Welp

The Belgian film Welp (translated to Cub for English audiences) is a fairly confused slasher horror film that has equally stunning moments as it does character development that is never built upon. From the start we get the crisis at hand; a boy named Sam is late for his boy scouts meeting, so it's given then and there that he will be the troubled titular character. While one of the camp counselors gives him grief, the other defends the boy, which again foreshadows what will come of their relationship with Sam as time moves on. 

The plot follows a fairly by-the-books structure. The boy scouts get to the camp, things start to go missing, people start dying, and eventually the perpetrators are shown. The first antagonist we meet is arguably the most important character in the film: Kai. This boy with a wooden mask made out of a tree trunk is responsible for the deaths of numerous people and also owes his allegiance to the Poacher, a tall brute of a man who is pretty much an unmasked Jason Voorhees. 

The problem with the two, however, is that there is never any story built around them other than that they enjoy murder as much as they do lying down traps in the area. It is almost like the Poacher plays a game like Saw with anyone who gets caught in his forest. Where he came from, who he is, or why he is killing anyone is never found out. The lack of a sequel to this film (so far) has me itching to know more about him, but leaves me at a standstill with how I feel about the movie as a whole. Even films such as Hatchet which spawned multiple sequels still allowed enough history and detail written about its monster to get the viewer lost in the film's mythology. 

Anyway, I lost my train of thought when I mentioned Kai. Kai is a youang boy, about the camper's age, who moves around like a little ghoul. He does begin develop a relationship with Sam, and as the story progresses Kai even defends Sam from the mean camp counselor's dog. You would think that this would lead to the two becoming friends and possibly even teaming up to reconcile Kai's animalistic behavior. Silly me for thinking that could possibly come out of a horror film. The overused cliche of everything going wrong, and eventually Sam and Kai fighting it out to the death, was a terrible move in my book. I think the film would have been much, much better if Sam and Kai bonded together so much so that they took down the Poacher rather than becoming his brainwashed, murderous slave. 

There was a lot of lost potential in this film. It is not in the gore factor as the murder scenes are well done (especially pay attention to falling trees), but the film could have easily escalated just by backing up character's with more history. It would have made the film much more fun and easily understood. Given the fact that it still isn't known whether or not Kai was a boy scout or possibly the Poacher's son, we don't know what was wrong with Sam even though it was mentioned that he had past troubles, and the fact that we don't know a single thing about the Poacher leaves a lot of room to be filled. 

The uneven structure comes more so into play as certain events lead to nowhere fast, such as the brief showings of some of the boy scouts bullying the others. That went nowhere other than to show that kids are kids and can be assholes. 

Hopefully, if anything, director Jonas Govaerts learns from this film and either makes his next film better or creates a sequel that fixes all of this one's problems. I know that horror sequels can sometimes suck, but better sequels have come before in horror; just look at Maniac Cop 2. There is hope, however slim it may be, that a Welp 2 or Cub 2 will be brighter and more well developed than this one.