REVIEW: ‘CADAVER’ WASN’T EVEN WORTH A LAUGH

LIAM EASLEY, ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT DIRECTOR

Halloween is certainly a busy time for streaming services like Netflix, as the company has already churned out several horror movies this October. On Oct. 22, Norwegian filmmaker Jarand Herdal’s “Cadaver” was unleashed, and it was pretty much just as bad as the other films Netflix has spat at us recently.

After a nuclear disaster destroyed a Norwegian city, a woman named Leonora, her husband Jacob and her daughter Alice discovered a dinner theater event happening at a local hotel. They went for the food, and they found themselves in for a very non-conventional performance that revolved around the audience. After a while, they started to question how much of it was really a performance as the audience members quickly started to disappear.

Let’s take a few steps back real quick. In the middle of a nuclear fallout, instead of evacuating a heavily radioactive site, the local inhabitants decided to attend a dinner show. Not only did this play exist, but it was actually an unnecessarily elaborate mechanism to kill people (which isn’t a spoiler because you’d have to be brainless not to see that one coming). The whole thing was basically a more discreet version of “The Wizard of Gore” with a Cold War touch.

Further, I failed to see why this movie was called “Cadaver.” Is a cadaver not a corpse that medical students study? Maybe the Norwegian word and original name of the movie “kadaver” bears some other meaning. But if they meant “corpse,” well, there were a lot of corpses in this movie. Which corpse was so significant that they named the movie after it? No one will ever know because this was just one example of the movie’s terrible writing.

“Cadaver” could have been better. Its plot, while needlessly intricate, was still the appropriate level of logiclessness for a mediocre horror film. However, the characters were scripted in such a way that it was obvious that their blatant, and at times inhuman, stupidity existed only to accelerate the plot. It was because of this and many other forced elements that “Cadaver” failed to be good.

There were also a lot of plot holes in this movie, but I’m not going to go into them because like Herdal, I, too, am a lazy writer.

This movie was an uninteresting waste of resources that was created by a man who thought it would be super cool because of its seemingly “crazy” twist. Don’t be fooled – there were no twists in this severely predictable movie. I would suggest steering clear of this title – it would faster produce a sigh than a scream.

If after reading this review you are still going to watch this movie, watch it in the original Norwegian with subtitles. The dubbed-over English sounds like everyone got vocal lessons from Tommy Wiseau.