.
© Anton Bitel
