Seeing as Black Rock was directed by Katie Aselton and co-written by her and Mark Duplass, one would think that it wouldn’t be your typical slasher/revenge flick. One would think that it would take some cues from the sorts of movies they’ve worked on before—the kind that focused on authenticity in character and improvisational acting. It turns out Black Rock is very much not a “Mumblecore” movie however, and is indeed just your typical revenge/slasher flick. Which is another way of saying that it’s pretty bad.
Our protagonists are a trio of women (Aselton, Lake Bell, and Kate Bosworth) who have decided to boat off to a remote, wooded island in order to have a weekend of camping wherein they can work out their interpersonal issues and bond. Once on the island, however, they very unexpectedly meet up with a trio of hunters (Will Bouvier, Jay Paulson, and Anslem Richardson) who seem to be affable enough chaps at first, but who turn out to be psychotic misogynists in the end. Sexual improprieties, murders, and revenge scenarios follow. It’s basically Deliverance by way of I Spit On Your Grave, but nowhere near as edgy or vital as either of those films must have felt upon release.
The problems here are pretty typical of the genre. The characters are underwritten and behave younger than they should, just so the film can shoehorn in the prerequisite party scene. The dusting of interpersonal conflict that does hit the film is poorly pulled off, with a scene where two of the girls—naked, freezing, and trying to carve spears with a pocketknife by moonlight—stop to talk about their past beefs surrounding men playing particularly like camp. None of the action elements are believable either, because we’re asked to accept that three skinny, unarmed women taking on three combat veterans armed with hunting rifles wouldn’t be a conflict that got resolved instantly. Black Rock is basically the Ewoks taking out the Storm Troopers, but stretched out so that those scenes become the entire movie. The girls are good enough actresses that the film doesn’t end up being a total loss, but it’s close enough that it ends up feeling like one anyway.
