Nine months after witnessing her best friend talk a drunken bully into killing himself, high schooler Mandy Lane (Amber Heard) has abandoned that friend in favour of the bully’s grieving social circle. When the group travels to a remote Texas ranch for the weekend, an unseen assailant begins to stalk them one by one.

Jonathan Levine’s debut feature, which was made in 2006, suffered a notorious delay in getting an American release and did not open there until 2013. In the meantime it built a small cult reputation courtesy of international audiences. Today in Australia it receives a new bluray edition, courtesy of local label Via Vision as a part of their ongoing program of spruced-up horror films. It is the kind of film that contains some great material, including some unexpected narrative choices and a grainy Tobe Hooper-inspired aesthetic. It is also the kind of film that really makes its audience wait for the good stuff: there is a lot of generic, weirdly unlikeable male-gazing going on before things begin to get good.

The Friday the 13th slasher model, in which a group of over-sexed young Americans on holiday get systematically hacked to death by a disgruntled psychopath, is a very busy genre of horror movie. There is hardly room for new entries to move, leaving most attempts to claw out some sort of innovation or niche. Scream (1996) managed the feat by forming a slasher movie whose characters were aware of slasher movies. Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day (2017) blended the slasher tropes with Groundhog Day. While Mandy Lane does find its own angle, it shares it with the audience very late in the day. It ends in a satisfying fashion, yet doubts are going to linger: is a great 10 minutes worth the tedious 80 minutes that come before it?

A reasonably strong cast do a good job of making unpleasant people watchable. Amber Heard delivers a slightly more realistic model of the virginal ‘final girl’. Michael Welch, Aaron Himelstein, and Edwin Hodge all portray variations of the standard ‘jock’ stereotypes – although Hodge made a much better impact in horror cinema in the subsequent Purge films. Melissa Price and Whitney Able suffer due to poor scripting, as well as some leering photography that genre self-awareness cannot entirely excuse. Particularly good is Anson Mount, later to star in streaming series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Here he plays a suspicious and aloof ranch hand who is either the killer or the only responsible adult in a five-mile radius.

Jonathan Levine, working with cinematographer Darren Genet, adopts a particularly grainy aesthetic that harks back to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). It does not fully succeed in adopting Hooper’s style, primarily because too much of the film seems inspired by and reminiscent of 1980s slashers. It also does not commit as fully to its grindhouse sensibilities as Rob Zombie’s films do. As far as original slasher films go, it is largely frustrating – but there are potential rewards if you are patient.