Sometimes it can be most useful to analyze something small and seemingly insignificant like, for example, a film's title! My mother tongue isn't English, but I've always been impressed by the number of synonyms that exist in this language for practically every single word. Some of these synonyms are truly cool and powerful words. As an example, I love the word "unhinged". I never heard of that word until I watched the 1982 original film and found out, via the awesome website thesaurus.com that it's a synonym for insane, berserk, manic etc. It's now one of my favorite words, and I also happen to be one of the few people who thinks that the original "Unhinged" is a uniquely grim and massively underrated 80s slasher! That film, with its demented storyline and notable moments of nauseating gore, truly deserved to be named "Unhinged". This 2017 remake shamelessly copies the title, but the atmosphere, the violence, the characters and simply the film in general are not "unhinged". In fact, it's weak and unremarkable horror fodder with a dumb and totally implausible plot, spineless lead characters and a nearly unforgivable shortage of blood, savagery and overall weirdness. Four American girls take an enormous detour through the English countryside to go to the wedding of one of them. That's where the story goes wrong already. A bachelorette-party in the backwoods, seriously? Why would any girl want to drive through a completely unknown region where there's absolutely nothing to see? They are not lost, or at least not at first, but deliberately avoid the main roads. Why, exactly is that? They clearly never listened to any basic traveling safety advise or even watched a horror movie in their lives, because they are surprised when they run into crazy people. How they then handle their problems is, if possible, even more stupid and unbelievable. "Unhinged" features all the irritating clichés and predictable plot twists you can think of. These girls take the dumbest decisions imaginable (like not calling the police when their mobiles still have signal) and do the most idiotic things that even my 5-year-old wouldn't do (like running off into the woods after a banal argument). All this might have been acceptable in the early 80s, but not now. The killings are tame, bloodless and not at all unhinged. The performances are very poor and unconvincing, especially from Michelle Archer as the odd lady and Lorena Andrea & Becca Hirana as the supposed tough chicks. I'm sorry, but there's absolutely nothing to recommend here.

Unhinged is a remake of sorts of the 1982 'video nasty' of the same name, and, like the original movie, it's an extremely dull watch, suffering from a predictable script, pedestrian direction and weak acting (it's four protagonists—three British women and one Australian—struggling with their American accents),whilst also failing to deliver those two staples of the genre: gory kills and female nudity.

The film stars Kate Lister as American bride-to-be Melissa, who is travelling with her sister and two friends through the English countryside en route to her wedding. On a deserted back-road, the girls encounter a local loony who tries to attack them, but who winds up dead, brained with a rock by Melissa's sister Lisa (Lucy-Jane Quinlan). Rather than report the incident, the girls stash the body in the boot of their car and go on their merry way. Their plans go further awry when their car runs out of petrol and they are forced to accept the hospitality of Miss Perkins (Michelle Archer),sole occupier of a remote country cottage, until her gardener comes to visit in a couple of day's time. While they are waiting for help to arrive, the foursome try to dispose of the dead guy in their car, but find themselves being stalked and killed by a maniac in a wedding dress and a rubber mask.

A routine stalk 'n slash with too much stalk (and talk) and not nearly enough slash, Unhinged pads out the running time with lots of pointless guff: there's the lesbian relationship that adds nothing to the plot and provides zero gratuitous titillation; we get a spot of crap exposition as one of the girls finds a box of newspaper clippings that are intended to help explain the backstory, but which I found all the more confusing; and finally, we have the mystery of the disappearing body in the boot, which is intended to mislead the viewer into believing that the supposedly dead man is still alive and now seeking revenge. He's not. The real identity of the killer is far sillier.

2/10. I always thought that the prime purpose of a remake was to radically overhaul or improve upon the original. That's most definitely not the case here.

Four hot "American" girls travel across the English countryside only to be offered refuge by a strange spinster when they run into difficulties. Three of these actresses are English, the other an Aussie, none of them can do a convincing American accent so right from the off things are bad. The voice of the killer sounds like a demon from some cheesy 80's horror movie & there are many plot holes, it's pretty dumb at times. On the plus side the musical score is pretty creepy, there's some girl on girl action (brief) and a bit of torture porn thrown in. Overall it's a poor remake of a film that wasn't very good in the first place, but seek out the original instead.