Party Hard Die Young (2018)

 This German slasher, Die letzte Party deines Lebens, from 2018 features an attractive cast portraying a graduating student class on vacay to a resort isle with plenty of neon-lit clubs and tourist bars. This is the kind of locale perfect for a traveling group to capture randy teens nearly adults drunk, high, and ready for sex. As a slasher, I think many fans of the genre might be disappointed. While there is a bit of gore (slit throat from broken glass, a liquor bottle forced down a mouth, a screwdriver stabbed into the back, a victim left to bleed in the middle of a club full of grooving youth), the violence quotient isn't particularly high and the camera cutaways reveal the lack-of-budget evidence. The mask is an alteration on a smiley face from a covering on the head of a teenage girl who is raped by two of the dicks among the student class on the isle trip...this obviously contributes a great deal to why the killer has chosen the specific class.

 I think because there are so many survivors by film's end, including the two rapists who suffer anal bottle abuse (shown out of sight when the camera cuts away to the lead final girl, played by Elisabeth Wabitsch), slasher fans will feel cheated. The film is as attractive as the many visitors to the resort (you will be hard-pressed to find any even average looking tourists), with a great deal of blue neon hue, among other candy colored lighting. The resort itself seems to aesthetically strive for a pop art presentation...rainbow aesthetic does pop off screen and the beach and resort, its clubs and bars, aim for a very arresting visual scheme that opposes the presence of a psychopath wanting to ruin the vacation of that select group of visitors, blamed for the suicide of a rape victim named Anna (Fanny Altenburger). How Anna is tied to the killer gives an explanation to the murders that is quite unsurprising and unoriginal. I think the film's main asset is the aforementioned captivating visual presentation because the slasher story itself, killer, and murders themselves just fail to really pop like the rainbow neon painting every scene. 2/5