An unsuccessful mélange of post-economic meltdown drama and slasher film, Central Park throws a timely motivation into the old serial killer psychology: financial ruin. Yet while his young cast is largely up to the task, writer-director Justin Reinsilber doesn’t land his concept, failing to build the kind of tension necessary to make viewers truly afraid to go back into the park.
A news broadcast, naturally, sets up the conflict, announcing that stockbroker Charles Lincoln Smith Jr. is headed to jail for a billion-dollar fraud that has press labeling him the black Bernie Madoff. Smith’s son Harold (Justin A. Davis) is a prep-school teen, and the sins of his father are weighing down on him, as classmates whose families were affected by his father’s crimes are starting to give Harold a hard time.
To get away from the media circus, Harold and his friends head for what they hope to be an evening of sex (or at least heavy petting) and drugs in Central Park. (Granted, that would likely be their plan regardless of what’s going on in the world.) Smith’s friends are varying degrees of obnoxious, so this is one of those horror movies where you look forward to certain characters’ untimely demise. Unfortunately, that’s not how it pans out.
Mikey (Deema Aitken) is the most sympathetic of the group—he’s the one kid who doesn’t seem to fit in to this privileged coke-addled clique. You feel sorry for him when, all strung-out in the park, he calls up a teacher to come help him get home. Guess who the first victim is.
Central Park in some ways deviates from the standard-issue slasher; Harold and his friends are given time to mourn Mikey’s death, and each subsequent murder they stumble upon feels more personal to its characters than one expects from an ‘80s slasher. But if the killer’s motivation is different—revenge for a devastated investment portfolio—his methods are ordinary, and the execution of his revenge seems kind of random. While Halloween killer Michael Myers, typical of the subgenre’s once-moralistic norm, punishes sexually active teens, this villain doesn’t wait for high-schoolers to get busy before smiting them—and targeting the most likable character first makes his acts seem even more brutal. And despite the specific set-up of stock market fraud (the killer wears a tabloid photo of Harold’s father for a mask), the killer remains unfocused; why target the friends of his tormentor’s son? Why not develop that motivation in a way that builds suspense with a single character? Because then you wouldn’t have a bloody slasher.
Confining the murders to one location had some promise—this could have been Die Hard in Central Park, as teens fled the reliable uniformity of the Manhattan street grid for a man-made wilderness. But the camera set-ups never establish enough of a sense of place. Production values (this is the New York film industry, after all) help keep Central Park watchable, and there are far worse horror movies, but, like much of today’s youth, it feels like so much wasted potential.
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