I must admit I was taken aback by this film’s title. Said film claimed to be a throwback to the slasher films of the 1980s. I was wondering what kind of slasher Steve Goltz and Kevin Sommerfield had produced, so I gave it a watch. Teddy is a well-crafted, glossy, killer in the woods movie with capable actors. Showcasing grade A production and fine direction, I could easily see this short being developed into a successful feature.

The film lacks in original content though, and offers no new twists to the genre. I did not like the killer. An emo-reject loner with a teddy bear who kills rowdy college kids is not scary to me. His style is fashioned after Michael Myers. He wears a ski mask, appears behind his victims, and never utters a word. I do not understand how carrying around a teddy bear, in and of itself is supposed to scare people.

The story is about four college kids out for a booze-out camping trip. Muscle-bound, and therefore shirtless, Clay, runs over an old man while driving intoxicated. The mostly unfazed group leave the corpse in a ditch and keep going. Teddy, watches from a distance, planning revenge I suppose. It’s not established if the old man was his uncle or granddad. You could probably expect what follows. Clay bangs his hot girlfriend in a tent and the group is picked off one by one, leaving a sole survivor. One of the campers appears to be homosexual and is sodomized with a pole in comical fashion. All the kills look good but nothing really shocks you. A little more depravity or maybe a gratuitous boob shot would have been well appreciated.

I admit that making a short film (12 minutes) look this good was not easy. I would have liked Teddy to be dressed up in a ragged bear costume with a blood-soaked muzzle. But that was probably not what these guys had in mind. At the end of the day, Teddy was a fair slasher, with a good looking cast and excellent production.

- Jorge Antonio Lopez